Terri's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 26 Jul 2024 11:30:37 -0700 60 Terri's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (Collins Business Essentials)]]> 226313
First published in 1982, this now classic story of greed and lies in Tinseltown appears here with a stunning final chapter on Begelman's post-Columbia career as he continued to dazzle and defraud . . . until his last hours in a Hollywood hotel room, where his story dramatically and poignantly would end.]]> 576 David McClintick 0060508159 Terri 5 3.95 1982 Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (Collins Business Essentials)
author: David McClintick
name: Terri
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/15
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Plot (The Book Series, #1)]]> 55315487 Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a psychologically suspenseful novel about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.

Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written—let alone published—anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.

Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that—a story that absolutely needs to be told.

In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.

As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his “sure thing� of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?]]> 320 Jean Hanff Korelitz 125079076X Terri 2
]]> 3.75 2021 The Plot (The Book Series, #1)
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Terri
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2021/06/10
date added: 2024/07/26
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review:
Why do writers so often write about writers? Writers are a persistently unhappy breed; they’re very attached to their misery. Jake, the protagonist, is completely on brand. He is tormented. He thinks all his ideas suck. He feels he is a failure. (Show me a happy writer, and you have not shown me a writer.) Three hundred and twenty pages is a long time to spend in this guy’s head. Yet I had a hard time putting the book down. It turns out that the author, Jean Hanff Korelitz, is the writer her main character could never hope to be.


]]> The Bee Sting 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Terri 5 3.92 2023 The Bee Sting
author: Paul Murray
name: Terri
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/19
date added: 2024/07/26
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]]> The Photograph 202858
Propelled by the author's signature mastery of narrative and psychology, The Photograph is Lively at her very best, the dazzling climax to all she has written before.]]> 231 Penelope Lively 0142004421 Terri 3 3.34 2003 The Photograph
author: Penelope Lively
name: Terri
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Succession � Season One: The Complete Scripts]]> 79330740 The complete, authorised scripts, including deleted scenes, of the multiple award-winning Succession .

** Winner of nineteen Emmys, nine Golden Globes, three BAFTAs and a Grammy. **
With an exclusive introduction from creator Jesse Armstrong.
'The most thrilling and beautifully obscene TV there is.' Guardian

'Extraordinarily entertaining and incisive.' Empire

'One of the most relentlessly paced shows on television.' Rolling Stone
Everything I've done in my life is for my children.

When Logan Roy, the head of one of the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerates, decides to retire, each of his four grown children follows a personal agenda that doesn't always sync with those of their siblings -- or their father.

Collected here for the first time, the complete scripts of Season One feature unseen extra material, including deleted scenes, alternative dialogue and character directions. They reveal a unique insight into the writing, creation and development of a TV sensation and a screen-writing masterpiece.
'Monstrous, near-Shakespearean perfection.' New Statesman]]> 840 Jesse Armstrong 0571384005 Terri 5 4.85 Succession – Season One: The Complete Scripts
author: Jesse Armstrong
name: Terri
average rating: 4.85
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/26
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]]> Entitlement 209330233 A novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.]]> 288 Rumaan Alam 0593718461 Terri 4 3.00 2024 Entitlement
author: Rumaan Alam
name: Terri
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/03
date added: 2024/07/26
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]]> Beautyland 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Terri 4 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Terri
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/07/26
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]]> Service 65599686
When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she’s thrust back to the summer she spent as a waitress at his high-end Dublin restaurant. Drawn in by the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the elegance of the food, the wild parties after service, Hannah also remembers the sizzling tension of the kitchens. And how the attention from Daniel morphed from kindness into something darker�

His restaurant shuttered, his lawyers breathing down his neck, Daniel is in a state of disbelief. Decades of hard graft, of fighting to earn recognition for his talent � is it all to fall apart because of something he can barely remember?

Hiding behind the bedroom curtains from the paparazzi lenses, Julie is raking through more than two decades spent acting the supportive wife, the good mother, and asking herself what it’s all been for.

Their three different voices reveal a story of power and abuse, victimhood and complicity. This is a novel about the facades that we maintain, the lies that we tell and the courage it takes to face the truth.]]> 256 Sarah Gilmartin 1911590804 Terri 4 4.22 2023 Service
author: Sarah Gilmartin
name: Terri
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/15
date added: 2024/07/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions]]> 209192724
When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, New York in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of professors, the boys were best friends and fierce rivals who soon followed each other to Yale University.

Michael blazed through Yale in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. Then one day, Jonathan received a devastating Michael had suffered a psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Michael was still in hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and living in a halfway house when he decided, against all odds, to enroll. Still battling delusions, he managed to graduate, and after his triumphant story was featured in The New York Times , sold a memoir for a vast sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie, and Brad Pitt was set to star. But then Michael, in the grip of psychosis, committed a horrific act that made him a front-page story of an entirely different sort.

The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's powerful account of an American tragedy, set in the final decades of the American century, an era that coincided with the emptying out of state mental hospitals. It is a story about the bonds of friendship, the price of delusion and the mystery of identity. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, The Best Minds is both a beautifully rendered coming of age story and an indictment of the profound neglect of mental illness in our society.]]> 576 Jonathan Rosen 014313289X Terri 2 3.96 2023 The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
author: Jonathan Rosen
name: Terri
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/07/26
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]]> Runaway: Stories 14280 Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships.

In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own. (back cover)

Runaway
Chance
Soon
Silence
Passion
Trespasses
Tricks
Powers]]> 335 Alice Munro 1400077915 Terri 0 4.00 2004 Runaway: Stories
author: Alice Munro
name: Terri
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/30
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
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]]> False Dawn 722236 143 Edith Wharton 9997519388 Terri 2 3.62 1924 False Dawn
author: Edith Wharton
name: Terri
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1924
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/08
date added: 2024/05/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Spell 30104 The Spell details the restlessness of every human heart.]]> 272 Alan Hollinghurst 0140286373 Terri 4 3.55 1998 The Spell
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Terri
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/23
shelves:
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]]> The Devil's Grip 182506562 Wickedly dark with a mystical edge, this story of an Italian love affair gone bad captures the irresistible pull of toxic relationships—from the acclaimed author of Carnality.

A woman arrives in Florence, overwhelmed by the strange, warm city so different from her home. Amidst the Renaissance architecture and amorous couples, she finds an unexpected love of her own. With his dark, ugly looks, people might stop and stare, wondering what someone like her was doing with someone like him. But he’s the Mickey to her Minnie, and she can fix him—they can fix each other. She feels bound to him, body and soul.

It’s not long before the lying starts. Other women have begun to notice him, and she spirals into paranoia. Soon they’re both cheating and lashing out, and she becomes more and more convinced he’s not merely a violent there’s a demon inside him, and inside her too. Their grip on each other is so strong, it might be impossible to break, even after she puts an ocean between them, following another man to New Orleans.

Heady, unsettling, and shockingly funny with its dead-on descriptions of codependent and abusive relationships, The Devil’s Grip takes us on a breathless journey with the shadow selves we can’t escape.]]> 288 Lina Wolff 1635424208 Terri 4 3.48 2022 The Devil's Grip
author: Lina Wolff
name: Terri
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/12
date added: 2024/05/23
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]]> Friday Black 37570595
These stories explore urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and the ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In “The Finkelstein Five,� Adjei-Brenyah reckons with the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In “Zimmer Land,� we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And “Friday Black� and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing� show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.

Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.]]> 194 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 1328911241 Terri 4 4.06 2018 Friday Black
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Terri
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/23
date added: 2024/02/23
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood]]> 123088295 310 Patty Lin 1958506060 Terri 1 3.73 2023 End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood
author: Patty Lin
name: Terri
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2024/02/15
date added: 2024/02/23
shelves:
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]]> The Pessimists 57500768
Welcome to small-town Connecticut, a place whose inhabitants seem to have it all -- the status, the homes, the money, and the ennui. There's Tripp and Virginia, beloved hosts whom the community idolizes, whose basement hides among other things a secret stash of guns and a drastic plan to survive the end times. There's Gunter and Rachel, recent transplants who left New York City to raise their children, only to feel both imprisoned by the banality of suburbia. And Richard and Margot, community veterans whose extramarital affairs and battles with mental health are disguised by their enviably polished veneers and perfect children. At the center of it all is the Petra School, the most coveted of all the private schools in the state, a supposed utopia of mindfulness and creativity, with a history as murky and suspect as our character's inner worlds.

With deep wit and delicious incisiveness, in The Pessimists, Bethany Ball peels back the veneer of upper-class white suburbia to expose the destructive consequences of unchecked privilege and moral apathy in a world that is rapidly evolving without them. This is a superbly drawn portrait of a community, and its couples, torn apart by unmet desires, duplicity, hypocrisy, and dangerous levels of discontent.]]> 304 Bethany Ball 0802158889 Terri 2 3.33 2021 The Pessimists
author: Bethany Ball
name: Terri
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2024/02/07
date added: 2024/02/13
shelves:
review:
I got sucked (suckered more like) by the back cover blurb that said this book “reinvents cheever country for the 21st century.� these vaguely discontented suburbanites bear no resemblance to the dark, tragic inhabitants of cheever country. nothing happens in “the pessimists.� nobody moves more than an inch or two from where they started. after i finished this book, i read “the swimmer� and realized the only way to cheever country is through john cheever.
]]> <![CDATA[The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial: A Drama In Two Acts]]> 42382 103 Herman Wouk 0385514417 Terri 4 4.11 1954 The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial: A Drama In Two Acts
author: Herman Wouk
name: Terri
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1954
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/28
date added: 2023/09/09
shelves:
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]]> Roman Fever and Other Stories 767955
Roman fever (1934)
Xingu (1911)
The other two (1904)
Souls belated (1899)
The angel at the grave (1901)
The last asset (1904)
After Holbein (1928)
Autres temps (1911)]]> 304 Edith Wharton 0684829908 Terri 5 4.11 1934 Roman Fever and Other Stories
author: Edith Wharton
name: Terri
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1934
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/27
date added: 2023/09/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Last Night in Montreal 40605629
Last Night in Montreal is a story of love, amnesia, compulsive travel, the depths and the limits of family bonds, and the nature of obsession. In this extraordinary debut, Emily St. John Mandel casts a powerful spell that captures the reader in a gritty, youthful world charged with an atmosphere of mystery, promise and foreboding where small revelations continuously change our understanding of the truth and lead to desperate consequences. Mandel's characters will resonate with you long after the final page is turned.]]> 230 Emily St. John Mandel 1936071452 Terri 2 3.77 2009 Last Night in Montreal
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Terri
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2023/08/20
date added: 2023/09/09
shelves:
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]]> May We Be Forgiven 17707741 "A big American story with big American themes" (Elle) from the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir The Mistress’s Daughter

In this vivid, transfixing new novel, A. M. Homes presents a darkly comic look at twenty-first-century domestic life and the possibility of personal transformation. Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his more successful younger brother, George, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. When George’s murderous temper results in a shocking act of violence, both men are hurled into entirely new lives. May We Be Forgiven digs deeply into the near biblical intensity of fraternal relationships, our need to make sense of things, and our craving for connection. It is an unnerving tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together.]]> 481 A.M. Homes 014750970X Terri 2 3.66 2012 May We Be Forgiven
author: A.M. Homes
name: Terri
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2023/08/13
date added: 2023/09/09
shelves:
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]]> Birnam Wood 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Terri 5 3.79 2023 Birnam Wood
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Terri
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/30
date added: 2023/08/03
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]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Terri 2 3.84 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Terri
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/07/10
date added: 2023/08/03
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]]> The Soulmate 60784540
Picture a lovely cottage on a cliff, with sloping lawns, walking paths, and beautiful flowers. It’s Gabe and Pippa Gerard’s dream home in a sleepy coastal town. But their perfect house hides something sinister. The tall cliffs have become a popular spot for people to end their lives. Over the past several months, Gabe comes to their rescue, literally talking them off the ledge.

Until one day, he doesn’t. When Pippa discovers Gabe knew the victim, the questions spiral. . . .Did the victim jump? Was she pushed? And would Gabe, the love of Pippa’s life, her soulmate . . . lie? As the perfect façade of their marriage begins to crack, the deepest and darkest secrets begin to unravel. Because sometimes, the most convincing lies are the ones we tell ourselves.]]> 327 Sally Hepworth 1250229707 Terri 0 to-read 3.78 2022 The Soulmate
author: Sally Hepworth
name: Terri
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Expendable Man 12459312
Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse, she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.]]> 252 Dorothy B. Hughes 159017495X Terri 3 4.04 1963 The Expendable Man
author: Dorothy B. Hughes
name: Terri
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1963
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/09
date added: 2023/06/19
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Gloria (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)]]> 31430302 59 Branden Jacobs-Jenkins 0822234335 Terri 5 4.21 2016 Gloria (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)
author: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
name: Terri
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/17
date added: 2023/06/19
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Appropriate/An Octoroon: Plays]]> 23282186 260 Branden Jacobs-Jenkins 1559364904 Terri 5 4.31 2015 Appropriate/An Octoroon: Plays
author: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
name: Terri
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/15
date added: 2023/06/19
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]]> Hello Beautiful 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano Terri 3 4.14 2023 Hello Beautiful
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Terri
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/19
date added: 2023/06/19
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]]> Horse 59109077 A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse--one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.]]> 401 Geraldine Brooks 0399562966 Terri 3 4.17 2022 Horse
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Terri
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/30
date added: 2023/06/19
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]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 Terri 5 4.46 2022 Demon Copperhead
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Terri
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/17
date added: 2023/06/19
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]]> The Latecomer 57693566 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer is a layered and immersive literary novel about three siblings, desperate to escape one another, and the upending of their family by the late arrival of a fourth.

The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the three siblings--Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally--feel no strong familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna, faced with being truly alone, makes the decision to have a fourth child. What role will the “latecomer� play in this fractured family?

A complex novel that builds slowly and deliberately, The Latecomer touches on the topics of grief and guilt, generational trauma, privilege and race, traditions and religion, and family dynamics. It is a profound and witty family story from an accomplished author, known for the depth of her character studies, expertly woven storylines, and plot twists.]]> 439 Jean Hanff Korelitz 1250790794 Terri 3 3.93 2022 The Latecomer
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Terri
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/14
date added: 2023/02/17
shelves:
review:
Four stars for the first two-thirds of the book -- a Jonathan Franzen-like dense, complicated, compelling family portrait. Two stars for the last third -- a warp-speed untying of all the knots and they all lived happily ever after. What?
]]> Severance 36348525
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]> 291 Ling Ma 0374261598 Terri 4 3.90 2018 Severance
author: Ling Ma
name: Terri
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/18
date added: 2023/02/17
shelves:
review:

]]> A Head Full of Ghosts 23019294
To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts' plight. With John, Marjorie's father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.

Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie's younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface--and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.]]> 287 Paul Tremblay 0062363239 Terri 1 3.78 2015 A Head Full of Ghosts
author: Paul Tremblay
name: Terri
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/25
shelves:
review:
“Exorcist�-lite told from three points of view, all the same person: Merry, an eight-year-old girl whose sister is “possessed�; Merry, 15 years later, revisiting the past; and Karen, the pseudonym Merry uses to write a blog about her vast knowledge of horror movies. Karen thinks she is fascinating and witty. She is not. She is a windbag and I have no clue what purpose she serves. The book is repetitive and dull, but I held out for a plot twist at the end worthy of a Stephen King front cover blurb. Thanks for nothing, Stephen.
]]> The Island 58340727 It was just supposed to be a family vacation.
A terrible accident changed everything.
You don't know what you're capable of until they come for your family.

After moving from a small country town to Seattle, Heather Baxter marries Tom, a widowed doctor with a young son and teenage daughter. A working vacation overseas seems like the perfect way to bring the new family together, but once they’re deep in the Australian outback, the jet-lagged and exhausted kids are so over their new mom.

When they discover remote Dutch Island, off-limits to outside visitors, the family talks their way onto the ferry, taking a chance on an adventure far from the reach of iPhones and Instagram.

But as soon as they set foot on the island, which is run by a tightly knit clan of locals, everything feels wrong. Then a shocking accident propels the Baxters from an unsettling situation into an absolute nightmare.

When Heather and the kids are separated from Tom, they are forced to escape alone, seconds ahead of their pursuers.

Now it’s up to Heather to save herself and the kids, even though they don’t trust her, the harsh bushland is filled with danger, and the locals want her dead.

Heather has been underestimated her entire life, but she knows that only she can bring her family home again and become the mother the children desperately need, even if it means doing the unthinkable to keep them all alive.]]> 375 Adrian McKinty 0316531286 Terri 0 to-read 3.71 2022 The Island
author: Adrian McKinty
name: Terri
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Murder Rule 57409438 For fans of the compulsive psychological suspense of Ruth Ware and Tana French, a mother daughter story—one running from a horrible truth, and the other fighting to reveal it—that twists and turns in shocking ways, from the internationally bestselling author of The Scholar and The Ruin.

First Rule: Make them like you.

Second Rule: Make them need you.

Third Rule: Make them pay.

They think I’m a young, idealistic law student, that I’m passionate about reforming a corrupt and brutal system.

They think I’m working hard to impress them.

They think I’m here to save an innocent man on death row.

They're wrong. I’m going to bury him.]]> 295 Dervla McTiernan 0063042207 Terri 0 to-read 3.61 2022 The Murder Rule
author: Dervla McTiernan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Appeal (The Appeal, #1) 54621096 447 Janice Hallett 1788165292 Terri 0 to-read 3.83 2021 The Appeal (The Appeal, #1)
author: Janice Hallett
name: Terri
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Broken Summer 60600503 A death, a lie, a secret. For twenty-six summers he didn’t have the courage to face the past.

Lee Hanjo is an artist at the peak of his fame, envied and celebrated. Then, on his forty-third birthday, he awakens to find that his devoted wife has disappeared, leaving behind a soon-to-be-published novel she’d secretly written about the sordid past and questionable morality of an artist with a trajectory similar to Hanjo’s. It’s clear to him that his life is about to shatter and the demons from his past will come out. But why did his wife do it? Why now?

The book forces Hanjo to reflect on a summer from his youth when a deadly lie irreversibly and tragically determined the fates of two families.

From master storyteller J.M. Lee, one of Korea’s most renowned authors, comes an unforgettable novel of hidden truths, denials, and their inevitable repercussions. Everyone still left standing from that terrible summer so long ago must finally reckon with the deceptions that started it all and, twist after shocking twist, reap both the suffering and the vindication that comes with revenge.]]> 251 Jung-Myung Lee 1662505051 Terri 0 to-read 3.30 2021 Broken Summer
author: Jung-Myung Lee
name: Terri
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> Sputnik Sweetheart 9557 alternate cover can be found here

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

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

Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island: Sumire has mysteriously vanished...]]> 229 Haruki Murakami 0099448475 Terri 0 to-read 3.85 1999 Sputnik Sweetheart
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Terri
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> NSFW 58673061 Blisteringly sharp, hypersmart, and compulsively readable―meet Isabel Kaplan’s searing debut novel about a young woman trying to succeed in Hollywood without selling her soul.

From the outside, the unnamed protagonist in NSFW appears the vision of success. She has landed an entry-level position at a leading TV network that thousands of college grads would kill for. And sure, she has much to learn. The daughter of a prominent feminist attorney, she grew up outside the industry, better versed in gender dynamics than box office hits. But she’s resourceful and hardworking―what could go wrong?

At first, the high adrenaline work environment motivates her, yet as she climbs the ranks, she confronts the reality of creating change from the inside. Her points only get attention when echoed by male colleagues. She hears whispers of abuse and sexual misconduct. Her mother says to keep her head down until she’s the one in charge―a scenario that seems idealistic at best, morally questionable at worst.

When her personal and professional lives collide, threatening both the network and her future, she must finally decide what to protect: the career she’s given everything for or the empowered woman she claims to be.]]> 272 Isabel Kaplan 1250822890 Terri 4 3.48 2022 NSFW
author: Isabel Kaplan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/10
date added: 2022/12/13
shelves:
review:
Truthfully, my favorite part of this book is the post-publication essay the author wrote for The Guardian, about how her boyfriend � a writer � handled her success as a writer. Which is to say, very badly. “NSFW� is a fictionalized account of the author’s life after college. It’s highly entertaining, if somewhat slight, but then, so was “Heartburn,� which this book seems pretty clearly modeled on. However, the essay in The Guardian is not fiction, it is fact, and Isabel Kaplan is one of those writers who is able to mine her own life with self-deprecating detachment. She can be extremely amusing with her personal pain. This is an art form created by Nora Ephron. Those who revere Nora Ephron (I am one) believe there will never be another writer like her. She is not in a league of her own � she is the entire league. But now I have to say, based on this early evidence, Isabel Kaplan looks to be a very promising rookie.
]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Terri 5 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Terri
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/06
date added: 2022/10/06
shelves:
review:
I am not a gamer. I have no desire to be one. I don’t think stories should have levels and puzzles that need to be solved to advance. I want to read a story, not actively participate in the writing of it. AND YET � I wish I could read this book again and meet these people for the first time and not know what’s going to happen. I crave stories with a magnificent, touching, completely earned and true ending, which this one has. But for once, I can’t accept that it’s over.
]]> Ill Will 30687788 Two sensational unsolved crimes—one in the past, another in the present—are linked by one man’s memory and self-deception in this chilling novel of literary suspense from National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon.

“We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves,� Dustin Tillman likes to say. It’s one of the little mantras he shares with his patients, and it’s meant to be reassuring. But what if that story is a lie?

A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he hears the news: His adopted brother, Rusty, is being released from prison. Thirty years ago, Rusty received a life sentence for the massacre of Dustin’s parents, aunt, and uncle. The trial came to symbolize the 1980s hysteria over Satanic cults; despite the lack of physical evidence, the jury believed the outlandish accusations Dustin and his cousin made against Rusty. Now, after DNA analysis has overturned the conviction, Dustin braces for a reckoning.

Meanwhile, one of Dustin’s patients gets him deeply engaged in a string of drowning deaths involving drunk college boys. At first Dustin dismisses talk of a serial killer as paranoid thinking, but as he gets wrapped up in their amateur investigation, Dustin starts to believe that there’s more to the deaths than coincidence. Soon he becomes obsessed, crossing all professional boundaries—and putting his own family in harm’s way.

From one of today’s most renowned practitioners of literary suspense, Ill Will is an intimate thriller about the failures of memory and the perils of self-deception. In Dan Chaon’s nimble, chilling prose, the past looms over the present, turning each into a haunted place.]]> 496 Dan Chaon 0345476042 Terri 4 3.35 2017 Ill Will
author: Dan Chaon
name: Terri
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/04
date added: 2022/10/02
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]]> The Last Housewife 59349100 From the author of the acclaimed In My Dreams I Hold a Knife comes a pitch-black thriller about a woman determined to destroy a powerful cult and avenge the deaths of the women taken in by it, no matter the cost.

While in college in upstate New York, Shay Evans and her best friends met a captivating man who seduced them with a web of lies about the way the world works, bringing them under his thrall. By senior year, Shay and her friend Laurel were the only ones who managed to escape. Now, eight years later, Shay's built a new life in a tiny Texas suburb. But when she hears the horrifying news of Laurel's death—delivered, of all ways, by her favorite true-crime podcast crusader—she begins to suspect that the past she thought she buried is still very much alive, and the predators more dangerous than ever.

Recruiting the help of the podcast host, Shay goes back to the place she vowed never to return to in search of answers. As she follows the threads of her friend's life, she's pulled into a dark, seductive world, where wealth and privilege shield brutal philosophies that feel all too familiar. When Shay's obsession with uncovering the truth becomes so consuming she can no longer separate her desire for justice from darker desires newly reawakened, she must confront the depths of her own complicity and conditioning. But in a world built for men to rule it—both inside the cult and outside of it—is justice even possible, and if so, how far will Shay go to get it?]]> 385 Ashley Winstead 172822991X Terri 3 3.68 2022 The Last Housewife
author: Ashley Winstead
name: Terri
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/09/24
date added: 2022/10/02
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]]> If We Were Villains 34275217
As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.]]> 354 M.L. Rio 1250095298 Terri 2 4.21 2017 If We Were Villains
author: M.L. Rio
name: Terri
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2022/09/09
date added: 2022/10/02
shelves:
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]]> My Face for the World to See 17262518
My Face for the World to See is set in Hollywood, where the tonic for anonymity is fame and you’re only as real as your image. At a party, the narrator, a screenwriter, rescues a young woman who staggers with drunken determination into the Pacific. He is living far from his wife in New York and long ago shed any illusions about the value of his work. He just wants to be left alone. And yet without really meaning to, he gets involved with the young woman, who has, it seems, no illusions about love, especially with married men. She’s a survivor, even if her beauty is a little battered from years of not quite making it in the pictures. She’s just like him, he thinks, and as their casual relationship takes on an increasingly troubled and destructive intensity, it seems that might just be true, only not in the way he supposes.]]> 131 Alfred Hayes 1590176677 Terri 1 3.75 1958 My Face for the World to See
author: Alfred Hayes
name: Terri
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1958
rating: 1
read at: 2022/08/31
date added: 2022/10/02
shelves:
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]]> Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont 58664440
Mrs. Palfrey prides herself on having always known “the right thing to do,� but in this new situation she discovers that resource is much reduced. Before she knows it, in fact, she tries something else.

Elizabeth Taylor’s final and most popular novel is as unsparing as it is, ultimately, heartbreaking.]]> 224 Elizabeth Taylor 1681375648 Terri 3 4.25 1971 Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
author: Elizabeth Taylor
name: Terri
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1971
rating: 3
read at: 2022/08/26
date added: 2022/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Atonement 6867
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.

As it follows that crime's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.]]> 351 Ian McEwan 038572179X Terri 4 3.94 2001 Atonement
author: Ian McEwan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/15
date added: 2022/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> I'm Glad My Mom Died 59364173
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,� eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?� She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!�), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]> 320 Jennette McCurdy Terri 5 4.45 2022 I'm Glad My Mom Died
author: Jennette McCurdy
name: Terri
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/08/05
date added: 2022/08/13
shelves:
review:
“I’m Glad My Mom Died� is like “The Diary of Anne Frank,� if Anne Frank were a child actor on a Nickelodeon show.
]]> The Singer's Gun 7617564 287 Emily St. John Mandel 1936071649 Terri 4 3.79 2010 The Singer's Gun
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Terri
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/04
date added: 2022/08/05
shelves:
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When I read, I mentally divide books into beginning, middle and end, and I tend not to like them all the same. I’m disappointed, even angry, when a book starts great, wanders off the premise (the premises?) in the middle, and ends with a thud. Sometimes, the middle is when the story takes off, and you’re hurtling to the ending, and then you get there, and it turns out to be a day-old carton of chinese food leftovers � not as good as you thought it would be. Emily St. John Mandel is one of those rare writers who can deliver on all fronts � in “Station Eleven� and “Sea of Tranquility.� In the case of “The Singer’s Gun,� she had me at hello, I was up reading late at night in the middle � but then, it just kind of ended. No chill, no fizz, nothing that would make you think: “I will definitely read this book again.� Emily St. John Mandel is a genius storyteller, and I loved “The Singer’s Gun.� I just didn’t love love it.
]]> <![CDATA[Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years]]> 97936
Widely acclaimed as a major text of the Watergate saga, J. Anthony Lukas’s Nightmare is a masterwork of investigation, highlighted by in-depth character sketches of the key players. For students of history coming to these events for the first time, this book reveals in depth the particular trauma of a nation in turmoil; for those who remember, the upheaval and what was at stake are once more brought to life.]]> 648 J. Anthony Lukas 0821412876 Terri 0 to-read 4.42 1973 Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years
author: J. Anthony Lukas
name: Terri
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/07/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sleepwalk 57771216 A high speed and darkly comic road trip through a near future America with a big hearted mercenary, from beloved and acclaimed novelist Dan Chaon

ł§±ô±đ±đ±č·É˛ą±ô°ě’s hero, Will Bear, is a man with so many aliases that he simply thinks of himself as the Barely Blur. At fifty years old, he’s been living off the grid for over half his life. He’s never had a real job, never paid taxes, never been in a committed relationship. A good-natured henchman with a complicated and lonely past and an LSD microdosing problem, he spends his time hopscotching across state lines in his beloved camper van, running sometimes shady, often dangerous errands for a powerful and ruthless operation he’s never troubled himself to learn too much about. He has lots of connections, but no true ties. His longest relationships are with an old rescue dog with posttraumatic stress, and a childhood friend as deeply entrenched in the underworld as he is, who, lately, he’s less and less sure he can trust.

Out of the blue, one of his many burner phones heralds a call from a twenty-year-old woman claiming to be his biological daughter, Cammie. She says she’s the product of one of his long-ago sperm donations; he’s half certain she’s AI. She needs his help. She’s entrenched in a widespread and nefarious plot involving Will’s employers, and continuing to have any contact with her increasingly fuzzes the line between the people Will is working for and the people he’s running from.

With his signature blend of haunting emotional realism and fast-paced intrigue, Chaon populates his fractured America with characters who ring all too true. Gazing both back to the past and forward to an inevitable enough seeming future, Sleepwalk examines where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the curses and joys of being human that will never change, no matter how far we travel to dodge them, or how cleverly we hide.]]> 320 Dan Chaon 1250175216 Terri 4 ]]> 3.61 2022 Sleepwalk
author: Dan Chaon
name: Terri
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/03
date added: 2022/07/03
shelves:
review:
If you are ever in a bookstore, randomly looking for something good to read, and all you know is that you want it to be the opposite of a Sally Rooney novel, pick up a Dan Chaon book and read the first page. I defy you not to turn it. He uses words like bait. It astounds me to know he taught creative writing at Oberlin for 10 years. How incredible it must have been to be in his class! (You know who was? Lena Dunham. It’s in his Wikipedia bio. I hope he is mentioned in her Wikipedia bio.)

]]> How Beautiful We Were 51794532 From the celebrated author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, comes a sweeping, wrenching story about the collision of a small African village and an America oil company.

"We should have known the end was near."

So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company.

Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle would last for decades and come at a steep price.

Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

"The unforgettable story of a community on the wrong end of Western greed, How Beautiful We Were will enthrall you, appall you, and show you what is possible when a few people stand up and say this is not right. A masterful novel by a spellbinding writer engaged with the most urgent questions of our day.”—David Ebershoff, bestselling author of The Danish Girl]]> 364 Imbolo Mbue 0593132424 Terri 0 to-read 3.92 2021 How Beautiful We Were
author: Imbolo Mbue
name: Terri
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Women Talking 40046077
While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?

Based on real events and told through the “minutes� of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.]]> 216 Miriam Toews 1635572584 Terri 0 to-read 3.61 2018 Women Talking
author: Miriam Toews
name: Terri
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> You Remind Me of Me 227481
You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better. With penetrating insight and a deep devotion to his characters, Dan Chaon explores the secret connections that irrevocably link them. In the process he examines questions of identity, fate, and Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?

In language that is both unflinching and exquisite, Chaon moves deftly between the past and the present in the small-town prairie Midwest and shows us the extraordinary lives of “ordinary� people.]]> 356 Dan Chaon 0345441419 Terri 3 3.63 2004 You Remind Me of Me
author: Dan Chaon
name: Terri
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2022/05/20
date added: 2022/05/24
shelves:
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]]> Pachinko 34051011
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.]]> 496 Min Jin Lee Terri 5 4.35 2017 Pachinko
author: Min Jin Lee
name: Terri
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/05
date added: 2022/05/24
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]]> Await Your Reply 6251222
Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can't stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself through unconventional and precarious means.

Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.
(jacket)]]> 324 Dan Chaon 0345476026 Terri 5 3.54 2009 Await Your Reply
author: Dan Chaon
name: Terri
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/22
date added: 2022/04/23
shelves:
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If I were a novelist, this is the novel I would want to be able to write. It’s rare for me to be able to visualize a book so completely, and that wasn’t always a good thing. There were times I would gasp and turn away from the book, as if I were watching it, not reading it. A limited TV series is inevitable, I thought. I’m completely in awe � but also a little bummed � that there can never be one.
]]> Sea of Tranquility 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Terri 5 4.04 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Terri
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/11
date added: 2022/04/22
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Until recently, there was only one author whose every book I wanted to (and did) read, and that was Patricia Highsmith. Even though I own all her books, I still start any visit to a bookstore at the shelves where her name is on the bindings. It’s like seeing a friend at a big party where I don’t really know anyone else. Then my daughter introduced me to Emily St. John Mandel. Right away, she reminded me of Patricia Highsmith � they both have the ability to make the unthinkable thinkable. Death is at the heart of their books. It’s my least favorite subject, but they are fascinated and inspired by it. They give life to death. I read “Station Eleven� twice, during a pandemic. I was at the Strand bookstore in New York City on April 8th, to buy “Sea of Tranquility� on its publication date. Hey, everybody! I made a new friend!
]]> Free Food for Millionaires 40727626
Free Food For Millionaires offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Inspired by 19th century novels such as Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, Min Jin Lee examines maintaining one's identity within changing communities in what is her remarkably assured debut.]]> 577 Min Jin Lee Terri 3 3.91 2007 Free Food for Millionaires
author: Min Jin Lee
name: Terri
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2022/04/01
date added: 2022/04/22
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]]> Notes on an Execution 57773248
Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. He hoped it wouldn’t end like this, not for him.

Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the homicide detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake.

Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.]]> 306 Danya Kukafka 0063052733 Terri 3 4.04 2022 Notes on an Execution
author: Danya Kukafka
name: Terri
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/15
date added: 2022/04/22
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]]> The Mephisto Waltz 223691 256 Fred Mustard Stewart 071810692X Terri 4 3.77 1969 The Mephisto Waltz
author: Fred Mustard Stewart
name: Terri
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/24
date added: 2022/04/22
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]]> To Paradise 57739876 From the author of the classic A Little Life, a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia.

In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.

These three sections are joined in an enthralling and ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.

To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel of marvellous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara’s understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love � partners, lovers, children, friends, family and even our fellow citizens � and the pain that ensues when we cannot.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385547935 Terri 5 3.74 2022 To Paradise
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Terri
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/18
date added: 2022/03/09
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People may fantasize there is such a place as paradise, maybe even that they’ve been there on their last vacation. But people cannot exist in a paradise; if they try, the paradise ceases to be. This book has three separate stories � the first two are parables about men who live in their own personal paradise, which they ultimately have to escape to survive. And these are light-hearted tales by comparison to the third story. In that one, we are the people and the world is our paradise, which we have casually robbed of all its gifts. Now nature is coming for us, with one vicious, incurable virus after another. Unfortunately, this is not a fictional dystopia. Hanya Yanagihara has written a diary of our future.
]]> The School for Good Mothers 57846320 An alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781982156121 can be found here.

In this taut and explosive debut novel, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance.

Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents� sacrifices. What’s worse is she can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with their angelic daughter Harriet does Frida finally feel she’s attained the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she’s just enough.

Until Frida has a horrible day.

The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida � ones who check their phones while their kids are on the playground; who let their children walk home alone; in other words, mothers who only have one lapse of judgement. Now, a host of government officials will determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion. Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that she can live up to the standards set for mothers � that she can learn to be good.

This propulsive, witty page-turner explores the perils of “perfect� upper-middle-class parenting, the violence enacted upon women by the state and each other, and the boundless love a mother has for her daughter.]]> 336 Jessamine Chan Terri 4 3.51 2022 The School for Good Mothers
author: Jessamine Chan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/17
date added: 2022/01/17
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"The School for Good Mothers" may be the scariest book I have ever read. This isn't a dystopian future; this is for anyone who lived through the Great Mindfuck of the late 1990s, when stay-at-home moms came for the working mothers. We were hit with the shrapnel of "Is your job more important than your child?" and "You have your whole life to work, but your child is only young once." Threatened with potential damage to our child's psyche by never being the mom on the class field trip. Hoping the brownies we made for the school bake sale might be rewarded with eye contact from the PTA overlords. Jessamine Chan has given this conflict the "Man in the High Castle" treatment -- an alternate timeline where less-than-perfect mothers can be sentenced to 12 months in a behavior modification boot camp, after which a judge decides if they get to keep their child. The most disturbing thing about "The School for Good Mothers" is that it felt so real, I had to remind myself, more than once, that it wasn't.
]]> Siren Queen 58724597
Luli Wei is beautiful, talented, and desperate to be a star. Coming of age in pre-Code Hollywood, she knows how dangerous the movie business is and how limited the roles are for a Chinese American girl from Hungarian Hill—but she doesn’t care. She’d rather play a monster than a maid.

But in Luli’s world, the worst monsters in Hollywood are not the ones on screen. The studios want to own everything from her face to her name to the women she loves, and they run on a system of bargains made in blood and ancient magic, powered by the endless sacrifice of unlucky starlets like her. For those who do survive to earn their fame, success comes with a steep price. Luli is willing to do whatever it takes—even if that means becoming the monster herself.

Siren Queen offers up an enthralling exploration of an outsider achieving stardom on her own terms, in a fantastical Hollywood where the monsters are real and the magic of the silver screen illuminates every page.]]> 280 Nghi Vo 1250788838 Terri 0 to-read 3.68 2022 Siren Queen
author: Nghi Vo
name: Terri
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/01/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> Behind Her Eyes 28965131 Why is everyone talking about the ending of Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes?

Louise is a single mom, a secretary, stuck in a modern-day rut. On a rare night out, she meets a man in a bar and sparks fly. Though he leaves after they kiss, she’s thrilled she finally connected with someone.

When Louise arrives at work on Monday, she meets her new boss, David. The man from the bar. The very married man from the bar…who says the kiss was a terrible mistake but who still can’t keep his eyes off Louise.

And then Louise bumps into Adele, who’s new to town and in need of a friend, but she also just happens to be married to David. David and Adele look like the picture-perfect husband and wife, but then why is David so controlling, and why is Adele so scared of him?

As Louise is drawn into David and Adele’s orbit, she uncovers more puzzling questions than answers. The only thing that is crystal clear is that something in this marriage is very, very wrong, but Louise can’t guess how wrong―and how far a person might go to protect their marriage’s secrets.]]> 307 Sarah Pinborough 125011117X Terri 4
Yes. Yes, there is.]]> 3.79 2017 Behind Her Eyes
author: Sarah Pinborough
name: Terri
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/13
date added: 2022/01/13
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Oh geez, I thought. A twist ending you don’t see coming. Is there really such a thing anymore?

Yes. Yes, there is.
]]> The Lying Life of Adults 48616787 336 Elena Ferrante 1609455916 Terri 4 3.67 2019 The Lying Life of Adults
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Terri
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/08
date added: 2022/01/08
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]]> Station Eleven 20170404 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 333 Emily St. John Mandel 0385353308 Terri 5 4.05 2014 Station Eleven
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Terri
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/28
date added: 2021/12/28
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]]> The Oasis 16071855 The Oasis, McCarthy's second novel, won a contest organized by Cyril Connelly, the British critic and editor of the prestigious literary magazine Horizon, and was first published as the February 1949 edition of that magazine. Connelly called the book "brilliant and true and funny and beautifully written and intelligently thought and felt."

The Oasis is a wickedly satiric roman a clef about a group of urban American intellectuals who try unsuccessfully to establish a rural utopian colony just as the Cold War is setting in and fear of the atomic bomb is reaching panic proportions. At its appearance a few months later in the U.S., the novel caused a scandal, alienating a number of McCarthy's friends.

One of her former lovers, the critic Philip Rahv, was so upset at the character based on him that he tried to stop its publication. At the same time, a then relatively new acquaintance who later became McCarthy's closest friend, Hannah Arendt, wrote her: "I just read The Oasis and must tell you that it was pure delight. You have written a veritable little masterpiece."

]]> 133 Mary McCarthy 1612192289 Terri 4 3.30 1949 The Oasis
author: Mary McCarthy
name: Terri
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1949
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/23
date added: 2021/12/23
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]]> Lemon 58574082
Seventeen years pass without any resolution for those who knew and loved Hae-on, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover some of what she's lost, ultimately setting out to find the truth of what happened.

Told at different points in time from the perspectives of Da-on and two of Hae-on's classmates, Lemon loosely follows the structure of a detective novel. But finding the perpetrator is not the main objective here. Instead, the work explores grief and trauma, raising important questions about guilt, retribution, and the meaning of death and life.]]> 147 Kwon Yeo-Sun 1635420881 Terri 3 3.40 2019 Lemon
author: Kwon Yeo-Sun
name: Terri
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/20
date added: 2021/12/15
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]]> Nightmare Alley 7140096 Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.

And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.]]> 275 William Lindsay Gresham 1590173481 Terri 3 3.87 1946 Nightmare Alley
author: William Lindsay Gresham
name: Terri
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1946
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/09
date added: 2021/12/15
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]]> The Power of the Dog 128073
Phil and George are brothers, more than partners, joint owners of the biggest ranch in their Montana valley. Phil is the bright one, George the plodder. Phil is tall and angular; George is stocky and silent. Phil is a brilliant chess player, a voracious reader, an eloquent storyteller; George learns slowly, and devotes himself to the business.

Phil is a vicious sadist, with a seething contempt for weakness to match his thirst for dominance; George has a gentle, loving soul. They sleep in the room they shared as boys, and so it has been for forty years. When George unexpectedly marries a young widow and brings her to live at the ranch, Phil begins a relentless campaign to destroy his brother's new wife. But he reckons without an unlikely protector.

From its visceral first paragraph to its devastating twist of an ending, The Power of the Dog will hold you in its grip.


WITH AN AFTERWORD BY ANNIE PROULX]]> 293 Thomas Savage 0316610895 Terri 4 4.16 1967 The Power of the Dog
author: Thomas Savage
name: Terri
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/30
date added: 2021/12/15
shelves:
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]]> The Anomaly 56920684
In June 2021, a senseless event upends the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man, though he works as a contract killer; Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star tired of living a lie; Joanna, a formidable lawyer whose flaws have caught up with her; and Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful writer who suddenly becomes a cult hit. All of them believed they had double lives. None imagined just how true that was.

This witty variation on the doppelgänger theme, which takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House, is Hervé Le Tellier's most ambitious work yet.]]> 391 Hervé Le Tellier 1635421691 Terri 2
The next 238 pages drains that world of all its color and hypnotic allure, until it’s just a bunch of politicians and scientists and � gahhhhh � philosophers sitting in heavily guarded secret rooms, trying to explain what happened in the first 153 pages.

If you watched “Lost� all the way to its excruciatingly pointless end, it’s like that, but shorter.]]> 3.80 2020 The Anomaly
author: Hervé Le Tellier
name: Terri
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2021/12/15
date added: 2021/12/15
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The first 153 pages of this book are exhilarating � you are drawn into this fascinating, wonderfully mysterious world, which looks familiar, but tantalizingly isn’t.

The next 238 pages drains that world of all its color and hypnotic allure, until it’s just a bunch of politicians and scientists and � gahhhhh � philosophers sitting in heavily guarded secret rooms, trying to explain what happened in the first 153 pages.

If you watched “Lost� all the way to its excruciatingly pointless end, it’s like that, but shorter.
]]> <![CDATA[What It Takes: The Way to the White House]]> 380057 1051 Richard Ben Cramer 0679746498 Terri 0 to-read 4.42 1992 What It Takes: The Way to the White House
author: Richard Ben Cramer
name: Terri
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Silence of the Girls (Women of Troy, #1)]]> 37969723
When Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks. Achilles refuses to fight in protest, and the Greeks begin to lose ground to their Trojan opponents. Keenly observant and coolly unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position, able to observe the two men driving the Greek army in what will become their final confrontation, deciding the fate not only of Briseis's people but also of the ancient world at large.

Briseis is just one among thousands of women living behind the scenes in this war—the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead—all of them erased by history. With breathtaking historical detail and luminous prose, Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp to vivid life. She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives—and it is nothing short of magnificent.]]> 325 Pat Barker Terri 2
A friend of mine fixed me up with "The Silence of the Girls." It's "The Iliad" told from the point of view of Achilles' other lover, Briseis.

I kept hoping it would fill the empty space left by "The Song of Achilles." It didn't. It just made me long for that version of the Trojan War even more.

I wonder if I would like "The Iliad."]]> 3.88 2018 The Silence of the Girls (Women of Troy, #1)
author: Pat Barker
name: Terri
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2021/10/15
date added: 2021/11/12
shelves:
review:
You know how it is when you pick up a book and start reading it, you find yourself falling in love with it, you're unable to go anywhere without it, you can barely sleep because you don't want to part with it. Then ... you finish it. It was so beautiful while it lasted. You reach for it in the morning, and realize, it's already on your bookshelf. You miss it terribly. That's how I felt about "The Song of Achilles," a retelling of "The Iliad" from the point of view of Achilles' lover, Patroclus.

A friend of mine fixed me up with "The Silence of the Girls." It's "The Iliad" told from the point of view of Achilles' other lover, Briseis.

I kept hoping it would fill the empty space left by "The Song of Achilles." It didn't. It just made me long for that version of the Trojan War even more.

I wonder if I would like "The Iliad."
]]> Crossroads 55881796 Jonathan Franzen's gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.

It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.

Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.

A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen's gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.]]> 592 Jonathan Franzen 0374181179 Terri 4 4.05 2021 Crossroads
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Terri
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/11
date added: 2021/11/12
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]]> All's Well 53256108 From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny, a darkly funny novel about a theater professor suffering chronic pain, who in the process of staging a troubled production of Shakespeare’s most maligned play, suddenly and miraculously recovers.

Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.

With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged...genius,� Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.]]> 352 Mona Awad Terri 3 3.70 2021 All's Well
author: Mona Awad
name: Terri
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/10/21
date added: 2021/11/12
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]]> The Swimming-Pool Library 30106 352 Alan Hollinghurst 0679722564 Terri 5 3.77 1988 The Swimming-Pool Library
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Terri
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/01
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
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]]> Housekeeping 11741 Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.]]> 219 Marilynne Robinson 0312424094 Terri 0 3.82 1980 Housekeeping
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Terri
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at: 2021/08/09
date added: 2021/10/02
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]]> Godshot 41719463
Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mice collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules, and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother, no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.

Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother-loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own.]]> 325 Chelsea Bieker 1948226480 Terri 2 3.77 2020 Godshot
author: Chelsea Bieker
name: Terri
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2021/08/28
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Nine Perfect Strangers 39280445 Could ten days at a health resort really change you forever?

These nine perfect strangers are about to find out...

Nine people gather at a remote health resort. Some are here to lose weight, some are here to get a reboot on life, some are here for reasons they can’t even admit to themselves. Amidst all of the luxury and pampering, the mindfulness and meditation, they know these ten days might involve some real work. But none of them could imagine just how challenging the next ten days are going to be.

Frances Welty, the formerly best-selling romantic novelist, arrives at Tranquillum House nursing a bad back, a broken heart, and an exquisitely painful paper cut. She’s immediately intrigued by her fellow guests. Most of them don’t look to be in need of a health resort at all. But the person that intrigues her most is the strange and charismatic owner/director of Tranquillum House. Could this person really have the answers Frances didn’t even know she was seeking? Should Frances put aside her doubts and immerse herself in everything Tranquillum House has to offer—or should she run while she still can?

It’s not long before every guest at Tranquillum House is asking exactly the same question.

Combining all of the hallmarks that have made Liane Moriarty's writing a go-to for anyone looking for wickedly smart, page-turning fiction that will make you laugh and gasp, Nine Perfect Strangers once again shows why she is a master of her craft.]]> 453 Liane Moriarty 1250069823 Terri 1 3.53 2018 Nine Perfect Strangers
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Terri
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2021/08/22
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Anatomy of a Scandal 34791469 400 Sarah Vaughan 1501172174 Terri 2 3.47 2018 Anatomy of a Scandal
author: Sarah Vaughan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2021/08/14
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Bluebeard 9601 318 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 038533351X Terri 4 4.06 1987 Bluebeard
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Terri
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1987
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/07
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> The Other Black Girl 55711688 Get Out meets The Stepford Wives in this electric debut about the tension that unfurls when two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York City book publishing.

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust.

Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.

It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career.

A whip-smart and dynamic thriller and sly social commentary that is perfect for anyone who has ever felt manipulated, threatened, or overlooked in the workplace, The Other Black Girl will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last twist.]]> 357 Zakiya Dalila Harris 1982160136 Terri 3 3.34 2021 The Other Black Girl
author: Zakiya Dalila Harris
name: Terri
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/03
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> The Nature of Fragile Things 53398512
Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she knows nothing about. San Francisco widower Martin Hocking proves to be as aloof as he is mesmerizingly handsome. Sophie quickly develops deep affection for Kat, Martin's silent five-year-old daughter, but Martin's odd behavior leaves her with the uneasy feeling that something about her newfound situation isn't right.

Then one early-spring evening, a stranger at the door sets in motion a transforming chain of events. Sophie discovers hidden ties to two other women. The first, pretty and pregnant, is standing on her doorstep. The second is hundreds of miles away in the American Southwest, grieving the loss of everything she once loved.

The fates of these three women intertwine on the eve of the devastating earthquake, thrusting them onto a perilous journey that will test their resiliency and resolve and, ultimately, their belief that love can overcome fear.

From the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War and As Bright as Heaven comes a gripping novel about the bonds of friendship and mother love, and the power of female solidarity.]]> 367 Susan Meissner 0451492188 Terri 1 4.21 2021 The Nature of Fragile Things
author: Susan Meissner
name: Terri
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2021/07/28
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
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]]> A Touch of Jen 55867897
Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beach-side paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, Remy and Alicia tumble into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what “self-actualization� looks like?

Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.]]> 320 Beth Morgan 0316704261 Terri 2 3.26 2021 A Touch of Jen
author: Beth Morgan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2021/07/24
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Home Fire 33621427
Then Eamonn enters the sisters� lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to—or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Suddenly, two families� fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will we make in the name of love?

The suspenseful and heartbreaking story of an immigrant family driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences ]]> 276 Kamila Shamsie 0735217688 Terri 5 4.00 2017 Home Fire
author: Kamila Shamsie
name: Terri
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/20
date added: 2021/07/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Anxious People 49127718 A poignant, charming novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined

Looking at real estate isn't usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can't fix up their own marriage. There's a wealthy banker who has been too busy making money to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can't seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment's only bathroom, and you've got the worst group of hostages in the world.

Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises, these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in a motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.

Humorous, compassionate, and wise, Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope—the things that save us, even in the most anxious of times.

Includes short story - The Last Round of Golf]]> 336 Fredrik Backman 198216963X Terri 3 4.17 2019 Anxious People
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Terri
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2021/07/17
date added: 2021/07/17
shelves:
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Reading this book is like trying to read a bowl of sugar. Everyone is so sweet to each other; they pat each other, and smile weakly, and grin. Fredrik Backman is a very prolific writer; this book feels like he was in a rush of some kind and didn't have time to use the search-and-replace function. Okay, repetitive word use is something which troubles few people; I just happen to be one of them. But this book goes nowhere. Literally. It's like being trapped at a really dull party with eight people -- or "idiots" as the author would say, another word that gets a lot of page time. But then, "idiot" has many uses in "Anxious People." It's an insult, it's a realization that you are one, it's a term of endearment; it's just a word comically employed to describe a bunch of people. Sometimes, it's hard to tell which "idiot" is up at bat. And the author goes to a lot of trouble to show that his characters are not idiots. They just like to talk about their problems in great detail. Do I sound like a bitchy curmudgeon? Well, I definitely feel like one, having read the last three pages, where Fredrik Bachman transforms this book into a beautiful, soulful examination of people in the company of people. And I feel my judgy eyerolls for the first 332 pages are now petty and meaningless. But I'm including this screed so you can see how far I had to come. Any criticism I had has disappeared. I am in awe. And I now understand what "idiot" means.
]]> A Suspension of Mercy 158885 Sydney Bartleby has killed his wife, Alicia—at least he has thought about it, compulsively, over and over again, plotting schemes, designing escapes, forging alibis. Of course he has; he's a mystery-script writer. But when Alicia takes a long, unannounced vacation, Sydney seizes the opportunity to perfect his artistic method.

With her characteristic precision and unrivaled sensitivity to the inner tremblings of human character, Patricia Highsmith shockingly portrays Sydney's descent into the treacherous world of his own fictions. Once again Highsmith proves herself to be a master at depicting the unsettling forces that boil beneath the surface of everyday life.]]> 235 Patricia Highsmith 0393321975 Terri 4 3.84 1965 A Suspension of Mercy
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Terri
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/07/17
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review:

]]> Hangsaman 131177 Hangsaman is Miss Jackson's second novel. The story is a simple one but the overtones are immediately present. "Natalie Waite who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight, past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions." In a few graphic pages, the family is before us—Arnold Waite, a writer, egotistical and embittered; his wife, the complaining martyr; Bud, the younger brother who has not yet felt the need to establish his independence; and Natalie, in the nightmare of being seventeen.

The Sunday afternoon cocktail party, to which Arnold Waite has invited his literary friends and neighbors, serves to etch in the details of this family's life, and to draw Natalie into the vortex. The story concentrates on the next few critical months in Natalie's life, away at college, where each experience reproduces on a larger scale the crucial failure of her emotional life at home. With a mounting tension rising from character and situation as well as the particular magic of which Miss Jackson is master, the novel proceeds inexorably to the stinging melodrama of its conclusion. The bitter cruelty of the passage from adolescence to womanhood, of a sensitive and lonely girl caught in a world not of her own devising, is a theme well suited to Miss Jackson's brilliant talent.]]> 191 Shirley Jackson 0445031174 Terri 5 3.78 1951 Hangsaman
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Terri
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1951
rating: 5
read at: 2021/02/05
date added: 2021/07/17
shelves:
review:

]]> The Divines 53018367 Normal People and the reflective haze of The Girls, a magnetic novel that moves between present-day Los Angeles and a British boarding school in the 1990s, exploring the destructive relationships between teenage girls.

Can we ever really escape our past?

The girls of St John the Divine, an elite English boarding school, were notorious for flipping their hair, harassing teachers, chasing boys, and chain-smoking cigarettes. They were fiercely loyal, sharp-tongued, and cuttingly humorous in the way that only teenage girls can be. For Josephine, now in her thirties, the years at St John were a lifetime ago. She hasn’t spoken to another Divine in fifteen years, not since the day the school shuttered its doors in disgrace.

Yet now Josephine inexplicably finds herself returning to her old stomping grounds. The visit provokes blurry recollections of those doomed final weeks that rocked the community. Ruminating on the past, Josephine becomes obsessed with her teenage identity and the forgotten girls of her one-time orbit. With each memory that resurfaces, she circles closer to the violent secret at the heart of the school’s scandal. But the more Josephine recalls, the further her life unravels, derailing not just her marriage and career, but her entire sense of self.

Suspenseful, provocative, and compulsively readable, The Divines is a scorching examination of the power of adolescent sexuality, female identity, and the destructive class divide. Exposing the tension between the lives we lead as adults and the experiences that form us, Eaton probes us to consider how our memories as adults compel us to reexamine our pasts.]]> 320 Ellie Eaton 0063012197 Terri 3
Josephine does manage to tell him the story -- that's the book, and for the first 75 percent, it is absolutely riveting. Eaton does a masterful job of creating the world of an elite English boarding school -- St. John the Divine -- home to next level nightmare teenage girls ... and the neurotic, insecure Josephine, or Joe, as she is known there. All the girls go by boys' names, when they're not calling themselves the Divines. Joe believes she is hideous, that her friends are constantly avoiding her, that she will never have a boyfriend. She does not know that this is true of every eighth-grade girl, she thinks that only she suffers so, and she makes very, very poor choices to compensate for her perceived shortcomings. As an adult, she claims to feel no connection to her life as a Divine, but it's clear that whatever happened there was SO AWFUL it still EATS AWAY at her, and she has to FACE IT or it will RUIN HER LIFE.

SPOILER ALERT

In the end, she looks at the class Facebook page, and discovers none of what she feared happened had actually happened.

Facebook? Really?

UGH.]]> 3.13 2021 The Divines
author: Ellie Eaton
name: Terri
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/02/02
date added: 2021/07/01
shelves:
review:
I don't think Ellie Eaton knew what a thrilling, suspenseful book she was writing. The premise is so relatable: What if everything you believed when you were 15 -- who you were and what people thought of you -- turned out to be wrong? It does, of course. But in "The Divines," it seems there might be terrible consequences, ones that Josephine (the main character) cannot bear to speak of to her new husband -- who is beautiful AND a great listener! And his name is JĂĽrgen! She might be jeopardizing her idyllic marriage because she can't tell JĂĽrgen her deep, dark secret.

Josephine does manage to tell him the story -- that's the book, and for the first 75 percent, it is absolutely riveting. Eaton does a masterful job of creating the world of an elite English boarding school -- St. John the Divine -- home to next level nightmare teenage girls ... and the neurotic, insecure Josephine, or Joe, as she is known there. All the girls go by boys' names, when they're not calling themselves the Divines. Joe believes she is hideous, that her friends are constantly avoiding her, that she will never have a boyfriend. She does not know that this is true of every eighth-grade girl, she thinks that only she suffers so, and she makes very, very poor choices to compensate for her perceived shortcomings. As an adult, she claims to feel no connection to her life as a Divine, but it's clear that whatever happened there was SO AWFUL it still EATS AWAY at her, and she has to FACE IT or it will RUIN HER LIFE.

SPOILER ALERT

In the end, she looks at the class Facebook page, and discovers none of what she feared happened had actually happened.

Facebook? Really?

UGH.
]]> Leave the World Behind 50358031
Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and - with nowhere else to turn - they have come to the country in search of shelter.

But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple - and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?]]> 241 Rumaan Alam 0062667637 Terri 5 3.13 2020 Leave the World Behind
author: Rumaan Alam
name: Terri
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/01
date added: 2021/07/01
shelves:
review:
hi. i'm new to goodreads; i want to keep a record of the books i read from now on, so i can look back and say, "look at all the books i read this year!" i finished this one at 2 a.m. new year's day, a classic couldn't-put-it-down experience. those are few and far between now. and if i find one, more often than not, the ending is such a wanh-wah. like you can tell the author had an idea for a novel, one they were in love with, they stayed in love for a while, and then they wanted out. the idea wasn't so fresh anymore, it was giving them trouble, maybe it wasn't such a great idea to begin with, they had another idea they wanted to move onto. but i think the last page of a book is as important, if not more important, as the first page. it's that final image that determines how long a book stays with us. i joined goodreads today specifically because i felt the need to celebrate that the first book i read in 2021, "leave the world behind," turned me to a block of ice by the last page, in a good way. i had to read the ending three or or four times before i could close the book, and i read it a couple more times this morning. this a new genre, at least to me -- rich people at the end of the world, finding out they have no special privilege that will save them. rumaan alam layered this book so carefully, starting with a beautiful family and their beautiful life. sure, the kids are bratty and the adults are smug, but why not, look at what they have. then ... something happens. they don't know what. we don't know what. in fact, did something actually happen? all we know is that a child spotted a deer in the backyard of her vacation home. and then another, and another, and another -- and as she walked closer, she realized there a lot of deer. hundreds of deer. that can't be good. but is it dangerously bad? slowly, alam drops in details which are vaguely disturbing, and then become more so; piece by piece he takes away the comfortable life, and throughout, the family never knows what's happening, and neither do we ... until we do. it's exactly how i would imagine the end of the world would be -- with information we couldn't handle, so we didn't.
]]> Animal 55711559 Honestly, sometimes I think it’s the only recourse. Killing men in times like these.

Joan has spent a lifetime enduring the cruel acts of men. But when one of them commits a shocking act of violence in front of her, she flees New York City in search of Alice, the only person alive who can help her make sense of her past. In the sweltering hills above Los Angeles, Joan unravels the horrific event she witnessed as a child—that has haunted her every waking moment—while forging the power to finally strike back.

Here is the electrifying debut novel from Lisa Taddeo, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Three Women, which was named to more than thirty best-of-the-year lists and hailed as “a dazzling achievement� (Los Angeles Times) and “a heartbreaking, gripping, astonishing masterpiece� (Esquire). Animal is a depiction of female rage at its rawest, and a visceral exploration of the fallout from a male-dominated society. With writing that scorches and mesmerizes, Taddeo illustrates one woman’s exhilarating transformation from prey into predator.]]> 336 Lisa Taddeo 1982122129 Terri 1 3.71 2021 Animal
author: Lisa Taddeo
name: Terri
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2021/06/20
date added: 2021/06/20
shelves:
review:
There's a lot of talk of sex positivity lately -- the current Bachelorette Katie talks about it, and Leah on the "Real Housewives of New York" talks about it, and maybe we're supposed to read "Animal" in that spirit. The narrator, Joan, has the most reductive view of the world: There are men she wants to fuck and men she doesn't want to fuck. Either way, she is going to fuck all of them, except for one she doesn't get around to fucking, but only because she's fucking the more attractive neighbor. Fuck is clearly the author's favorite word. It goes without saying all men want to fuck her -- actually, it doesn't go without saying. Every time Joan meets someone -- and unfortunately, she's new in town, so she's always meeting people -- right away, she can tell ... well, you know. A lot of the fucking is graphically described, but it's the only thing that happens in the book, apart from some hideously gruesome acts of violence, which I think leads Joan to a more profound understanding of human relationships? Maybe? Oh, and she meets a couple women, which is rare, because women don't usually like her. No shit.
]]> Corrigan 91686 319 Caroline Blackwood 1590170067 Terri 4 3.90 1984 Corrigan
author: Caroline Blackwood
name: Terri
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/23
date added: 2021/05/23
shelves:
review:
"Corrigan" is a book about a con, which is so obvious, you figure it out right away. Then you spend two-thirds of the book impatiently waiting for the characters to catch up with you ... only to discover that the person who's been conned is you.
]]> The Push 52476830 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

A tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family–and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for–and everything she feared.

Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had.

But in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter–she doesn’t behave like most children do.

Or is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well.

Then their son Sam is born–and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she’d always imagined with her child. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fall-out forces Blythe to face the truth.

The Push is a tour de force you will read in a sitting, an utterly immersive novel that will challenge everything you think you know about motherhood, about what we owe our children, and what it feels like when women are not believed.]]> 307 Ashley Audrain 1984881663 Terri 4 4.03 2021 The Push
author: Ashley Audrain
name: Terri
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/03
date added: 2021/05/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Road Through the Wall 131190 220 Shirley Jackson 044503128X Terri 4 3.61 1948 The Road Through the Wall
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Terri
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1948
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/10
date added: 2021/05/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead]]> 42946966
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?]]> 275 Olga Tokarczuk 0525541357 Terri 3 3.94 2009 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Terri
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2021/04/29
date added: 2021/04/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 340 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Terri 4 3.71 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Terri
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/04/04
date added: 2021/04/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[AMORALMAN: A True Story and Other Lies]]> 53168892 In & Of Itself.

Derek DelGaudio believed he was a decent, honest man. But when irrefutable evidence to the contrary is found in an old journal, his memories are reawakened and Derek is forced to confront—and try to understand—his role in a significant act of deception from his past.

Using his youthful notebook entries as a road map, Derek embarks on a soulful, often funny, sometimes dark journey, retracing the path that led him to a world populated by charlatans, card cheats, and con artists. As stories are peeled away and artifices are revealed, Derek examines the mystery behind his father's vanishing act, the secret he inherited from his mother, the obsession he developed with sleight-of-hand that shaped his future, and the affinity he felt for the professional swindlers who taught him how to deceive others. And once he finds himself working as a crooked dealer in a big-money Hollywood card game, Derek begins to question his own sense of morality, and discovers that even a master of deception can find himself trapped inside an illusion.

Amoralman is a wildly engaging exploration of the fictions we live as truths. It is ultimately a book about the lies we tell ourselves and the realities we manufacture in others.]]> 256 Derek Delgaudio 0525658556 Terri 4 4.24 2021 AMORALMAN: A True Story and Other Lies
author: Derek Delgaudio
name: Terri
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/03/28
date added: 2021/04/04
shelves:
review:

]]> The People in the Trees 35396824
Readers of exciting, challenging and visionary literary fiction-including admirers of Norman Rush's Mating, Ann Patchett's State of Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, and Peter Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord-will be drawn to this astonishingly gripping and accomplished first novel. A decade in the writing, this is an anthropological adventure story that combines the visceral allure of a thriller with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide. It is a book that instantly catapults Hanya Yanagihara into the company of young novelists who really, really matter.]]> 476 Hanya Yanagihara 0345803310 Terri 5 3.93 2013 The People in the Trees
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Terri
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2021/03/26
date added: 2021/03/28
shelves:
review:
When you think about it, there is no such thing as a reliable narrator; every story, including our own, is always going to be one-sided. But I cannot think of a narrator as unreliable as Norton Perina. He disingenuously represents himself as a hapless medical student who gets extremely odd job offers, but ultimately reveals that he is in fact a grotesque egomaniac whose distinguished scientific career depends on conducting experiments on humans. And that isn't even the worst thing about him! He keeps blithely divulging horrible, soulless aspects of himself, right up until the final sentence. By the end, I was gasping out loud at least once every page. I feel that most authors want you to identify with their protagonists, even when they're evil. This was an unsettling, yet exhilarating, experience for me -- to love the story, but loath the person telling it.
]]> Fake Accounts 45732027 A woman in a post-election tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this provocative and subversive debut novel that examines social media, sex, feminism, and fiction, the connection they've all promised, and the lies they help us tell.

On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend's phone and makes a startling discovery: he's an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she's not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she's relieved—he was always a little distant—and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women's March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.

Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can't trust anyone--shouldn't the feeling be mutual?

Narrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age.]]> 272 Lauren Oyler 1948226928 Terri 0 2.83 2021 Fake Accounts
author: Lauren Oyler
name: Terri
average rating: 2.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2021/02/17
date added: 2021/02/17
shelves:
review:

]]> White Ivy 50892388
Raised outside of Boston, Ivy’s immigrant grandmother relies on Ivy’s mild appearance for cover as she teaches her granddaughter how to pilfer items from yard sales and second-hand shops. Thieving allows Ivy to accumulate the trappings of a suburban teen—and, most importantly, to attract the attention of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of a wealthy political family. But when Ivy’s mother discovers her trespasses, punishment is swift and Ivy is sent to China, and her dream instantly evaporates.

Years later, Ivy has grown into a poised yet restless young woman, haunted by her conflicting feelings about her upbringing and her family. Back in Boston, when Ivy bumps into Sylvia Speyer, Gideon’s sister, a reconnection with Gideon seems not only inevitable—it feels like fate.

Slowly, Ivy sinks her claws into Gideon and the entire Speyer clan by attending fancy dinners, and weekend getaways to the cape. But just as Ivy is about to have everything she’s ever wanted, a ghost from her past resurfaces, threatening the nearly perfect life she’s worked so hard to build.

Filled with surprising twists and offering sharp insights into the immigrant experience, White Ivy is both a love triangle and a coming-of-age story, as well as a glimpse into the dark side of a woman who yearns for success at any cost.]]> 354 Susie Yang Terri 4 3.52 2020 White Ivy
author: Susie Yang
name: Terri
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/06
date added: 2021/02/17
shelves:
review:

]]> The Sparsholt Affair 35427341 From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Man Booker Prize, a sweeping new novel that explores richly complex relationships between fathers and sons as it spans seven transformative decades in England, from the 1940s through the present

In the fall of 1940, with the world at war, a young man arrives at Oxford to study engineering, though his sights are already set on joining the Royal Air Force as a pilot. Handsome, charismatic, a powerful athlete and oarsman, David Sparsholt seems at first unaware of the effect he has on others--especially on the lonely and romantic Evert Dax, son of a celebrated novelist, himself also destined to become a writer. While the Blitz rages in London, Oxford exists at a strange remove from the action: a place of transience and uncertainty, the fears and rigors of the blackout both encouraging and concealing unexpected liaisons. Between these two young men of very different backgrounds an unusual friendship develops, one whose consequences will unfold over the many years that follow.

Alan Hollinghurst's masterly new novel evokes the intimate lives of three generations of Sparsholts in a sequence of vividly rendered episodes: a childhood holiday in Cornwall; eccentric social gatherings at the Dax family home; the adventures of David's son Johnny, in pursuit of love and a career as a painter in 1970s London. Changes in taste, morality, and private life are explored in a group portrait of friends brought together by art, literature, and love. Champions of the Modern live to see modernity itself becoming history, while more personal, life-changing crises and scandals--including that which gives this novel its title--recede into the past, leaving their ambiguous traces. And as gay men and women live in increasing freedom and openness, and the gay scene evolves into new forms and possibilities, The Sparsholt Affair becomes a meditation on human transience, even as it expresses the countervailing longing for permanence and continuity.

Witty, tender, epic in scope yet rich in observation, The Sparsholt Affair is a dazzling new work of fiction by a writer justly hailed by the Wall Street Journal as "one of the best novelists at work today."]]> 454 Alan Hollinghurst 1447208218 Terri 0 to-read 3.50 2017 The Sparsholt Affair
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Terri
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/02/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Eileen 23453099 So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys� prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.]]> 260 Ottessa Moshfegh 1594206627 Terri 3 3.57 2015 Eileen
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Terri
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2021/01/27
date added: 2021/01/27
shelves:
review:

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