Josh's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 13 Apr 2025 17:35:24 -0700 60 Josh's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Absolute Preacher Vol. 3 36022870 Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's groundbreaking Vertigo series continues to receive the Absolute Edition treatment with ABSOLUTE PREACHER VOL. 3!

Merging with a bizarre spiritual force called Genesis, Texan Preacher Jesse Custer becomes completely disillusioned with the beliefs that he had dedicated his entire life to. Now possessing the power of "The Word," an ability to make people do whatever he utters, Custer begins a violent and riotous journey across the country. Joined by his gun-toting girlfriend Tulip and the hard-drinking Irish vampire Cassidy, the Preacher loses faith in both man and God as he witnesses dark atrocities and improbable calamities during his exploration of America.

Collects issues #41-66 of PREACHER in an oversize Absolute Edition format, complete with a new slipcase and bonus material!]]> 736 Garth Ennis 1401278485 Josh 0 currently-reading 4.45 Absolute Preacher Vol. 3
author: Garth Ennis
name: Josh
average rating: 4.45
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> Absolute Preacher Vol. 2 31616107
Acclaimed by fans and critics alike, this groundbreaking title shattered conventions and set new standards for American comics during its original run. Now, Vertigo and DC Comics are proud to present the definitive Absolute Edition of Ennis and Dillon’s transformative work. This second of three deluxe slipcased volumes collects issues #27-40 of the series together with the specials “Saint of Killers,� “Cassidy—Blood and Whiskey,� “One Man’s War,� “The Good Old Boys� and “The Story of You-Know-Who,� and features an introduction by actor Graham McTavish—the Saint of Killers from AMC’s Preacher—as well as previously unseen preliminary art from the specials, a gallery of PREACHER covers and collectibles, and more treasures from the series� infamous GONE TO TEXAS letters column.

Collects PREACHER #27-40, PREACHER SPECIAL: SAINT OF KILLERS #1-4, PREACHER SPECIAL: THE STORY OF YOU-KNOW-WHO #1, PREACHER SPECIAL: THE GOOD OLD BOYS #1 and PREACHER SPECIAL: CASSIDY—BLOOD AND WHISKEY #1.]]> 686 Garth Ennis 1401268099 Josh 4 4.49 2017 Absolute Preacher Vol. 2
author: Garth Ennis
name: Josh
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/04/13
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]]> Absolute Preacher Vol. 1 27246006
Merging with a bizarre spiritual force called Genesis, Texan Preacher Jesse Custer becomes completely disillusioned with the beliefs that he had dedicated his entire life to. Now possessing the power of "The Word," an ability to make people do whatever he utters, Custer begins a violent and riotous journey across the country. Joined by his gun-toting girlfriend Tulip and the hard drinking Irish vampire Cassidy, the Preacher loses faith in both man and God as he witnesses dark atrocities and improbable calamities during his exploration of America.

Collects issues #1-26 of PREACHER in an oversized Absolute Edition format, complete with a new slipcase and bonus material!]]> 680 Garth Ennis 1401264417 Josh 4 4.58 2016 Absolute Preacher Vol. 1
author: Garth Ennis
name: Josh
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> The Iron Heel 23575211 160 Jack London 150312097X Josh 0 to-read 3.59 1908 The Iron Heel
author: Jack London
name: Josh
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1908
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Glass Bead Game 16634 The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.

Set in the twenty-third century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).]]> 558 Hermann Hesse 0312278497 Josh 0 to-read 4.12 1943 The Glass Bead Game
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Josh
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Combinations (Golemgrad Pentalogy, #1)]]> 29850159
“Kafka’s The Trial meets Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.”]]> 925 Louis Armand Josh 0 to-read 4.24 2016 The Combinations (Golemgrad Pentalogy, #1)
author: Louis Armand
name: Josh
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Caves of Alienation (Library of Wales)]]> 9737111 592 Stuart Evans 190576295X Josh 0 to-read 3.67 1977 The Caves of Alienation (Library of Wales)
author: Stuart Evans
name: Josh
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus: Out, Such, Between, Thru]]> 438040 742 Christine Brooke-Rose 1857548841 Josh 0 to-read 4.22 1986 The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus: Out, Such, Between, Thru
author: Christine Brooke-Rose
name: Josh
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe]]> 206348383 A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book
Featured in The New York Times Book Review and NPR

Real-world solutions to America’s thorniest social problemsâ€Äě°ů´Çłľ housing to retirement to drug addiction—based on original reporting from around the world

A new generation of Americans has declared that another world is possible. And yet, the stubborn problems of inequality, climate change, and declining health seem as intractable as ever. Where might different answers lie?

Intrepid journalist Natasha Hakimi Zapata has traveled around the world, from Costa Rica to New Zealand, and Estonia to Singapore, uncovering how different countries solve the problems that plague the United States. Through in-depth reporting, including interviews with senior government officials, activists, industry professionals, and the ordinary people affected by their policies, Another World Is Possible examines innovative programs that address public health, social services, climate change, housing, education, addiction, and more.


In each instance Zapata provides a clear-eyed assessment of the history, challenges, cost-effectiveness, and real-world impact of these programs. The result is a compelling, frame-shifting account of how we might live differently and create a safer, healthier, more sustainable future.

A work of keen analysis as well as enormous heart and optimism, Another World Is Possible is destined to crack the mold of current debates, and to refresh our sense of what might be possible tomorrow.]]> 420 Natasha Hakimi Zapata 162097889X Josh 0 to-read 4.18 2025 Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe
author: Natasha Hakimi Zapata
name: Josh
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/05
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]]> Blue Lard 157975976
Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author’s books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines.

The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese—peppered with ample neologisms—and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process� is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write.

This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers?

Blue Lard is a stylistically acrobatic book, translated by Max Lawton into an English idiom just as bizarre as the Russian original. Evoking both Pulp Fiction and the masterpieces of Marquis de Sade,ĚýSorokin’s novel is a brutal, heady trip that annihilates all of its twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century competition in the Russian canon—and that annihilates Russia itself in a resounding act of heavy-metal dissidence.]]> 422 Vladimir Sorokin 1681378191 Josh 0 to-read 3.90 1999 Blue Lard
author: Vladimir Sorokin
name: Josh
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> Invincible, Compendium Three 37491885
Collects INVINCIBLE #97-144.]]> 1112 Robert Kirkman 1534306862 Josh 4 4.70 2018 Invincible, Compendium Three
author: Robert Kirkman
name: Josh
average rating: 4.70
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> Cancerqueen 2043342
Tommaso Landolfi is one of Italy's greatest writers, and this volume represents his finest work of the past ten years.

Landolfi's universe is peopled by madmen, fantasists, talking animals, robots, anguished lovers—it is funny, sometimes horrifying, and always bewitching.

The title story, for instance, in the best science-fiction tradition, concerns the spaceship Cancerqueen, which whisks off to the moon a mad scientist and an equally deranged writer. But Cancerqueen herself is no model of mental health either, and in a hair-rising and riotous climax the three characters find their deserved ends. At once, "Cancerqueen", parodies and extends the methods of Poe and H. G. Wells.

Landolfi's writings recall Gogol for their sharp humor, Kafka for their sense of the fantastic, Borges for stylistic wit. But Landolfi's individuality and range have forced his critics to abandon all notions of critical categories and to designate him, simply, an original.

Titles within:
- A Note on Landolfi
- The Mute
- Hands
- Stefano's Two Sons
- Autumn
- Cancerqueen
- Fable
- Misdeal
- [Untitled]
- Looking
- A Family Chat
- At the Station
- Venetian Dialogue
- Week of Sun
- The Sword
- The Calculations of Probability
- "Night Must Fall"
- Shadows]]> 276 Tommaso Landolfi Josh 0 to-read 3.93 Cancerqueen
author: Tommaso Landolfi
name: Josh
average rating: 3.93
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]]> <![CDATA[Words in Commotion and Other Stories]]> 493409
Titles within:
- Introduction: Precision and Chance, by Italo Calvino
- The Labrenas
- Chicken Fate
- Two Wakes
- The Kiss
- Gogol's Wife
- The Werewolf
- The Provincial Night
- Maria Guiseppa
- Uxoricide
- The Test
- The Ampulla
- A Woman's Breast
- The Eternal Province
- Prefigurations: Prato
- Literary Prize
- The Grace of God
- Prize in Spite Of
- Rain
- The Eclipse
- The Gnat
- An Abstract Concept
- Personaphilologicaldramatic Conference with Implications
- Dialogue of Greater Systems
- Words in Commotion
- Translators Afterword]]> 304 Tommaso Landolfi 0140094776 Josh 0 to-read 3.82 1986 Words in Commotion and Other Stories
author: Tommaso Landolfi
name: Josh
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Gogol's Wife and Other Stories]]> 101063
The short stories included are:

- Gogol's Wife
- Pastoral
- Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies
- The Two Old Maids
- Wedding Night
- The Death of the King of France
- Giovanni and His Wife
- Sunstroke
- A Romantic's Letter on Gambling]]> 183 Tommaso Landolfi 0811200809 Josh 0 to-read 3.84 1961 Gogol's Wife and Other Stories
author: Tommaso Landolfi
name: Josh
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Devil in the Hills (Peter Owen Modern Classic)]]> 693468 190 Cesare Pavese 0720611180 Josh 0 to-read 3.77 1949 The Devil in the Hills (Peter Owen Modern Classic)
author: Cesare Pavese
name: Josh
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> Among Women Only 1739081 D.D. Paige 0720610303 Josh 0 to-read 3.57 1949 Among Women Only
author: D.D. Paige
name: Josh
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> The Moon and the Bonfire 132376 192 Cesare Pavese 0720611199 Josh 0 to-read 3.88 1950 The Moon and the Bonfire
author: Cesare Pavese
name: Josh
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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]]> House on the Hill 959451 192 Cesare Pavese 0720642868 Josh 0 to-read 3.66 1948 House on the Hill
author: Cesare Pavese
name: Josh
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Invincible, Compendium Two 18101127 1184 Robert Kirkman 1607067722 Josh 4 4.68 2013 Invincible, Compendium Two
author: Robert Kirkman
name: Josh
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> Piranesi 50202953
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.]]> 272 Susanna Clarke 163557563X Josh 0 to-read 4.22 2020 Piranesi
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Josh
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> Tell Me an Ending 58438576 What if you didn't have to live with your worst memories?

Across the world, thousands of people are shocked by a notification that they once chose to have a memory removed. Now they are being given an opportunity to get that memory back. Four individuals are filled with new doubts, grappling with the unexpected question of whether to remember unknown events, or to leave them buried forever.

Finn, an Irish architect living in the Arizona desert, begins to suspect his charming wife of having an affair. Mei, a troubled grad school dropout in Kuala Lumpur, wonders why she remembers a city she has never visited. William, a former police inspector in England, struggles with PTSD, the breakdown of his marriage, and his own secret family history. Oscar, a handsome young man with almost no memories at all, travels the world in a constant state of fear.

Into these characters� lives comes Noor, a psychologist working at the Nepenthe memory removal clinic in London. The process of reinstating patients� memories begins to shake the moral foundations of her world. As she delves deeper into how the program works, she will have to risk everything to uncover the cost of this miraculous technology.

A provocative exploration of secrets, grief, and identity—of the stories we tell ourselves�Tell Me an Ending is a sharp, dark, and devastating novel about the power of memory.

Never Let Me Go meets Black Mirror in this thrilling speculative debut about a tech company that deletes unwanted memories, the consequences for those forced to contend with what they tried to forget, and the dissenting doctor who seeks to protect her patients from further harm.]]> 448 Jo Harkin 1982164328 Josh 0 to-read 3.61 2022 Tell Me an Ending
author: Jo Harkin
name: Josh
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> The Dream Hotel 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

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

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

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Josh 0 to-read 3.68 2025 The Dream Hotel
author: Laila Lalami
name: Josh
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> <![CDATA[The Defection of A.J. Lewinter]]> 868398 304 Robert Littell 0142003468 Josh 0 to-read 3.72 1973 The Defection of A.J. Lewinter
author: Robert Littell
name: Josh
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> The Once and Future Spy 173799 The Company, received rave reviews across the nation, The Once and Future Spy is finally back in print. This is Littell at the top of his form, constructing a tale of espionage and counterespionage that reveal the dirty tricks and dangerous secrets concerning the subjects he knows intimately-the CIA and American history, past and present. Littell proves beyond all doubt that he is a storyteller of inimitable caliber. As Stephen Coonts put it, "Eric Ambler invented the modern spy novel. Robert Littell perfected it. The Once and Future Spy is a classic spy story."

At the center of Littell's plot is an elite plan, so secret and so dangerous that its existence is known only to a tiny group of specialists within CIA headquarters. There is virtually no paper trail-but somehow, the plan has sprung a leak. The plotters must urgently trace it-or face deadly consequences. Meanwhile, at work elsewhere on another highly sensitive project for "the Company" is an operative known as "the Weeder"-a man obsessed with American history and one of its heroes. When the Weeder's and Washington's clandestine worlds collide, the present faces the past and disturbing moral choices are weighed against a shining patriotic dream. What is the truth? Whose truth should be believed?

Extraordinarily inventive, breathtakingly imaginative, and relentlessly gripping, The Once and Future Spy is easy to read, hard to put down.]]> 304 Robert Littell 0142004057 Josh 0 to-read 3.60 1990 The Once and Future Spy
author: Robert Littell
name: Josh
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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]]> The Amateur 210455691 368 Robert Littell 1641296887 Josh 0 to-read 3.44 1981 The Amateur
author: Robert Littell
name: Josh
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> The Company 1218465 1281 Robert Littell 0330372890 Josh 0 to-read 4.25 2002 The Company
author: Robert Littell
name: Josh
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1]]> 201604423 Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx’s thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source.

For Marx, our global economic system is relentlessly driven by “value”—to produce it, capture it, trade it, and most of all, to increase it. Lifespans are shortened under the demand for ever-greater value. Days are lengthened, work is intensified, and the division of labor deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannize our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonization, and enslavement.

With a foreword by Wendy Brown and an afterword by William Clare Roberts, this is a critical edition of Capital for our time, one that faithfully preserves the vitality and directness of Marx’s German prose and renders his ideas newly relevant to modern readers.]]> 944 Karl Marx 0691190070 Josh 0 to-read 4.91 1887 Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1
author: Karl Marx
name: Josh
average rating: 4.91
book published: 1887
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
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]]> Invincible: Compendium One 11924046
Collects #1�47, #0, Invincible story from the Image Comics Summer Special, The Pact #4]]> 1092 Robert Kirkman 1607064111 Josh 4 4.59 2011 Invincible: Compendium One
author: Robert Kirkman
name: Josh
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Thief of Thieves, Vol. 1: "I Quit."]]> 15737245
Collects issues #1 - #7!

978-1607065920]]> 152 Robert Kirkman 1607065924 Josh 0 to-read 3.78 2012 Thief of Thieves, Vol. 1: "I Quit."
author: Robert Kirkman
name: Josh
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> Oblivion Song, Vol. 1 36477721
Collects OBLIVION SONG #1-6.]]> 144 Robert Kirkman Josh 0 to-read 3.75 2018 Oblivion Song, Vol. 1
author: Robert Kirkman
name: Josh
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Outcast by Kirkman & Azaceta Book 1]]> 31540471 ]]> 296 Robert Kirkman 1534300910 Josh 0 to-read 4.13 2016 Outcast by Kirkman & Azaceta Book 1
author: Robert Kirkman
name: Josh
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cocaine and Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette]]> 207294358 From the creator of the acclaimed country music history podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones, comes the epic American saga of country music’s legendary royal couple—George Jones and Tammy Wynette.By the early 1960s nearly everybody paying attention to country music agreed that George Jones was the greatest country singer of all time. After taking honky-tonk rockers like “White Lightning� all the way up the country charts, he revealed himself to be an unmatched virtuoso on “She Thinks I Still Care,� thus cementing his status as a living legend. That’s where the trouble started. Only at this new level of fame did Jones realize he suffered from extreme stage fright. His method of dealing with that involved great quantities of alcohol, which his audience soon discovered as Jones more often than not showed up to concerts falling-down drunk or failed to show up at all. But the fans always forgave him because he just kept singing so damn good. Then he got married to Tammy Wynette right around the time she became one of the most famous women alive with the release of “Stand by Your Man.� Tammy Wynette grew up believing George Jones was the greatest country singer of all time. After deciding to become a country singer herself, she went to Nashville, got a record deal, then met and married her hero. With the pop crossover success of “Stand by Your Man� (and the international political drama surrounding the song’s lyrics) came a gigantic audience, who were sold a fairy tale image of a couple soon being called The King and Queen of Country Music. Many fans still believe that fairy tale today. The behind-the-scenes truth is very different from the images shown on album covers. Illustrated throughout by singular artist Wayne White, Cocaine & Rhinestones is an unprecedented look at the lives of two indelible country icons, reframing their careers within country music as well as modern history itself.]]> 512 Tyler Mahan Coe 1668015188 Josh 0 currently-reading 4.04 2024 Cocaine and Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette
author: Tyler Mahan Coe
name: Josh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Absolution (Southern Reach, #4)]]> 210367505 TOP SECRET: A clear and present threat exists. Open-ended. Existential. Confirmation via uncanny op. Nature of same: Unknown. Initiating entity: Unknown. Priority: High.

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance � award winners and international bestsellers all, the first the basis for a now-classic film � Jeff VanderMeer brings us back for a surprise fourth and final foray into Area X.

Absolution opens decades before Area X forms, with a science expedition whose mysterious end suggests terrifying consequences for the future � and marks the Forgotten Coast as a high-priority area of interest for Central, the shadowy government agency responsible for monitoring extraordinary threats.

Many years later, the Forgotten Coast files wind up in the hands of a washed-up Central operative known as Old Jim. He starts pulling a thread that reveals a long and troubling record of government agents meddling with forces they clearly cannot comprehend. Soon, Old Jim is back out in the field, grappling with personal demons and now partnered with an unproven young agent, the two of them tasked with solving what may be an unsolvable mystery. With every turn, the stakes get higher: Central agents are being liquidated by an unknown rogue entity and Old Jim’s life is on the line.

Old Jim’s investigation culminates in the first Central expedition into what has now been labeled Area X. A border has come down, and a full team � well trained but eccentric � has been assembled to find Area X’s “off switch� somewhere in the volatile, dangerous terrain that has mysteriously defied all attempts to be explored, mapped, or controlled. A landscape that, one way or another, seems to consume all who enter it.

Sweeping in scope and rich with ideas, iconic characters, and unpredictable adventure, Absolution converges the past, present, and future in terrifying, ecstatic, and mind-bending ways. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.]]> 441 Jeff VanderMeer 0374616590 Josh 4 3.61 2024 Absolution (Southern Reach, #4)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
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]]> Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1) 13453029
The first Wool story was released as a standalone short in July of 2011. Due to reviewer demand, the rest of the story was released over the next six months.

This is the story of mankind clawing for survival, of mankind on the edge. The world outside has grown unkind, the view of it limited, talk of it forbidden. But there are always those who hope, who dream. These are the dangerous people, the residents who infect others with their optimism. Their punishment is simple. They are given the very thing they profess to want: They are allowed outside.

Alternate cover for B0071XO8RA]]> 509 Hugh Howey Josh 0 to-read 4.22 2012 Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1)
author: Hugh Howey
name: Josh
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Franz Kafka The Complete Stories]]> 4350671 486 Nahum N. Glatzer 0805234195 Josh 5 4.42 1911 Franz Kafka The Complete Stories
author: Nahum N. Glatzer
name: Josh
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1911
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
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]]> Collected Stories 35720976 Collected Stories is an authoritative new translation of the complete fiction of Bruno Schulz, whose work has influenced writers as various as Salman Rushdie, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, Danilo Kiš, and Roberto Bolaño.

Schulz’s prose is renowned for its originality. Set largely in a fictional counterpart of his hometown of Drohobycz, his stories merge the real and the surreal. The most ordinary objects—the wind, an article of clothing, a plate of fish—can suddenly appear unfathomably mysterious and capable of illuminating profound truths. As “Father,� one of his most intriguing characters, declaims: “Matter has been granted infinite fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time, a seductive power of temptation that entices us to create forms.�

This comprehensive volume includes all of The Cinnamon Shops, restoring the original Polish title to Schulz’s most famous collection (sometimes titled The Street of Crocodiles in English), and Sanatorium under the Hourglass. Also included are four previously uncollected short stories that pay tribute to Schulz’s enduring genius. Madeline G. Levine’s masterful new translation shows contemporary readers how Schulz, often compared to Proust and Kafka, reveals the workings of memory and consciousness.]]> 269 Bruno Schulz 0810136600 Josh 0 to-read 4.21 2018 Collected Stories
author: Bruno Schulz
name: Josh
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass]]> 359559 200 Bruno Schulz 0395860237 Josh 0 to-read 4.32 1937 Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
author: Bruno Schulz
name: Josh
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1937
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The House on the Borderland and Other Novels]]> 634041 656 William Hope Hodgson 0575073721 Josh 0 to-read 3.93 The House on the Borderland and Other Novels
author: William Hope Hodgson
name: Josh
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3)]]> 18077752
Meanwhile, Acceptance tunnels ever deeper into the circumstances surrounding the creation of Area X—what initiated this unnatural upheaval? Among the many who have tried, who has gotten close to understanding Area X—and who may have been corrupted by it?

In this last installment of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may be solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound—or terrifying.]]> 341 Jeff VanderMeer 0374104115 Josh 4 3.66 2014 Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/12
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]]> Tales of the Dying Earth 40866 Jack Vance is one of the most remarkable talents to ever grace the world of science fiction. His unique, stylish voice has been beloved by generations of readers. One of his enduring classics is his 1964 novel, The Dying Earth, and its sequels--a fascinating, baroque tale set on a far-future Earth, under a giant red sun that is soon to go out forever.

This omnibus volume comprised all four books in the series
The Dying Earth
The Eyes of the Overworld
Cugel's Saga
Rialto the Marvellous]]> 741 Jack Vance 0312874561 Josh 0 to-read 4.14 1998 Tales of the Dying Earth
author: Jack Vance
name: Josh
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> Secret Lives 230856 160 Jeff VanderMeer 080951088X Josh 0 to-read 3.60 2008 Secret Lives
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> <![CDATA[City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris]]> 1117820
This is the first edition containing four novellas:

"Dradin, In Love"
"An Early History of Ambergris"
"The Transformation of Martin Lake"
"The Strange Case of X"]]> 219 Jeff VanderMeer 1587154366 Josh 0 to-read 4.09 2001 City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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]]> The Third Bear 7778983
In “The Situation,� a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta-ray to be used for educational purposes (once described as Dilbert meets Gormenghast). In “Three Days in a Border Town,� a sharpshooter seeks the truth about her husband in an elusive floating city beyond a far-future horizon; “Errata� follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world. Also included are two stories original to this collection, including “The Quickening,� in which a lonely child is torn between familial obligation and loyalty to a maligned talking rabbit.

Chimerical and hypnotic, VanderMeer leads readers through the postmodern into a new literature of the imagination.]]> 273 Jeff VanderMeer 1892391988 Josh 0 to-read 3.90 2010 The Third Bear
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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]]> The Backbone of the World 60312248 New York Times bestselling author.

Millie Two Bears lives alone in a trailer in the heart of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. Since her husband went to jail, she’s been on the outs with the reservation. And it’s not just people she has to contend with. Now the prairie dogs are moving in on her patch of land. When a strange woman comes into Millie’s life, and Millie’s rodent war escalates, a fateful confrontation with vengeance, secrets, and survival is just underfoot.

Stephen Graham Jones’s The Backbone of the World is part of Trespass, a collection of wild stories about animal instincts, human folly, and survival from award-winning, bestselling authors. Read or listen to each in a single sitting.]]> 54 Stephen Graham Jones 1542034442 Josh 0 to-read 3.92 2022 The Backbone of the World
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Josh
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Tiger Came to the Mountains]]> 60312270
She is the adventurer of the family. Her brother, the gentle dreamer. Even as they bond over folktales and hold each other close, their world has never felt so dangerous. Revolutionaries and pelones are in conflict, soldiers have turned into scavengers, and an escaped tiger has slipped up the mountain, looking for easy prey. As the darkest of legends becomes real, a young girl will do anything to save her brother’s life.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Tiger Came to the Mountains is part of Trespass, a collection of wild stories about animal instincts, human folly, and survival from award-winning, bestselling authors. Read or listen to each in a single sitting.]]> 28 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 1542037468 Josh 0 to-read 3.74 2022 The Tiger Came to the Mountains
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Josh
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> Wildlife 60436372 New York Times bestselling author.

Sam has retreated to her late father’s rental house, a safe place to commune with the animals in the greenbelt out back, tend to her garden, and keep her secrets. Her sense of security slowly returns—until an aggressive neighbor from the other side of the ravine fells a tree on her property. How little he regards nature. Or understands its darkness. How little he knows Sam.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Wildlife is part of Trespass, a collection of wild stories about animal instincts, human folly, and survival from award-winning, bestselling authors. Read or listen to each in a single sitting.]]> 57 Jeff VanderMeer 154203745X Josh 0 to-read 3.38 2022 Wildlife
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> Veniss Underground 230853
First, Nicholas, a would-be Living Artist, seeks to escape his demons in the shadowy underground—but in doing so makes a deal with the devil himself. In her fevered search for him, his twin sister, Nicola, spins her own unusual and hypnotic tale as she discovers the hidden secrets of the city. And finally, haunted by Nicola’s sudden, mysterious disappearance and gripped by despair, Shadrach, Nicola’s lover, embarks on a mythic journey to the nightmarish levels deep beneath the surface of the city to bring his love back to light. There he will find wonders beyond imagining…and horrors greater than the heart can bear.

By turns beautiful, horrifying, delicate, and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession in a landscape that defies the boundaries of the imagination.

This special edition includes the short stories “The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight�; “Detectives and Cadavers�; and “A Heart for Lucretia� and the novella Balzac’s War, offering a complete tour of the fantastic world of Veniss.

Praise for Veniss Underground

“A wonder-filled journey that echoes Dante’s Divine Comedy, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch.� —Publishers Weekly

“Audacious . . . full of beautiful sentences, black humor and terrible wonders.� —San Francisco Chronicle

“[The novel’s] milieu recalls Philip K. Dick, its passages of prose poetry Edgar Allan Poe, its wry fatalism Jim Thompson. Wow!� � Booklist

“In the hands of a brilliant writer like Jeff VanderMeer, writing fantasy can be a means of serious artistic expression . . . also playful, poignant, and utterly, wildly imaginative.� —Peter Straub, author of lost boy lost girl]]> 278 Jeff VanderMeer 0553383566 Josh 0 to-read 3.82 2003 Veniss Underground
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Shriek: An Afterword (Ambergris, #2)]]> 230855 City of Saints & Madmen--Shriek: An Afterword relates the scandalous, heartbreaking, and horrifying secret history of two squabbling siblings and their confidantes, protectors, and enemies.

Narrated with flamboyant intensity and under increasingly urgent conditions by ex-society figure Janice Shriek, this afterword presents a vivid gallery of characters and events, emphasizing the adventures of Janice's brother Duncan, a historian obsessed with a doomed love affair and a secret that may kill or transform him; a war between rival publishing houses that will change Ambergris forever; and the gray caps, a marginalized people armed with advanced fungal technologies who have been waiting underground for their chance to mold the future of the city.

Part academic treatise, part tell-all biography, after this introduction to the Family Shriek, you'll never look at history in quite the same way again.
]]> 352 Jeff VanderMeer 0765314657 Josh 0 to-read 4.04 2006 Shriek: An Afterword (Ambergris, #2)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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]]> Finch (Ambergris, #3) 6582496 339 Jeff VanderMeer 0980226015 Josh 0 to-read 4.03 2009 Finch (Ambergris, #3)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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]]> Dead Astronauts (Borne, #2) 37589179
A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden.

Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth � all the Earths.]]> 352 Jeff VanderMeer Josh 0 to-read 3.35 2019 Dead Astronauts (Borne, #2)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[City of Saints and Madmen (Ambergris, #1)]]> 230852 City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer has reinvented the literature of the fantastic. You hold in your hands an invitation to a place unlike any you’ve ever visited–an invitation delivered by one of our most audacious and astonishing literary magicians.

City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading–and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced he’s made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he’s really from a place called Chicago.�

By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and “eyewitness� reports invokes a universe within a puzzlebox where you can lose–and find–yourself again.]]> 704 Jeff VanderMeer 0553383574 Josh 0 to-read 3.87 2002 City of Saints and Madmen (Ambergris, #1)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Strange Bird: A Borne Story (Borne, #1.5)]]> 35654201 The Strange Birdâ€Äě°ů´Çłľ New York Times bestselling novelist Jeff VanderMeer—is a novella-length digital original that expands and weaves deeply into the world of his “thorough marvelâ€�* of a novel, Borne.

The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory—she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape.

But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The sky itself is full of wildlife that rejects her as one of their own, and also full of technology—satellites and drones and other detritus of the human civilization below that has all but destroyed itself. And the farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful that have outlived the corporation a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. But of the many creatures she encounters with whom she bears some kind of kinship, it is the humans—all of them now simply scrambling to survive—who are the most insidious, who still see her as simply something to possess, to capture, to trade, to exploit. Never to understand, never to welcome home.

With The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer has done more than add another layer, a new chapter, to his celebrated novel Borne. He has created a whole new perspective on the world inhabited by Rachel and Wick, the Magician, Mord, and Borne—a view from above, of course, but also a view from deep inside the mind of a new kind of creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.

Praise for Borne

*“Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy was an ever-creeping map of the apocalypse; with Borne he continues his investigation into the malevolent grace of the world, and it's a thorough marvel.� —Colson Whitehead

“VanderMeer is that rare novelist who turns to nonhumans not to make them approximate us as much as possible but to make such approximation impossible. All of this is magnified a hundredfold in Borne . . . Here is the story about biotech that VanderMeer wants to tell, a vision of the nonhuman not as one fixed thing, one fixed destiny, but as either peaceful or catastrophic, by our side or out on a rampage as our behavior dictates—for these are our children, born of us and now to be borne in whatever shape or mess we have created. This coming-of-age story signals that eco-fiction has come of age as wilder, more reckless and more breathtaking than previously thought, a wager and a promise that what emerges from the twenty-first century will be as good as any from the twentieth, or the nineteenth.� —Wai Chee Dimock, The New York Times Book Review]]> 96 Jeff VanderMeer 0374714932 Josh 0 to-read 4.15 2017 The Strange Bird: A Borne Story (Borne, #1.5)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2017
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]]> Hummingbird Salamander 53359447 Annihilation, a brilliant speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the possible end of all things.

Security consultant “Jane Smith� receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander. Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control.

Soon, Jane and her family are in danger, with few allies to help her make sense of the true scope of the peril. Is the only way to safety to follow in Silvina’s footsteps? Is it too late to stop? As she desperately seeks answers about why Silvina contacted her, time is running out—for her and possibly for the world.

Hummingbird Salamander is Jeff VanderMeer at his brilliant, cinematic best, wrapping profound questions about climate change, identity, and the world we live in into a tightly plotted thriller full of unexpected twists and elaborate conspiracy.]]> 351 Jeff VanderMeer 0374173540 Josh 0 to-read 3.23 2021 Hummingbird Salamander
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> Boy's Life 36505403 An Alabama boy’s innocence is shaken by murder and madness in the 1960s South in this novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of Swan Song.

It’s 1964 in idyllic Zephyr, Alabama. People either work for the paper mill up the Tecumseh River, or for the local dairy. It’s a simple life, but it stirs the impressionable imagination of twelve-year-old aspiring writer Cory Mackenson. He’s certain he’s sensed spirits whispering in the churchyard. He’s heard of the weird bootleggers who lurk in the dark outside of town. He’s seen a flood leave Main Street crawling with snakes. Cory thrills to all of it as only a young boy can.
Ěý
Then one morning, while accompanying his father on his milk route, he sees a car careen off the road and slowly sink into fathomless Saxon’s Lake. His father dives into the icy water to rescue the driver, and finds a beaten corpse, naked and handcuffed to the steering wheel—a copper wire tightened around the stranger’s neck. In time, the townsfolk seem to forget all about the unsolved murder. But Cory and his father can’t.
Ěý
Their search for the truth is a journey into a world where innocence and evil collide. What lies before them is the stuff of fear and awe, magic and madness, fantasy and reality. As Cory wades into the deep end of Zephyr and all its mysteries, he’ll discover that while the pleasures of childish things fade away, growing up can be a strange and beautiful ride.
Ěý
“Strongly echoing the childhood-elegies of King and Bradbury, and every bit their equal,� Boy’s Life, a winner of both the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Awards, represents a brilliant blend of mystery and rich atmosphere, the finest work of one of today’s most accomplished writers (Kirkus Reviews).]]> 625 Robert McCammon Josh 0 to-read 4.47 1991 Boy's Life
author: Robert McCammon
name: Josh
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
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]]> Swan Song 11557
He is the Man with the Scarlet Eye, a malevolent force that feeds on the dark desires of the countless followers he has gathered into his service. His only desire is to find a special child named Swan—and destroy her. But those who would protect the girl are determined to fight for what is left of the world, and their souls.

In a wasteland born of rage, populated by monstrous creatures and marauding armies, the last survivors on earth have been drawn into the final battle between good and evil that will decide the fate of humanity....]]> 956 Robert McCammon 0671741039 Josh 0 to-read 4.29 1987 Swan Song
author: Robert McCammon
name: Josh
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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]]> Stinger 36687393 542 Robert McCammon Josh 0 to-read 3.97 1988 Stinger
author: Robert McCammon
name: Josh
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
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]]> The Dreaming Void (Void #1) 866136 At the very heart of the galaxy is the Void, a self-contained microuniverse that cannot be breached, cannot be destroyed, and cannot be stopped as it steadily expands in all directions, consuming everything in its path: planets, stars, civilizations. The Void has existed for untold millions of years. Even the oldest and most technologically advanced of the galaxy’s sentient races, the Raiel, do not know its origin, its makers, or its purpose.

But then Inigo, an astrophysicist studying the Void, begins dreaming of human beings who live within it. Inigo’s dreams reveal a world in which thoughts become actions and dreams become reality. Inside the Void, Inigo sees paradise. Thanks to the gaiafield, a neural entanglement wired into most humans, Inigo’s dreams are shared by hundreds of millions–and a religion, the Living Dream, is born, with Inigo as its prophet. But then he vanishes.

Suddenly there is a new wave of dreams. Dreams broadcast by an unknown Second Dreamer serve as the inspiration for a massive Pilgrimage into the Void. But there is a chance that by attempting to enter the Void, the pilgrims will trigger a catastrophic expansion, an accelerated devourment phase that will swallow up thousands of worlds.

And thus begins a desperate race to find Inigo and the mysterious Second Dreamer. Some seek to prevent the Pilgrimage; others to speed its progress–while within the Void, a supreme entity has turned its gaze, for the first time, outward...]]> 630 Peter F. Hamilton 0345496531 Josh 0 to-read 4.19 2007 The Dreaming Void (Void #1)
author: Peter F. Hamilton
name: Josh
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)]]> 17333324
On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.

Once, she was the Justice of Toren - a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.

Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.]]> 386 Ann Leckie Josh 0 to-read 3.98 2013 Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)
author: Ann Leckie
name: Josh
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> <![CDATA[The Reality Dysfunction (Night's Dawn, #1)]]> 45245
But now something has gone catastrophically wrong. On a primitive colony planet a renegade criminal's chance encounter with an utterly alien entity unleashes the most primal of all our fears. An extinct race which inhabited the galaxy aeons ago called it "The Reality Dysfunction." It is the nightmare which has prowled beside us since the beginning of history.]]> 1223 Peter F. Hamilton 0330340328 Josh 0 to-read 4.13 1996 The Reality Dysfunction (Night's Dawn, #1)
author: Peter F. Hamilton
name: Josh
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Pandora's Star (Commonwealth Saga #1)]]> 45252 Second Chance, is dispatched to learn what has occurred and whether it represents a threat. In command is Wilson Kime, a five-time rejuvenated ex-NASA pilot whose glory days are centuries behind him.

Opposed to the mission are the Guardians of Selfhood, a cult that believes the human race is being manipulated by an alien entity they call the Starflyer. Bradley Johansson, leader of the Guardians, warns of sabotage, fearing the Starflyer means to use the starship's mission for its own ends.

Pursued by a Commonwealth special agent convinced the Guardians are crazy but dangerous, Johansson flees. But the danger is not averted. Aboard the Second Chance, Kime wonders if his crew has been infiltrated. Soon enough, he will have other worries. A thousand light-years away, something truly incredible is waiting: a deadly discovery whose unleashing will threaten to destroy the Commonwealth... and humanity itself. Could it be that Johansson was right?]]> 768 Peter F. Hamilton 0345461622 Josh 0 to-read 4.24 2004 Pandora's Star (Commonwealth Saga #1)
author: Peter F. Hamilton
name: Josh
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1)]]> 36510196
The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-- and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. To defend Earth, and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.

Earth itself is a backwater. The bulk of humanity's resources are in the hands of the Colonial Defense Force. Everybody knows that when you reach retirement age, you can join the CDF. They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You'll be taken off Earth and never allowed to return. You'll serve two years at the front. And if you survive, you'll be given a generous homestead stake of your own, on one of our hard-won colony planets.

John Perry is taking that deal. He has only the vaguest idea what to expect. Because the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder than he can imagine--and what he will become is far stranger.]]> 318 John Scalzi Josh 0 to-read 4.25 2005 Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1)
author: John Scalzi
name: Josh
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> Eden, Eden, Eden 1233488
Set in a polluted and apocalyptic zone of the Algerian desert in a time of civil warfare, this delirious, lacerating novel brings scenes of brutal carnage into intimate collision with relentless acts of prostitutional sex and humiliation.]]> 163 Pierre Guyotat 187159247X Josh 0 to-read 3.83 1970 Eden, Eden, Eden
author: Pierre Guyotat
name: Josh
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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]]> I Who Have Never Known Men 60811826 Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.


As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.


Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.]]> 184 Jacqueline Harpman 1945492600 Josh 0 to-read 4.12 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Josh
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence]]> 660518 Better Never to Have Been argues for a number of related, highly provocative, views: (1) Coming into existence is always a serious harm. (2) It is always wrong to have children. (3) It is wrong not to abort fetuses at the earlier stages of gestation. (4) It would be better if, as a result of there being no new people, humanity became extinct. These views may sound unbelievable--but anyone who reads Benatar will be obliged to take them seriously.]]> 237 David Benatar 0199296421 Josh 0 to-read 3.91 2006 Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
author: David Benatar
name: Josh
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> A Short Stay in Hell 13456414
In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.]]> 110 Steven L. Peck 098374842X Josh 0 to-read 4.17 2011 A Short Stay in Hell
author: Steven L. Peck
name: Josh
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Authority (Southern Reach, #2)]]> 18077769 The bone-chilling, hair-raising second installment of the Southern Reach Trilogy

After thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X—a seemingly malevolent landscape surrounded by an invisible border and mysteriously wiped clean of all signs of civilization—has been a series of expeditions overseen by a government agency so secret it has almost been forgotten: the Southern Reach. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.

John RodrĂ­guez (aka "Control") is the Southern Reach's newly appointed head. Working with a distrustful but desperate team, a series of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, Control begins to penetrate the secrets of Area X. But with each discovery he must confront disturbing truths about himself and the agency he's pledged to serve.

In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Area X's most disturbing questions are answered . . . but the answers are far from reassuring.]]> 341 Jeff VanderMeer 0374104107 Josh 4 3.54 2014 Authority (Southern Reach, #2)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/06
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]]> Borne (Borne, #1) 31451186
At first, Borne looks like nothing at all—just a green lump that might be a Company discard. The Company, although severely damaged, is rumoured to still make creatures and send them to distant places that have not yet suffered Collapse.

Borne somehow reminds Rachel of the island nation of her birth, now long lost to rising seas. She feels an attachment she resents; attachments are traps, and in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet when she takes Borne to her subterranean sanctuary, the Balcony Cliffs, Rachel convinces her lover, Wick, not to render Borne down to raw genetic material for the drugs he sells—she cannot break that bond.

Wick is a special kind of supplier, because the drug dealers in the city don’t sell the usual things. They sell tiny creatures that can be swallowed or stuck in the ear, and that release powerful memories of other people’s happier times or pull out forgotten memories from the user’s own mind—or just produce beautiful visions that provide escape from the barren, craterous landscapes of the city.

Against his better judgment, out of affection for Rachel or perhaps some other impulse, Wick respects her decision. Rachel, meanwhile, despite her loyalty to Wick, knows he has kept secrets from her. Searching his apartment, she finds a burnt, unreadable journal titled “Mord,� a cryptic reference to the Magician (a rival drug dealer) and evidence that Wick has planned the layout of the Balcony Cliffs to match the blueprint of the Company building. What is he hiding? Why won’t he tell her about what happened when he worked for the Company?]]> 323 Jeff VanderMeer 0374115249 Josh 0 to-read 3.93 2017 Borne (Borne, #1)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/05
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]]> <![CDATA[One Billion Years to the End of the World]]> 60145750
This mordantly funny and provocative tale from Soviet Russia's leading science fiction writers is the story of astrophysicist Dmitri Malianov. As he reaches a major breakthrough, he finds himself plagued by interruptions, from a mysterious crate of vodka to a glamorous woman on his doorstep. Is the Universe trying to tell him something?

'On putting down one of their books, you feel a cold breeze still lifting the hairs on the back of your neck' The New York Times]]> 0 Arkady Strugatsky 0141994487 Josh 0 to-read 3.71 One Billion Years to the End of the World
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 3.71
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]]> The Doomed City 199635782
This is life in the Experiment. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a die-hard believer in the Experiment, even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. As increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.]]> Arkady Strugatsky Josh 0 to-read 3.64 The Doomed City
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 3.64
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rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Waves Extinguish the Wind (Rediscovered Classics)]]> 97459629 Today, Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are counted among the best science fiction writers of the twentieth century.
In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well.
The Waves Extinguish the Wind provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end. Searching for evidence that the mysterious alien Wanderers were interfering in Earth's development, Kammerer and his young trainee Toivo Glumov discovered a deeper and more disturbing secret within humanity itself.
This new translation by Daniels Umanovskis joins updated editions of Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, and The Beetle in the Anthill to bring the saga of the Noon Universe to its fitting a search for truth and answers in a universe that provides only questions.]]> 178 Arkady Strugatsky 1641606290 Josh 0 to-read 4.10 The Waves Extinguish the Wind (Rediscovered Classics)
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 4.10
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]]> stalker 53345872 Arkady Strugatsky Josh 0 to-read 4.06 stalker
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 4.06
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]]> Lame Fate / Ugly Swans 53138863 The nested novels Ugly Swans and Lame Fate offer insight into this period of enforced silence. Never before translated into English,ĚýLame Fate is the first-person account of middle-aged author Felix Sorokin. When the Soviet Writersâ€� Union asks him to submit a writing sample to a newfangled machine that can supposedly evaluate the "objective value" of any literary work, he faces a dilemma. Should he present something establishment-approved but middling, or risk sharing his unpublished masterpiece, which has languished in his desk drawer for years?
Sorokin’s masterwork isĚýUgly Swans, previously published in English as a standalone work but presented here in an authoritative new translation. Ugly Swans chronicles the travails of disgraced literary celebrity Victor Banev, who returns to his provincial hometown to find it haunted by the mysteriousĚýł¦±ô˛ąłľłľľ±±đ˛őâ€�black-masked men residing in a former leper colony. Possessing supernatural talents, including the ability to control the weather, the clammies terrify the town’s adult population but enthrall its teenagers, including Banev’s daughter Irma. Together, Lame Fate andĚýUgly Swans illuminate some of the Strugatskys' favorite themes—the (im)possibility of political progress, the role of the individual in society, the nature of honor and courage, and the enduring value of art—in consummately entertaining fashion. By turns chilling, uproariousĚýand moving, these intertwining stories are sure to delight readers from all walks of life.
Ěý]]> 416 Arkady Strugatsky 1641600713 Josh 0 to-read 4.03 Lame Fate / Ugly Swans
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 4.03
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]]> <![CDATA[Far Rainbow / The Second Invasion from Mars]]> 331250 240 Arkady Strugatsky 0020256108 Josh 0 to-read 4.05 1967 Far Rainbow / The Second Invasion from Mars
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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]]> The Final Circle of Paradise 1057763
But somehow, since his long sojourn in far orbits, things had subtly gone wrong. He got disquieting hints of irrational actions, of secret societies of a destructive nature, of events of mass madness... and a constant reference to a mysterious product only available through the "right connections."

And when he pursued the enigmas, he found himself projected into The Final Circle of Paradise - the ultimate electronic "high."]]> 172 Arkady Strugatsky 0879972645 Josh 0 to-read 3.76 1965 The Final Circle of Paradise
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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]]> The Ugly Swans 1255122 240 Arkady Strugatsky 0020072406 Josh 0 to-read 4.30 1972 The Ugly Swans
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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]]> The Snail on the Slope 1535134 243 Arkady Strugatsky 0553131974 Josh 0 to-read 3.97 1966 The Snail on the Slope
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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]]> The Dead Mountaineer's Inn 22466714
But he hadn’t counted on the other vacationers, an eccentric bunch including a famous hypnotist, a physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, a sulky teenager of indeterminate gender, and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses. And as the chalet fills up, strange things start happening—things that seem to indicate the presence of another, unseen guest. Is there a ghost on the premises? A prankster? Something more sinister? And then an avalanche blocks the mountain pass, and they’re stuck.

Which is just about when they find the corpse. Meaning that Glebksy’s vacation is over and he’s embarked on the most unusual investigation he’s ever been involved with. In fact, the further he looks into it, the more Glebsky realizes that the victim may not even be human.

In this late novel from the legendary Russian sci-fi duo—here in its first-ever English translation—the Strugatskys gleefully upend the plot of many a Hercule Poirot mystery—and the result is much funnier, and much stranger, than anything Agatha Christie ever wrote.]]> 256 Arkady Strugatsky 161219432X Josh 0 to-read 3.70 1970 The Dead Mountaineer's Inn
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Doomed City (Rediscovered Classics)]]> 27219742 Roadside Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel they worked hardest on, the novel that was their own favorite, the novel that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English.
Ěý
The Doomed CityĚýwas so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their best friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia during perestroika in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication. It was translated into a host of major European languages, and now appears in English in a major new translation by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield.
Ěý
The Doomed CityĚýis set in an experimental city whose sun gets switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves under conditions established by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a diehard believer in the Experiment, even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. And as increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.
Ěý
Boris Strugatsky wrote that the task of writingĚýThe Doomed CityĚý“was genuinely delightful and fascinating work.â€� Readers will doubtless say the same of the experience of reading it.
]]> 462 Arkady Strugatsky 1613749937 Josh 0 to-read 3.89 1989 The Doomed City (Rediscovered Classics)
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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]]> Escape Attempt 331252
Escape Attempt
The Kid From Hell
Space Mowgli]]> 321 Boris Strugatsky 0026152509 Josh 0 to-read 3.95 1962 Escape Attempt
author: Boris Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The Waves Extinguish the Wind (Maxim Kammerer #3)]]> 61311660 Today, Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are counted among the best science fiction writers of the twentieth century.
In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well.
The Waves Extinguish the Wind provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end. Searching for evidence that the mysterious alien Wanderers were interfering in Earth’s development, Kammerer and his young trainee Toivo Glumov discovered a deeper and more disturbing secret within humanity itself.
This new translation by Daniels Umanovskis joins updated editions of Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, and The Beetle in the Anthill to bring the saga of the Noon Universe to its fitting end: a search for truth and answers in a universe that provides only questions.]]> 184 Arkady Strugatsky 1641606266 Josh 0 to-read 4.01 1984 The Waves Extinguish the Wind (Maxim Kammerer #3)
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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]]> Beetle in the Anthill 759514 192 Arkady Strugatsky 0026151200 Josh 0 to-read 4.27 1979 Beetle in the Anthill
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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]]> Noon: 22nd Century 1091478 319 Arkady Strugatsky 0026151502 Josh 0 to-read 4.02 1961 Noon: 22nd Century
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Josh
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)]]> 17934530 Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.]]> 195 Jeff VanderMeer 0374104093 Josh 4 3.79 2014 Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Josh
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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]]> Complete Stories 34144894 Featuring five never-before-published Vonnegut stories!

Here for the first time is the complete short fiction of one of the twentieth century’s foremost imaginative geniuses. More than half of Vonnegut’s output was short fiction, and never before has the world had occasion to wrestle with it all together. Organized thematically—”War,� “Women,� “Science,� “Romance,� “Work Ethic versus Fame and Fortune,� “Behavior,� “The Band Director� (those stories featuring Lincoln High’s band director and nice guy George Hemholtz), and “Futuristic”—these ninety-eight stories were written from 1941 to 2007, and include those Vonnegut published in magazines and collected in Welcome to the Monkey House, Bagombo Snuff Box, and other books; here for the first time five previously unpublished stories; as well as a handful of others that were published online and read by few. During his lifetime Vonnegut published fewer than half of the stories he wrote, his agent telling him in 1958 upon the rejection of a particularly strong story, “Save it for the collection of your works which will be published someday when you become famous. Which may take a little time.�

Selected and introduced by longtime Vonnegut friends and scholars Dan Wakefield and Jerome Klinkowitz, Complete Stories puts Vonnegut’s great wit, humor, humanity, and artistry on full display. An extraordinary literary feast for new readers, Vonnegut fans, and scholars alike.]]> 911 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 1609808088 Josh 0 currently-reading 4.50 2017 Complete Stories
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Josh
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> Backwardness 212319985 944 Garielle Lutz Josh 0 to-read 4.73 Backwardness
author: Garielle Lutz
name: Josh
average rating: 4.73
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> The Complete Gary Lutz 52847776 The Complete Gary Lutz includes all of his story collections along with several new and unpublished pieces.]]> 499 Garielle Lutz 1733535918 Josh 0 to-read 4.53 2019 The Complete Gary Lutz
author: Garielle Lutz
name: Josh
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> Man Plus (Man Plus #1) 367215 215 Frederik Pohl 1857989465 Josh 0 to-read 3.76 1976 Man Plus (Man Plus #1)
author: Frederik Pohl
name: Josh
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> Timequake 33586715
With his trademark wicked wit, Vonnegut addresses memory, suicide, the Great Depression, the loss of American eloquence, and the obsolescent thrill of reading books.]]> 276 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0795318642 Josh 4 3.80 1997 Timequake
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Josh
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Petroleum-238: Big Oil's Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It]]> 202080624


Petroleum-238 provides the shocking answer. Shielded by a system of lax regulations and legal loopholes, this waste has been spilled, spread, injected, dumped, and freely emitted across America-from booming Texas and Pennsylvania oil and gas fields, to North Dakota's Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, and more unexpected locations, like the piney woods of Mississippi and Park Avenue in New York City. Nobel relies on oilfield workers, community activists, a century of academic research, and a trove of never-before released industry and government documents to lay out a series of game-changing reveals into the world's most powerful industry. Oilfield waste has been spread on farm fields, under the misguided belief it helps crops grow and cows love it. Radioactive oilfield waste has been shipped in from other countries, thanks to an exemption. The waste has even been used to build school playgrounds, sold in hardware stores, and in many states it is being spread on roads. None have been more deceived than the industry's own workers, who are suffering mysterious health maladies, and dying from unexplainable cancers.



Nobel's book is an impressive work of science journalism, with surprising moments of literary beauty. It is also a welcome breakdown of America's red-blue divide and the false wall corporations and politicians often set between industry workers and environmentalists. In the tradition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Petroleum-238 is a landmark work of environmental writing and an urgent call to action.]]> 436 Justin Nobel Josh 0 to-read 4.53 Petroleum-238: Big Oil's Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It
author: Justin Nobel
name: Josh
average rating: 4.53
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]]> Hocus Pocus 9589 322 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0425161293 Josh 5 3.83 1990 Hocus Pocus
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Josh
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> Spring (Seasonal Quartet, #3) 40545817 336 Ali Smith 0241207053 Josh 0 to-read 4.08 2019 Spring (Seasonal Quartet, #3)
author: Ali Smith
name: Josh
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> Companion Piece 58511594
It follows the unique achievement of her Seasonal cycle of novels - Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer - written and published in as close as possible to real time, between 2016 and 2020, absorbing and refracting the times we are living through: the 'state-of-the-nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us' (New Statesman).

'Ali Smith is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now' Observer]]> 230 Ali Smith 0241541344 Josh 0 to-read 3.83 2022 Companion Piece
author: Ali Smith
name: Josh
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
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]]> Hotel World 123036 Hotel World, set in the luxurious anonymity of the Global Hotel, in an unnamed northern English city. The disembodied yet interconnected characters include Sara, a 19-year-old chambermaid who has recently died at the hotel; her bereaved sister, Clare, who visits the scene of Sara's death; Penny, an advertising copywriter who is staying in the room opposite; Lise, the Global's depressed receptionist; and the homeless Else who begs on the street outside. Smith's ambitious prose explores all facets of language and its uses. Sara takes us through the moment of her exit from the world and beyond; in her desperate, fading grip on words and senses she gropes to impart the meaning of her death in what she terms "the lift for dishes"--then comes a flash of clarity: "That's the name for it, the name for it; that's it; dumb waiter dumb waiter dumb waiter." Blended with hers are other voices: Penny's bland journalese and Else's obsession with metaphysical poetry.

Hotel World is not an easy read: disturbing and witty by turns, with its stream-of-consciousness narrators reminiscent of Virgina Woolf's The Waves, its deceptively rambling language is underpinned by a formal construction. Exploring the "big themes" of love, death and millennial capitalism, it takes as its starting point Muriel Spark's Momento Mori ("Remember you must die") and counteracts this axiom with a resolute "Remember you must live". Ali Smith's novel is a daring, compelling, and frankly spooky read. --Catherine Taylor

]]> 238 Ali Smith 0140296794 Josh 0 to-read 3.60 2001 Hotel World
author: Ali Smith
name: Josh
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2001
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]]> There But For The 10187223 There but for the is the sparkling satirical novel by bestselling Ali Smith. 'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party . . .' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they at first appear.

There but for the was hailed as one of the best books of 2011 by Jeanette Winterson, A.S. Byatt, Patrick Ness, Sebastian Barry, Boyd Tonkin, Erica Wagner and Nick Barley. 'Dazzlingly inventive' A.S. Byatt 'Whimsically devastating. Playful, humorous, serious, profoundly clever and profoundly affecting' Guardian 'A real gem' Erica Wagner, The Times 'Eccentric, adventurous, intoxicating, dazzling. This is a novel with serious ambitions that remains huge fun to read' Literary Review 'If you liked Smith's earlier fiction, you will know that she enjoys setting up a situation before chucking in a literary Molotov cocktail then describing what happens' Sunday Express 'Wonderful, word-playful, compelling' Jeanette Winterson 'Smith can make anything happen, which is why she is one of our most exciting writers today' Daily Telegraph 'I take my hat off to Ali Smith. Her writing lifts the soul' Evening Standard]]> 357 Ali Smith Josh 0 to-read 3.49 2011 There But For The
author: Ali Smith
name: Josh
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2011
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]]> Girl Meets Boy 1527854
Ali Smith's re-mix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold.

It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations.

Funny and fresh, poetic and political, Girl Meets Boy is a myth of metamorphosis for the modern world.]]> 161 Ali Smith 1841958697 Josh 0 to-read 3.80 Girl Meets Boy
author: Ali Smith
name: Josh
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]]> The Accidental 127630 The Accidental is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. Jonathan Safran Foer has called her writing “thrilling.� Jeanette Winterson has praised her for her “style, ideas, and punch.� Here, in a novel at once profound, playful, and exhilaratingly inventive, she transfixes us with a portrait of a family unraveled by a mysterious visitor.

Amber—thirtysomething and barefoot—shows up at the door of the Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer. She talks her way in. She tells nothing but lies. She stays for dinner.

Eve Smart, the author of a best-selling series of biographical reconstructions, thinks Amber is a student with whom her husband, Michael, is sleeping. Michael, an English professor, knows only that her car broke down. Daughter Astrid, age twelve, thinks she’s her mother’s friend. Son Magnus, age seventeen, thinks she’s an angel.

As Amber insinuates herself into the family, the questions of who she is and how she’s come to be there drop away. Instead, dazzled by her seeming exoticism, the Smarts begin to examine the accidents of their lives through the searing lens of Amber’s perceptions. When Eve finally banishes her from the cottage, Amber disappears from their sight, but not—they discover when they return home to Londonâ€Äě°ů´Çłľ their profoundly altered lives.

Fearlessly intelligent and written with an irresistible blend of lyricism and whimsy, The Accidental is a tour de force of literary improvisation that explores the nature of truth, the role of chance, and the transformative power of storytelling.]]> 306 Ali Smith 1400032180 Josh 0 to-read 3.37 2005 The Accidental
author: Ali Smith
name: Josh
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2005
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]]> Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4) 52842705 is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet.

In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time.

This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common?

Summer.]]> 384 Ali Smith 0241207061 Josh 0 to-read 4.05 2020 Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4)
author: Ali Smith
name: Josh
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2020
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]]> Winter (Seasonal, #2) 34516974 The dazzling second novel in Ali Smith’s essential Seasonal Quartetâ€Äě°ů´Çłľ the Baileys Prize-winning, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and How to be Both.

Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer’s leaves? Dead litter.

The world shrinks; the sap sinks.
But winter makes things visible. And if there’s ice, there’ll be fire.

In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter.

It’s the season that teaches us survival.
Here comes Winter.]]> 322 Ali Smith 0241207029 Josh 0 to-read 3.81 2017 Winter (Seasonal, #2)
author: Ali Smith
name: Josh
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> How to be Both 20439328
How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real—and all life’s givens get given a second chance.

A NOTE TO THE READER:
Who says stories reach everybody in the same order?
This novel can be read in two ways and this book provides you with both.
In half of all printed editions of the novel the narrative EYES comes before CAMERA.
In the other half of printed editions the narrative CAMERA precedes EYES.
The narratives are exactly the same in both versions, just in a different order.

The books are intentionally printed in two different ways, so that readers can randomly have different experiences reading the same text. So, depending on which edition you happen to receive, the book will be: EYES, CAMERA, or CAMERA, EYES. Enjoy the adventure.]]> 376 Ali Smith Josh 0 to-read 3.65 2014 How to be Both
author: Ali Smith
name: Josh
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> Gliff 203164415 From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing.

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

Add two children. And a horse.

From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.]]> 288 Ali Smith 0593701569 Josh 0 to-read 3.95 2024 Gliff
author: Ali Smith
name: Josh
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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