sandra. 's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 13 Apr 2025 04:02:41 -0700 60 sandra. 's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg My Documents: A Novel 228440179 The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this “rich, gripping novel that lands squarely as a mirror of our contemporary moral squalor� ( Los Angeles Times ).

“Funny, powerful, and propulsive . . . a moving portrait of the kind of people we become when we are trying to survive.”—Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings

Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family. As young adults, they’re on the precipice of new Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naïve freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America creates a national panic, prompting a government policy that pushes Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.

Cut off entirely from the outside world, forced to work jobs they hate, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long, dusty days in camp and acclimate to life without the internet. That is, until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this connection as a chance to tell the world about the horrors of camp—and as an opportunity to bolster her own reporting career in the process.

Informed by real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen’s novel gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism, M� Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to one another, and to ourselves, after tragedy.]]> Kevin Nguyen sandra. 0 to-read 0.0 My Documents: A Novel
author: Kevin Nguyen
name: sandra.
average rating: 0.0
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]]> The Book Censor's Library 175678711
The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.]]> 272 Bothayna Al-Essa 1632063344 sandra. 0 to-read 3.94 2019 The Book Censor's Library
author: Bothayna Al-Essa
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
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]]> The Sirens of Titan 4982 224 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. sandra. 0 to-read 4.16 1959 The Sirens of Titan
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1959
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/22
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]]> A Language of Limbs 210373324
Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.

A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak - the jokes you tell as you're dying and the ways laughing at a funeral softens the edges of our grief. An unashamed celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us, and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.]]> 277 Dylin Hardcastle 1761562428 sandra. 0 to-read 4.39 2024 A Language of Limbs
author: Dylin Hardcastle
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Summer that Melted Everything]]> 26114523 Fielding Bliss has never forgotten the summer of 1984:
the year a heatwave scorched the small town of Breathed, Ohio.
The year he became friends with the devil.


When local prosecutor Autopsy Bliss publishes an invitation to the devil to come to the country town of Breathed, Ohio, nobody quite expected that he would turn up. They especially didn't expect him to turn up a tattered and bruised thirteen-year-old boy.


Fielding, the son of Autopsy, finds the boy outside the courthouse and brings him home, and he is welcomed into the Bliss family. The Blisses believe the boy, who calls himself Sal, is a runaway from a nearby farm town. Then, as a series of strange incidents implicate Sal � and riled by the feverish heatwave baking the town from the inside out � there are some around town who start to believe that maybe Sal is exactly who he claims to be.


But whether he's a traumatised child or the devil incarnate, Sal is certainly one strange fruit: he talks in riddles, his uncanny knowledge and understanding reaches far outside the realm of a normal child � and ultimately his eerily affecting stories of Heaven, Hell, and earth will mesmerise and enflame the entire town.


Devastatingly beautiful, The Summer That Melted Everything is a captivating story about community, redemption, and the dark places where evil really lies.

]]> 320 Tiffany McDaniel 1250078067 sandra. 4 3.97 2016 The Summer that Melted Everything
author: Tiffany McDaniel
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/05/29
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: potential-book-club-selections
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]]> Fruit of the Drunken Tree 36636727 In the vein of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a mesmerizing debut set against the backdrop of the devastating violence of 1990's Colombia about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both.

The Santiago family lives in a gated community in Bogotá, safe from the political upheaval terrorizing the country. Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to this protective bubble, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation.

When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways. But Petrona's unusual behavior belies more than shyness. She is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls' families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy that will force them both to choose between sacrifice and betrayal.

Inspired by the author's own life, and told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree contrasts two very different, but inextricable coming-of-age stories. In lush prose, Rojas Contreras sheds light on the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.]]> 304 Ingrid Rojas Contreras sandra. 5 3.93 2018 Fruit of the Drunken Tree
author: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2018/08/13
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: potential-book-club-selections
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]]> Nowhere Is a Place 205110 304 Bernice L. McFadden 0525948759 sandra. 5 4.13 2006 Nowhere Is a Place
author: Bernice L. McFadden
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2016/10/29
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: potential-book-club-selections
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]]> Tobacco Road 59091 192 Erskine Caldwell 082031661X sandra. 5 3.72 1932 Tobacco Road
author: Erskine Caldwell
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2016/11/17
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: potential-book-club-selections
review:

]]> The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 37380 359 Carson McCullers 0618084746 sandra. 5 3.99 1940 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
author: Carson McCullers
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at: 2011/01/12
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: potential-book-club-selections
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]]> Darkness at Noon 30672
Darkness at Noon (from the German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik 1917 revolutionary who is cast out, imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government he'd helped create.]]> 216 Arthur Koestler 0553265954 sandra. 5 4.09 1940 Darkness at Noon
author: Arthur Koestler
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at: 2010/09/12
date added: 2025/03/18
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]]> Go Tell It on the Mountain 17143 Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.]]> 256 James Baldwin 0141185910 sandra. 5 4.06 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain
author: James Baldwin
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1953
rating: 5
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]]> The Space Between Us 218357 321 Thrity Umrigar 006079156X sandra. 5 4.02 2005 The Space Between Us
author: Thrity Umrigar
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2014/03/03
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: potential-book-club-selections
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]]> The Weight of Heaven 3429253
When Frank and Ellie Benton lose their only child, seven-year-old Benny, to a sudden illness, the perfect life they had built is shattered. Filled with wrenching memories, their Ann Arbor home becomes unbearable, and their marriage founders. But an unexpected job half a world away offers them an opportunity to start again. Life in Girbaug, India, holds promise—and peril—when Frank befriends Ramesh, a bright, curious boy who quickly becomes the focus of the grieving man's attentions. Haunted by memories of his dead son, Frank is consumed with making his family right—a quest that will lead him down an ever-darkening path with stark repercussions.

Filled with satisfyingly real characters and glowing with local color, The Weight of Heaven is a rare glimpse of a family and a country struggling under pressures beyond their control. In a devastating look at cultural clashes and divides, Umrigar illuminates how slowly we recover from unforgettable loss, how easily good intentions can turn evil, and how far a person will go to build a new world for those he loves.]]> 365 Thrity Umrigar 0061472549 sandra. 5 3.79 2009 The Weight of Heaven
author: Thrity Umrigar
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2014/03/13
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: potential-book-club-selections
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]]> My Name Is Asher Lev 11507 This is a previously-published edition of ISBN 9781400031047.

Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day, and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.

Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time, his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.]]> 369 Chaim Potok sandra. 4 4.23 1972 My Name Is Asher Lev
author: Chaim Potok
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1972
rating: 4
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]]> Slaughterhouse-Five 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.�

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. sandra. 5 4.10 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1969
rating: 5
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]]> Idolfire 214540663 An epic sapphic fantasy roadtrip inspired by the fall of Rome, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Frontier and Floating Hotel

On one side of the world, Aleya Ana-Ulai is desperate for a chance. Her family have written her off as a mistake, but she's determined to prove every last one of them wrong.

On the other, Kirby of Wall's End is searching for redemption. An ancient curse tore her life apart, but to fix it, she'll have to leave everything behind.

Fate sets them both on the path to Nivela, a city once poised to conquer the world with the power of a thousand stolen gods. Now the gates are closed and the old magic slumbers. Dead � or waiting for a spark to light it anew�

A character-driven science-fantasy road trip book with sword fights and a slowburn romance, Idolfire delves into the vastness of history and the terrifying power of organized faith.]]> 480 Grace Curtis 0756419808 sandra. 0 to-read 3.87 2025 Idolfire
author: Grace Curtis
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

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

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

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 sandra. 0 to-read 4.55 2025 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
author: John Green
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.55
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]]> Good Dirt 213618132 The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

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

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

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

In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.]]> 368 Charmaine Wilkerson 0593358368 sandra. 0 to-read 4.06 2025 Good Dirt
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass]]> 214151713 In a compelling blend of personal narrative and in-depth reporting, New York magazine senior writer Sarah Jones exposes the harsh reality of America’s racial and income inequality and the devastating impact of the pandemic on our nation’s most vulnerable people.

In the tradition of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Andrea Elliot’s Invisible Child, Disposable is a poignant exploration of America’s underclass, left vulnerable by systemic racism and capitalism. Here, Sarah Jones delves into the lives of the essential workers, seniors, and people with disabilities who were disproportionately affected by COVID-19—not due to their age or profession, but because of the systemic inequality and poverty that left them exposed.

The pandemic served as a stark revelation of the true state of America, a country where the dream of prosperity is a distant mirage for millions. Jones argues that the pandemic didn’t create these dynamics, but rather revealed the existing social mobility issues and wealth gap that have long plagued the nation. Behind the staggering death toll are stories of lives lost, injustices suffered, and institutions that failed to protect their people.

Jones brings these stories to the forefront, transforming the abstract concept of the pandemic into a deeply personal and political phenomenon. She argues that America has abandoned a sacrificial underclass of millions but insists that another future is possible. By addressing the pervasive issues of racial justice and public policy, Jones calls for a future where no one is seen as disposable again.]]> 304 Sarah Jones 1982197420 sandra. 0 to-read 3.66 2025 Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass
author: Sarah Jones
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.66
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]]> Fundamentally 213870133 A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with a one-of-a-kind job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.

When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.

In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. The UN is a mess of competing interests, and her team consists of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr. But then Nadia meets Sara, a hilarious, foul-mouthed East Londoner who was pulled into radicalism at just fifteen. The two are kindred spirits, and Nadia vows to get Sara home.

As the rehabilitation program picks up traction, Sara reveals a secret that upends everything, forcing Nadia to make a drastic choice. In the fallout, Nadia’s brown-savior fantasies crumble, leaving her to wonder if she can save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.

A fierce, wildly funny, and razor-sharp exploration of radicalism, family, and the quest for belonging, Fundamentally boldly inspects one of the defining controversies of our age and introduces a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 352 Nussaibah Younis 0593851382 sandra. 0 to-read 3.84 2025 Fundamentally
author: Nussaibah Younis
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> O Sinners! 213618149 A journalist investigates a seductive and mysterious cult and its leader, an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran, in this not-to-be-missed novel.

Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist reeling from the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed in a cult called The Nameless. Based in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic Vietnam War-veteran named Odo, The Nameless adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as “THERE IS NO GOD BUT THE NAMELESS,� “ALL SUFFERING IS DISTORTION,� and “SEE ONLY BEAUTY.� Faruq, skeptical but committed to unraveling the mystery of The Nameless, extends his stay over months, as he gets deeper into the cult's inner workings, compassionate teachings, and closer to Odo. Faruq himself begins to unravel, forced to come-to-terms with the memories he has been running from while trying to resist Odo's spell.

Told in three seamlessly interwoven threads between Faruq’s present-day investigation, Odo’s time before the formation of the movement as a Black infantryman during the Vietnam War, alongside three other Black soldiers, and a documentary script that recounts The Nameless� clash with a Texan fundamentalist church, O SINNERS! examines both longing and belonging. Ultimately the novel What is it that we seek from cults and, inevitably, from each other?]]> 464 Nicole Cuffy 0593597443 sandra. 0 to-read 3.69 2025 O Sinners!
author: Nicole Cuffy
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> Dream Count 219521090 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until � betrayed and brokenhearted � she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America � but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X sandra. 0 to-read 3.97 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> Elegy, Southwest 214152231 A timely and urgent novel following a young married couple on a road trip through the American southwest as they grapple with the breakdown of their relationship in the shadow of environmental collapse, for fans of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez.

In November 2018, Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest. While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry.

Over the course of their trip, Eloise, beginning to suspect she might be pregnant, helplessly witnesses Lewis’s descent as he struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never quite felt at home.

Elegy, Southwest is a novel which entwines a tragic love story with an intelligent and profound consideration of the way we now live alongside environmental breakdown; an elegy for lost love and for the landscape that makes us.]]> 288 Madeleine Watts 1668051621 sandra. 0 to-read 3.95 2025 Elegy, Southwest
author: Madeleine Watts
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> Sister Europe 215361985 An irresistible and poignant novel about the upper echelons of Berlin society, a grand literary celebration, and the afterparty that upends the night and carries a group of guests deeper into the city.

Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she’s unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she’s reduced to begging the ancient award-winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend Demian, a native Berliner, who in turn invites his two best the troubled innocent Livia, and an American publisher, Toto, who will do anything for a free meal.

But Toto doesn’t come alone. In tow are his much younger internet date—she’s stood him up often enough to be nicknamed “the Flake”—and Demian’s 15-year-old daughter, Nicole. Not to mention the cop who’s been trailing Nicole since she left the red-light district. Presiding over the affair is Naema's infinitely rich, endlessly disaffected grandson, Prince Radi, whose catastrophic pass at Nicole culminates in an epic midnight food run that changes all their lives.

With sophistication and tenderness, Nell Zink weaves a vividly colored tapestry of a milieu at odds with itself, taking her trademark ambiguity, daring and humor to new heights.]]> 208 Nell Zink 0593534913 sandra. 0 to-read 3.56 2025 Sister Europe
author: Nell Zink
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> Death of the Author 214283593 The future of storytelling is here.

Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.

In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.

What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.]]> 448 Nnedi Okorafor 0063391147 sandra. 0 to-read 4.11 2025 Death of the Author
author: Nnedi Okorafor
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism]]> 198563691 Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize� Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.

By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.]]> 400 Eve L. Ewing 0593243706 sandra. 0 to-read 4.59 2025 Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
author: Eve L. Ewing
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing]]> 214152372 A rollicking adventure starring three free-spirited Victorians on a twenty-year quest to decipher cuneiform, the oldest writing in the world�from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.

It was one of history’s great vanishing acts.

Around 3,400 BCE—as humans were gathering in complex urban settlements—a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For three millennia, wedge shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon and of Persia’s mighty Achaemenid Empire, along with precious minutiae about everyday life in the cradle of civilization. And then…the meaning of the characters was lost.

London, 1857. In an era obsessed with human progress, mysterious palaces emerging from the desert sands had captured the Victorian public’s imagination. Yet Europe’s best philologists struggled to decipher the bizarre inscriptions excavators were digging up.

Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave British military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher this script that would enable them to peek farther back into human history than ever before.

From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The Mesopotamian Riddle whisks you on a wild adventure through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand our past.]]> 400 Joshua Hammer 1668015447 sandra. 0 to-read 4.16 2025 The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing
author: Joshua Hammer
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> Dengue Boy 212808263 Close to Cronenberg and deeply indebted to Kafka, this gaucho-punk novel offers an explosive interpretation of an ultra-capitalistic society at the grips with climate collapse.

The protagonist of this story has no understanding of the words “winter�, "cold�, or "snow" because he has never experienced the phenomena they describe. We find ourselves in Victorica, a province of La Pampa, Argentina, some time after 2197 � the year in which the last of the Antarctic icecaps melted and an unprecedented climate catastrophe ensued, radically transforming the landscape of the region into a Caribbean Pampas. It is here that the Dengue Child grows up, a mutant mix of child and mosquito, the result of crazy experimenting driven by ultra-capitalistic corporations racing against each other to own viruses and their cures, destroying even their very own children’s existence to cash in on the stock exchange.

Another of the surprising effects of the thaw is the appearance of powerful telepathic pebbles from the bowels of the earth that seem to encapsulate the world's original wisdom, and which are the subject of lucrative smuggling. Meanwhile, the wealthy of the region chose to cruise around on ships where they can experience ice-skating and hand carve ice from valuable remains of glaciers. In their ultra-air conditioned homes, their kids play Indians vs Christians, a brutal video game set in the historical 19th century.

The future according to Michel Nieva looks frenetic and shocking. He counts among the rising voices of Argentina, packing punches in a deeply intelligent, informed, and humorful prose which takes root in Latin American storytelling and sci-fi tradition.]]> 224 Michel Nieva 1662602650 sandra. 0 to-read 3.60 2023 Dengue Boy
author: Michel Nieva
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> Beta Vulgaris 213395442 A young woman’s seasonal job takes a dark, surreal turn in this vivid and surprising debut.

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

As crewmembers vanish, Elise obsesses over Tom’s closeness with their charismatic coworker Cee and falls back on self-destructive patterns of disordered eating and dissociation. Against the horrors of her uncertain future, is the siren song of the beet pile almost . . . appealing? Biting and eerie, Beta Vulgaris harnesses an audacious premise to undermine straightforward narratives of class, trauma, consumption, and redemption.]]> 296 Margie Sarsfield 1324078731 sandra. 0 to-read 3.58 2025 Beta Vulgaris
author: Margie Sarsfield
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> Dr. Josef's Little Beauty 207050879 A Holocaust story as fascinating and compelling as it is terrifying and puzzling—a book about aging and war crimes, pain and pride.

In the middle of summer, omnipresent heat radiates as a group of elderly people are remembering their youth. The story focuses on two sisters, Leokadia and Helena, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing, because both of them spent time as children in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. At the center is Helena, who at the age of 12 was saved from extermination by the notorious doctor Josef Mengele, the real-life Nazi officer, and physician who was known as the “angel of death� for the experiments he conducted on prisoners, including twins and siblings.

This is a story both provocative and disturbing about the fear that lingers in victims. Was the sisters� relationship with the executioner a desperate attempt to save their lives, or perhaps they harbor a hideous pride and sense of superiority over other prisoners? Rudzka’s extraordinary writing turns unsettling questions about memory and survival into art.]]> 224 Zyta Rudzka 1644213753 sandra. 0 to-read 4.00 2006 Dr. Josef's Little Beauty
author: Zyta Rudzka
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Picks and Shovels (Martin Hench, #3)]]> 211004856 New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow returns to the world of Red Team Blues to bring us the origin story of Martin Hench and the most powerful new tool for crime ever the personal computer.

The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant--what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money--but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.

When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup the Three Wise Men to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Three Wise Men without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Magenta Women's Enterprise. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Three Wise Men and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Three Wise Men out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they're seeking to unroot or the risks they run.

In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 400 Cory Doctorow 1250865905 sandra. 0 to-read 4.17 2025 Picks and Shovels (Martin Hench, #3)
author: Cory Doctorow
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter]]> 207298334 The incredible and inspiring story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the World War II female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo.During World War II, Elzbieta Zawacka—the WW2 female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo—was the only woman to reach London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command. In Britain, she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the "Silent Unseen.� She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then she was the only female member of these forces to be parachuted back behind enemy lines to Nazi-occupied Poland. There, while being hunted by the Gestapo (who arrested her entire family), she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland. After the war, she was discharged as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned (and tortured) her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Agent Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to brilliant life—while transforming how we value the history of women resistance fighters during World War II.]]> 416 Clare Mulley 1639367624 sandra. 0 to-read 4.07 2024 Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter
author: Clare Mulley
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/21
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]]> Berlin Atomized 204642515 For fans of Fernanda Melchor and Joshua Cohen; A knetic debut novel following three siblings—young, Jewish, and downwardly-mobile—from 2001 to 2034, as they each come of age and escape their affluent gated community in Buenos Aires, their stories spanning Europe and Israel, even Japan, as they search for one another again.Berlin Atomized begins in Buenos Aires of the early 2000s with the self-baptisms of Nina Goldstein. She bathes too frequently, washing with fervor and I am not asleep. She grows up amid the partying and undeserved siestas, the paper maché revolutions of youth, while her brother Jeremías is drawn into the city's powder keg music scene, and the eldest, Mateo, simply lights things on fire. Each sibling rehearses their escape from affluent Nordelta, the capitalist Eden of their birth, unaware that the gated community will soon be underwater, the family in pieces. From Punta del Este to Paris, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Brussels to Tokyo, the novel progresses into a dire near future of constant flight, fire, and the siblings� search for one another.]]> 220 Julia Kornberg 1662602855 sandra. 0 to-read 3.60 2021 Berlin Atomized
author: Julia Kornberg
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> All the Water in the World 211003759 In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most � love and work, community and knowledge � will survive.]]> 304 Eiren Caffall 1250353521 sandra. 0 to-read 3.57 2025 All the Water in the World
author: Eiren Caffall
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> Victim 177185976
Javier Perez is a hustler from a family of hustlers. He learns from an early age how to play the game to his own advantage, how his background—murdered drug dealer dad, single cash-strapped mom, best friend serving time for gang activity—can be a key to doors he didn’t even know existed. This kind of story, molded in the right way, is just what college admissions committees are looking for, and a full academic scholarship to a prestigious university brings Javi one step closer to his dream of becoming a famous writer.

As a college student, Javi embellishes his life story until there’s not even a kernel of truth left. The only real connection to his past is the occasional letter he trades with his childhood best friend, Gio, who doesn’t seem to care about Javi’s newfound awareness of white privilege or the school-to-prison pipeline. Soon after Javi graduates, a viral essay transforms him from a writer on the rise to a journalist at a legendary magazine where the editors applaud his “unique perspective.� But Gio more than anyone knows who Javi really is, and sees through his game. Once Gio’s released from prison and Javi offers to cut him in on the deal, will he play along with Javi’s charade, or will it all come crumbling down?

A satirical sendup of tear-jerking trauma plots with a tender portrait of friendship at its core, Victim asks what real diversity looks like and how far one man is willing to go to make his story hit the right notes.]]> 276 Andrew Boryga 0385549970 sandra. 0 to-read 3.83 2024 Victim
author: Andrew Boryga
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/12
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]]> Animal 56379222 Honestly, sometimes I think it’s the only recourse. Killing men in times like these .

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

Here is the electrifying debut novel from Lisa Taddeo, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Three Women, which was named to more than thirty best-of-the-year lists and hailed as “a dazzling achievement� (Los Angeles Times) and “a heartbreaking, gripping, astonishing masterpiece� (Esquire). Animal is a depiction of female rage at its rawest, and a visceral exploration of the fallout from a male-dominated society. With writing that scorches and mesmerizes, Taddeo illustrates one woman’s exhilarating transformation from prey into predator.]]> 332 Lisa Taddeo 1982122145 sandra. 0 to-read 3.82 2021 Animal
author: Lisa Taddeo
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> White Elephant 41967928
While tensions between Ted and Nick escalate, other dysfunctions abound: Allison finds herself compulsively drawn to the man who is threatening to upend her quietly organized life. A lawyer with a pot habit and a serious mid-life crisis skirts his responsibilities. And in a quest for popularity, a teenage girl gets caught up in a not-so-harmless prank. Newcomers and longtime residents alike begin to clash in conflicting pursuits of the American Dream, with trees mysteriously uprooted, fires set, fingers pointed, and lines drawn.

White Elephant is an uproarious, tangled-web tale of neighbor hating neighbor (and neighbor falling head over heels for neighbor). Soon, peaceful Willard Park becomes a tinder box with nowhere to go but up in flames.]]> 320 Julie Langsdorf 0062857770 sandra. 0 to-read 3.45 2019 White Elephant
author: Julie Langsdorf
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Playground 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

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

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 sandra. 0 to-read 4.16 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> Stoner 8551582
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
--nyrb.com]]> 305 John Williams 1590173937 sandra. 3 4.38 1965 Stoner
author: John Williams
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1965
rating: 3
read at: 2011/11/27
date added: 2024/09/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team]]> 8307587 304 Michael Weinreb 1440623171 sandra. 0 to-read 3.50 2007 The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team
author: Michael Weinreb
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church]]> 207595616 A thrilling exposé recounting how members of Opus Dei—a secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic sect—pushed its radical agenda within the Church and around the globe, using billions of dollars siphoned from one of the world’s largest banks.

For over half a century, Banco Popular was one of the most profitable banks in the world—until one day, in 2017, when the Spanish bank suddenly collapsed overnight. When investigative journalist Gareth Gore was dispatched to report on the story, he expected to find yet another case of unbridled capitalist ambition gone wrong. Instead, he uncovered decades of deception that hid one of the most brazen cases of corporate pillaging in history, perpetrated by a group of men sworn to celibacy and self-flagellation who had secretly controlled Popular and abused their positions there to help spread Opus Dei to every corner of the world.

Drawing on unparalleled access to bank records, insider accounts, and exclusive interviews with whistle-blowers from within Opus Dei, Gore reveals how money from the bank was used to lure unsuspecting recruits—some of them only children—into a life of servitude. He also tracks the ascent of Opus Dei within the United States, exposing its role in bankrolling many right-wing causes, including the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

In an era of disinformation and deep fakes, here is a real-life conspiracy which hid in plain sight for more than sixty years. Gore tells a shocking story of money and power that spans decades and continents. Documenting Opus Dei’s secret history for the first time, this thrilling work of investigative storytelling raises important questions about the dark forces that shape our society.]]> 447 Gareth Gore 1668016168 sandra. 0 to-read 4.19 2024 Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church
author: Gareth Gore
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World]]> 199809440
In November of 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was an AI chatbot called ChatGPT, and was unlike any app people had used before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. Behind the scenes, battles for control and prestige between the world’s two leading AI firms, OpenAI and DeepMind, who now steers Google's AI efforts, has remained elusive - until now.

In Supremacy, Olson, tech writer at Bloomberg, tells the astonishing story of the battle between these two AI firms, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the hazardous direction they could go as they serve two tech monopolies whose power is unprecedented in history. The story focuses on the continuing rivalry of two key CEOs at the center of it all, who cultivated a religion around their mission to build god-like super intelligent machines: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind.

Supremacy sharply alerts readers to the real threat of artificial intelligence that its top creators are ignoring: the profit-driven spread of flawed and biased technology into industries, education, media and more. With exclusive access to a network of high-ranking sources, Parmy Olson uses her 13 years of experience covering technology to bring to light the exploitation of the greatest invention in human history, and how it will impact us all.]]> 336 Parmy Olson 1250337747 sandra. 0 to-read 4.03 2024 Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World
author: Parmy Olson
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Boys of Dunbar: A Story of Love, Hope, and Basketball]]> 27274460 289 Alejandro Danois 1451666993 sandra. 0 to-read 4.15 2016 The Boys of Dunbar: A Story of Love, Hope, and Basketball
author: Alejandro Danois
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> We All Loved Cowboys 42647752 "This short but profoundly moving novel by the young Brazilian writer is one of the finest explorations of love you will find anywhere this year."�John Freeman, The Boston Globe

After a falling out, Cora and Julia reunite for a long-planned road trip through Brazil. As they drive from town to town, the complications of their friendship resurface. By the end of the trip, they must decide what the future holds, in a queer, coming-of-age debut novel that has been celebrated in Brazil.

]]> 180 Carol Bensimon 194549218X sandra. 2 3.35 2013 We All Loved Cowboys
author: Carol Bensimon
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/04
date added: 2024/09/04
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]]> Quarterlife 205478780 Quarterlife is] by a distance the best debut of the year." —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

India’s literary novel of the year—an enthralling, award-winning debut from a “blazingly original voice� (Vauhini Vara).

“In the fashion of the big novels by Salman Rushdie or Amitav Gosh� (Biblio), Quarterlife is a groundbreaking portrait of a nation on the cusp of a new age. When the Bharat Party comes to power after a divisive election, Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant, is lured home to Mumbai. With him is Amanda, a restless New Englander eager to embody her ideals through a teaching fellowship in a Muslim-majority slum. Meanwhile, Naren’s charismatic brother Rohit, an amateur filmmaker, sets out to explore his roots and befriends the fiery young men of the Hindu nationalist machine. Their journeys lead them into an astonishing milieu of brutal debates and infatuations as fraught as they are addictive, feeding into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets—where the simmering unrest erupts. Hailed as “a landmark novel� (Indian Express), Quarterlife is a brilliantly innovative work that tests the limits of what the novel can achieve.]]> 416 Devika Rege 1324095490 sandra. 0 to-read 3.61 Quarterlife
author: Devika Rege
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.61
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

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

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore sandra. 3 4.16 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/23
date added: 2024/08/23
shelves: random-poland-polish-reference
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]]> Two-Step Devil 197239494
It's 2014 in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, where the Prophet—a 70-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local dump, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael and the Prophet feels certain that she is his Big Fish, a messenger sent by God to take his apocalyptic warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past—and perhaps change her future.

Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives, Two-Step Devil is a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.]]> 269 Jamie Quatro 0802163130 sandra. 0 to-read 3.76 2024 Two-Step Devil
author: Jamie Quatro
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Ancients 203164471 A richly imagined, sweeping novel set in the climate-changed world of our own descendants, by the acclaimed author of WHISKEY WHEN WE’RE DRY.

A young boy and his older sisters find themselves suddenly and utterly alone, orphaned in an abandoned fishing village. Their food supplies dwindling, they set out across a breathtaking yet treacherous wilderness in search of the last of their people.

Down the coast, raiders deliver the children's mother, along with the rest of their human cargo, to the last port city of a waning empire. Determined to reunite with her family, she plots her escape—while her fellow captives plan open revolt.

At the center of power in this crumbling city, a young scholar inherits his father's business and position of privilege, along with the burden of his debts. As the empire's elite prepare to flee to new utopia across the sea, he must decide where his allegiance lies.

With a rapidly changing climate shifting the sands beneath their feet, these three paths converge in a struggle for the future of humanity—who will inherit what remains and who gets to tell its story. At once a sweeping survival story; an epic of the distance future; and a post-apocalyptic vision of hope and optimism, THE ANCIENTS weaves a multilayered narrative about human resilience, hope, and stewardship of our world for future generations.]]> 400 John Larison 0593831160 sandra. 0 to-read 3.77 2024 The Ancients
author: John Larison
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Coin 199349912 A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling, far from home, as she gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags

The Coin follows a Palestinian woman as she pursues a dream that generations of her family have failed at: to live and thrive in America. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys in New York, where her eccentric methods cross conventional boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags, the value of which "increases, year by year, regardless of poverty, of war, of famine." The juxtaposition of luxury and the abject engulfs her as she is able to con her way to bag after bag, preoccupied by the suffering she knows of the world.

Eventually, her body and mind go to war. America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her ideology. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her feelings of existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

Enthralling, sensory, and uncanny, The Coin explores materiality, nature and civilization, class, homelessness, sexuality, beauty—and how oppression and inherited trauma manifest in every area of our lives—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative and original, humorous and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.]]> 240 Yasmin Zaher 1646222105 sandra. 0 to-read 3.50 2024 The Coin
author: Yasmin Zaher
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/15
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]]> Next Stop 207294345 For readers of Leave the World Behind and Exit West, an astonishingly resonant novel that explores the precariousness of Jewish American life through one family after a black hole consumes the State of Israel and similar strange events occur in major cities around the world, ushering in a time of chaos as well as miracles. When a black hole suddenly consumes Israel and as similar anomalies spread across the globe, a conspiracy takes hold. Will the holes swallow the Jews, or will they swallow the earth? Against a backdrop of anti-semitic paranoia, restrictions on Jewish life, and spasms of violence, Ethan and Ella, Jewish citizens of a nameless American city, meet and fall in love. Ella, a photojournalist, documents the changes in daily life, particularly among the city’s Jewish residents. Some Jews, feeling inexplicably drawn to the unusual events, go underground to an abandoned subway system that seems to connect the entire world. Others leave for the south, forming militias and stockpiling weapons. But most, like Ethan, Ella, and her young son Michael, stay and try to make their way amid the hostility and small joys of the ever-changing landscape. But then thousands of commercial planes are sucked from the sky. Air travel stops. Borders close. Refugees pour into the capital. Eventually all Jews in the city are forced to relocate to the Pale, an area sandwiched between a park and a river. There, under the watchful eye of border guards, drones, and robotic dogs, they form a fragile new society. Suspenseful, thought-provoking, and brilliantly conceived, Next Stop is an enthralling novel that explores the fault lines between our collective, national, and individual memories and how our deepest bonds can be unexpectedly reshaped in moments of crisis.]]> 304 Benjamin Resnick 1668066637 sandra. 0 to-read 3.80 Next Stop
author: Benjamin Resnick
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.80
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date added: 2024/08/12
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]]> Nicked 200555176
"Miracles, marvels, saints, sinners, love, plague, and treachery! M. T. Anderson has laid out a medieval feast of a novel, stuffed with everything I could have wished for. If I could canonize him for it, I would. But I’ll settle for shouting about how much I love this book."—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

"M. T. Anderson is one of our greatest and most precious voices. His books aren't just brilliantly witty and vastly entertaining, they're fixed stars of wisdom and sanity in our increasingly unhinged universe. When lost, I use them to steer by."—Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians Trilogy

The year is 1087, and a pox is sweeping through the Italian city of Bari. When a lowly monk is visited by Saint Nicholas in his dreams, he interprets the vision as a call to serve the sick. But his superiors, and the power brokers they serve, have different plans for the tender-hearted Brother Nicephorus.

Enter Tyun, a charismatic treasure hunter renowned for “liberating� holy relics from their tombs. The seven-hundred-year-old bones of Saint Nicholas are rumored to weep a mysterious liquid that can heal the sick, Tyun says. For the humble price of a small fortune, he will steal the bones and deliver them to Bari, curing the plague and restoring glory to the fallen city. And Nicephorus, the “dreamer,� will be his guide.

What follows is a heist for the ages, as Nicephorus is swept away on strange tides, and alongside even stranger bedfellows, to commit sacrilegious theft. Based on real historical accounts, Nicked is a swashbuckling saga, a medieval novel noir, a meditation on the miraculous, and a monastic meet-cute, filled with wide-eyed wonder at the world that awaits beyond our own borders.]]> 223 M.T. Anderson 0593701607 sandra. 0 to-read 3.68 2024 Nicked
author: M.T. Anderson
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy]]> 203956638
The figure of the American sheriff has loomed large in popular imagination, though given the outsize jurisdiction sheriffs have over people’s lives, the office of sheriffs remains a gravely under-examined institution. Locally elected, largely unaccountable, and difficult to remove, the country’s over three thousand sheriffs, mostly white men, wield immense power—making arrests, running county jails, enforcing evictions and immigration laws—with a quarter of all U.S. law enforcement officers reporting to them. In recent years there’s been a revival of “constitutional sheriffs,� who assert that their authority supersedes that of legislatures, courts, and even the president. They’ve protested federal mask and vaccine mandates and gun regulations, railed against police reforms, and, ultimately, declared themselves election police, with many endorsing the “Big Lie� of a stolen presidential election. They are embraced by far-right militia groups, white nationalists, the Claremont Institute, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in mass deportation and border policing.

How did a group of law enforcement officers decide that they were “above the law?� What are the stakes for local and national politics, and for America as a multi-racial democracy?

Blending investigative reporting, historical research, and political analysis, author Jessica Pishko takes us to the roots of why sheriffs have become a flashpoint in the current politics of toxic masculinity, guns, white supremacy, and rural resentment, and uncovers how sheriffs have effectively evaded accountability since the nation’s founding.

A must-read for fans of Michelle Alexander, Gilbert King, Elizabeth Hinton, and Kathleen Belew.]]> 480 Jessica Pishko 0593471318 sandra. 0 to-read 3.99 The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy
author: Jessica Pishko
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.99
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date added: 2024/08/06
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]]> Burn 202102018 From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, a novel about two men—friends since boyhood—who emerge from the woods of rural Maine to a dystopian country racked by bewildering violence

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

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

Drenched in the beauty of the natural world and attuned to the specific cadences of male friendship, even here at the edge of doom, Burn is both a blistering warning about a divided country’s political strife and an ode to the salvation found in our chosen families.]]> 291 Peter Heller 0593801628 sandra. 0 to-read 3.51 2024 Burn
author: Peter Heller
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/05
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]]> Blue Ruin 196845471 From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty, power, and capital’s influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it.

Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.

When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won’t recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.

Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.]]> 272 Hari Kunzru 0593801377 sandra. 2 3.81 2024 Blue Ruin
author: Hari Kunzru
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/05
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]]> Long Island Compromise 55777544 “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?�

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives� successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives� tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.]]> 464 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0593133498 sandra. 0 to-read 3.72 2024 Long Island Compromise
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

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

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

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 sandra. 0 to-read 3.66 2022 The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics]]> 199798813 This tour de force of investigative journalism—in the vein of The Next Civil War and Why We’re Polarized—depicts the United States of America as a country at a crossroads with the battle between the right and left spilling out from the darkest corners of the internet into the real world with often tragic consequences. Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and probing interviews under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups. At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right. This ongoing battle, long fought mainly on the internet, has spilled out into the real world with greater and greater frequency, culminating in the attempted coup on January 6th. Combining her years of on-the-ground reporting, Reeve clearly illustrates this shocking sweep of violence, where this cultural shift came from, and where it is going. She also introduces us to a shocking but powerful cast of characters, such as the creator of 8chan—an online hub for conspiracies and misogynistic rhetoric—and the white power leader who is still pulling the strings from a prison cell. Uncovering the hidden links between these events and how we can prevent further upheavals of this nature, Black Pill is a necessary read for any supporter of democracy.]]> 304 Elle Reeve 1982198885 sandra. 0 to-read 4.17 2024 Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
author: Elle Reeve
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
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date added: 2024/06/17
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]]> Lapvona 59693959 In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him as a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.

Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.]]> 313 Ottessa Moshfegh sandra. 0 to-read 3.53 2022 Lapvona
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/11
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]]> The Second Coming 198563704
When 13-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in 2011, her estranged dad, Ethan, seems like the furthest thing from her mind. A convicted felon and recovering addict, Ethan has always struggled to see past himself. But then a call from his ex makes him fear their daughter's in deeper trouble than anyone realizes. Believing he's the only one who can save her, he decides to return to New York with a the whole of his life, its hard-won triumphs and harrowing mistakes...

So begins the intimate epic of Jolie and child and adult, apart and together, different yet the same. Their journey toward each other will face opposition from grandparents and siblings and friends. It will strain connections with roommates and benefactors and a probation officer desperate to help. It will push Jolie out past her depth with a mysterious admirer, and Ethan in over his head with his first love, Jolie's mom. But as father and daughter struggle to find their footing, new vistas from a surf break in mid-'90s Delaware to group therapy during the Great Recession, from an encampment at Occupy Wall Street to a HoJo on Maryland's Eastern Shore, from the heights of the Brooklyn Bridge to horizons seldom seen in fiction.]]> 608 Garth Risk Hallberg 0593536924 sandra. 0 to-read 3.05 2024 The Second Coming
author: Garth Risk Hallberg
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.05
book published: 2024
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date added: 2024/05/31
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]]> <![CDATA[Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania]]> 146070961 432 Kathryn Hughes 1421448149 sandra. 0 to-read 3.66 2024 Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania
author: Kathryn Hughes
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
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date added: 2024/05/24
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]]> Nuclear War: A Scenario 182733784
Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds� notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.]]> 400 Annie Jacobsen 0593476093 sandra. 0 to-read 4.37 2024 Nuclear War: A Scenario
author: Annie Jacobsen
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/01
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]]> The Book of Daniel 411761 320 E.L. Doctorow 0452275660 sandra. 0 to-read 3.87 1971 The Book of Daniel
author: E.L. Doctorow
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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]]> Wandering Stars 174147294
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.]]> 315 Tommy Orange 0593318250 sandra. 2 3.83 2024 Wandering Stars
author: Tommy Orange
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/30
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: random-poland-polish-reference
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]]> The Well of Loneliness 24874088 496 Radclyffe Hall 014119183X sandra. 0 to-read 3.80 1928 The Well of Loneliness
author: Radclyffe Hall
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1928
rating: 0
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]]> The Daughter of Doctor Moreau 54829360 A lavish historical drama reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Mexico.

Carlota Moreau: a young woman, growing up in a distant and luxuriant estate, safe from the conflict and strife of the Yucatán peninsula. The only daughter of either a genius, or a madman.

Montgomery Laughton: a melancholic overseer with a tragic past and a propensity for alcohol. An outcast who assists Dr. Moreau with his scientific experiments, which are financed by the Lizaldes, owners of magnificent haciendas and plentiful coffers.

The hybrids: the fruits of the Doctor’s labor, destined to blindly obey their creator and remain in the shadows. A motley group of part human, part animal monstrosities.

All of them living in a perfectly balanced and static world, which is jolted by the abrupt arrival of Eduardo Lizalde, the charming and careless son of Doctor Moreau’s patron, who will unwittingly begin a dangerous chain reaction.

For Moreau keeps secrets, Carlota has questions, and in the sweltering heat of the jungle, passions may ignite.

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is both a dazzling historical novel and a daring science fiction journey.]]> 306 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0593355334 sandra. 0 to-read 3.56 2022 The Daughter of Doctor Moreau
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/17
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]]> Real Americans 62929342 Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? ]]> 399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 sandra. 0 to-read 3.94 2024 Real Americans
author: Rachel Khong
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/17
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]]> Thirst 174156085 Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic.

It is the twilight of Europe’s bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and be discreet.

In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother's terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women—and they cross a threshold from which there’s no turning back.

With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.]]> 256 Marina Yuszczuk 0593472063 sandra. 0 to-read 3.43 2020 Thirst
author: Marina Yuszczuk
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/16
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]]> Like Happiness 127305658 A searing debut about the complexities of gender, power, and fame, told through the story of a young woman’s destructive relationship with a legendary writer.

It’s 2015, and Tatum Vega feels that her life is finally falling into place. Living in sunny Chile with her partner, Vera, she spends her days surrounded by art at the museum where she works. More than anything else, she loves this new life for helping her forget the decade she spent in New York City orbiting the brilliant and famous author M. Domínguez.

When a reporter calls from the US asking for an interview, the careful separation Tatum has constructed between her past and present begins to crumble. Domínguez has been accused of assault, and the reporter is looking for corroboration.

As Tatum is forced to reexamine the all-consuming but undefinable relationship that dominated so much of her early adulthood, long-buried questions surface. What did happen between them? And why is she still struggling with the mark the relationship left on her life?

Told in a dual narrative alternating between her present day and a letter from Tatum to Domínguez, recounting and reclaiming the totality of their relationship, Like Happiness explores the nuances of a complicated and imbalanced relationship, catalyzing a reckoning with gender, celebrity, memory, Latinx identity, and power dynamics.]]> 304 Ursula Villarreal-Moura 1250882834 sandra. 0 to-read 3.77 2024 Like Happiness
author: Ursula Villarreal-Moura
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/13
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]]> The Things We Didn’t Know 176442848
Andrea Rodríguez is nine years old when her mother whisks her and her brother, Pablo, away from Woronoco, the tiny Massachusetts factory town that is the only home they’ve known. With no plan and no money, she leaves them with family in the mountainside villages of Puerto Rico and promises to return.

Months later, when Andrea and Pablo are brought back to Massachusetts, they find their hometown significantly changed. As they navigate the rifts between their family’s values and all-American culture and face the harsh realities of growing up, they must embrace both the triumphs and heartache that mark the journey to adulthood.

A heartfelt, evocative portrait of another side of life in 1950s America, The Things We Didn’t Know establishes Elba Iris Pérez as a sensational new literary voice.]]> 320 Elba Iris Pérez 1668012065 sandra. 0 to-read 3.83 2024 The Things We Didn’t Know
author: Elba Iris Pérez
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/13
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]]> A Great Country 181109976 From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel in the tradition of Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere, exploring the ties and fractures of a close-knit Indian-American family in the aftermath of a violent encounter with the police.

Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple.

For the most part, these differences among the five members of the Shah family are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one Saturday night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested. The fallout from that event will shake each family member's perception of themselves as individuals, as community members, as Americans, and will lead each to consider: how do we define success? At what cost comes ambition? And what is our role and responsibility in the cultural mosaic of modern America?

For readers of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, A Great Country explores themes of immigration, generational conflict, social class and privilege as it reconsiders the myth of the model minority and questions the price of the American dream.]]> 256 Shilpi Somaya Gowda 0063324342 sandra. 0 to-read 3.87 2024 A Great Country
author: Shilpi Somaya Gowda
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/13
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]]> Your Presence Is Mandatory 133938432
Ukraine, 2007. Yefim Shulman, husband, grandfather and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow Nina finds a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession forces them to reassess the man they thought they knew and the country he had defended.

In 1941, Yefim is a young artillerist on the border between Soviet Union and Germany, eager to defend his country and his large Jewish family against Hitler's forces. But surviving the war requires sacrifices Yefim never imagined-and even when the war ends, his fight isn't over. He must conceal his choices from the KGB and from his family. Spanning seven decades between World War II and the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, Your Presence Is Mandatory traces the effect Yefim's coverup had on the lives of Nina, their two children and grandchildren.

From Germany's prison camps and forced labor system to the Soviet culture of pride and paranoia, Sasha Vasilyuk shines a light on one family caught between two totalitarian regimes, and the grace they find in the course of their survival.]]> 336 Sasha Vasilyuk 1639731539 sandra. 0 to-read 3.53 2024 Your Presence Is Mandatory
author: Sasha Vasilyuk
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/03
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]]> Hard by a Great Forest 145624505
“My mother stayed, so that we could go.�

Having fled conflict in the former-Soviet Republic of Georgia as children, Saba and his brother have fought to make peace with the past. In particular, they struggle with the sacrifices of a mother who remained in a war zone so that their father could get them out. Now, years later, the brothers are young adults, their mother is dead, and their father has been lured back to their beautiful, decaying homeland � only to disappear. Then Saba’s older brother, chasing after their missing father, vanishes too.

Left alone to figure out what has happened and to find his family, Saba sets off on his own urgent, haunted search across his homeland. Accompanied by new friends and old ghosts as he follows a breadcrumb trail of clues, he must wrestle the present from the past as he crosses into the kind of danger zones � both physical and emotional � that he thought he had left behind.

Harrowing and tender but leavened with humor and an appreciation for the absurd, Hard by a Great Forest offers a unique story about traumas of war felt even decades after the fighting, and the long-term effects on those families driven not just to survive, but to remember.]]> 352 Leo Vardiashvili 0593545036 sandra. 0 to-read 3.85 2024 Hard by a Great Forest
author: Leo Vardiashvili
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/30
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]]> Blessings 159269939 'Chukwuebuka Ibeh's writing has a certain delicacy to it, so wonderfully observant, and so beautiful' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When Obiefuna's father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and the family's apprentice, newly arrived from the nearby village, he banishes Obiefuna to a Christian boarding school marked by strict hierarchy and routine, devastating violence. Utterly alienated from the people he loves, Obiefuna begins a journey of self-discovery and blossoming desire, while his mother Uzoamaka grapples to hold onto her favourite son, her truest friend.

Interweaving the perspectives of Obiefuna and his mother Uzoamaka, as they reach towards a future that will hold them both, BLESSINGS is an elegant and exquisitely moving story of love and loneliness. Asking how we can live freely when politics reaches into our hearts and lives, as well as deep into our consciousness, it is a stunning, searing debut.]]> 246 Chukwuebuka Ibeh 0241998034 sandra. 0 to-read 4.11 2024 Blessings
author: Chukwuebuka Ibeh
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/30
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]]> Great Expectations 139400711
I’d seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency.

When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator’s idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he’ll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States� first Black president.

Great Expectations is about David’s eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood—that force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.

Meditating on politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family, Great Expectations is both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas, marking the arrival of a major new writer.]]> 272 Vinson Cunningham 0593448235 sandra. 0 to-read 3.24 2024 Great Expectations
author: Vinson Cunningham
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2024
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett sandra. 0 to-read 4.47 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.47
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]]> American Abductions 80333180 350 Mauro Javier Cárdenas 1628975180 sandra. 0 to-read 3.92 2024 American Abductions
author: Mauro Javier Cárdenas
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.92
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]]> Severance 36348525
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]> 291 Ling Ma 0374261598 sandra. 3 3.90 2018 Severance
author: Ling Ma
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/27
date added: 2024/03/27
shelves: random-poland-polish-reference, psychwardreads
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]]> The Possessed 175678232 416 Witold Gombrowicz 0802162525 sandra. 0 to-read 3.75 1939 The Possessed
author: Witold Gombrowicz
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1939
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State]]> 150247424
Our modern world is awash in surveillance. Most of us are dimly aware of this—ever get the sense that an ad is “following� you around the internet?—but we don’t understand the extent to which the technology embedded in our phones, computers, cars, and homes is part of a vast ecosystem of data collection. Our public spaces are blanketed by cameras put up in the name of security. And pretty much everything that emits a wireless signal of any kind—routers, televisions, Bluetooth devices, chip-enabled credit cards, even the tires of every car manufactured since the mid-2000s—can be and often is covertly monitored. All of this surveillance has produced an extraordinary amount of data about every citizen—and the biggest customer is the U.S. government.

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

Sobering and revelatory, Means of Control is our era’s defining story of the dangerous grand bargain we’ve ubiquitous, often cheap technology, but at what price to our privacy?]]> 400 Byron Tau 0593443225 sandra. 0 to-read 4.29 2024 Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State
author: Byron Tau
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.29
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]]> <![CDATA[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]> 17125 The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury

This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.]]> 182 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sandra. 2 3.98 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 2
read at: 2023/05/04
date added: 2024/03/15
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]]> Wellness 65650229 A witty and poignant novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture and the bonds that keep people together

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit.Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.]]> 611 Nathan Hill 0593536118 sandra. 0 to-read 3.97 2023 Wellness
author: Nathan Hill
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/28
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]]> <![CDATA[End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration]]> 62926960
From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames

Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.

Back in 2010, when Nature magazine asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his models to predict that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order circa 2020. The years since have proved his prediction more and more accurate, and End Times reveals why.

The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it's very hard to exit.

In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. That is only one possible end time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.]]> 368 Peter Turchin 0593490509 sandra. 0 to-read 4.02 End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration
author: Peter Turchin
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.02
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]]> <![CDATA[Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs]]> 134939419
Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system seemingly bent on punishing their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family relocates to an affluent suburban enclave, but can’t escape the changes sweeping the country. On Chicago’s North Shore, a multiracial mom joins an ultraprogressive challenge to the town’s liberal status quo. In Compton, California, whose suburban roots are now barely recognizable, undocumented Hispanic parents place their gifted son’s future in the hands of educators at a remarkable elementary school. And outside Pittsburgh, a Black mother moves to the same street where the author grew up, then confronts the destructive legacy left behind by white families like his.

Education journalist Benjamin Herold braids these human stories together with local and national history to make Disillusioned an astonishing reading experience—and an urgent argument that suburbia and its schools are locked in a devastating cycle that has brought America to a point of crisis. For generations, upwardly mobile white families have extracted opportunity from the nation’s heavily subsidized suburbs, then moved on before the bills for maintenance and repair came due, leaving the mostly Black and Brown families who followed to clean up the ensuing mess. Now, though, rapidly shifting demographics and the reality that endless expansion is no longer feasible are disrupting that pattern. Forced to face truths that their communities were built to avoid, everyday suburban families suddenly find themselves at the center of the nation’s most pressing How do we confront America’s troubled history? How do we build a future in which all children can thrive?

In exploring these questions, Herold pulls back the curtain on suburban public schools and school boards, which he argues are the new ground zero in the fight to revive the country’s faltering promise. Then, alongside Bethany Smith—the mother from his old neighborhood, who contributes a powerful epilogue to the book—Herold offers a path toward renewal. The result is nothing short of a journalistic masterpiece.]]> 496 Benjamin Herold 0593298187 sandra. 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs
author: Benjamin Herold
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
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date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad]]> 58120777
This book underscores with wit, humour, wisdom, and sensitivity the perils of trying to find lasting love and companionship in Africa’s craziest city that will prove universal and illuminating.]]> 254 Damilare Kuku sandra. 0 to-read 3.98 2024 Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad
author: Damilare Kuku
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/08
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]]> Women and Children First 123006769 A gripping literary puzzle that unwinds the private lives of ten women as they confront tragedy in a small Massachusetts town.

Nashquitten, MA, is a decaying coastal enclave that not even tourist season can revive, full of locals who have run the town’s industries for generations. When a young woman dies at a house party, the circumstances around her death suspiciously unclear, the tight-knit community is shaken. As a mother grieves her daughter, a teacher her student, a best friend her confidante, the events around the tragedy become a lightning rod: blame is cast, secrets are buried deeper. Some are left to pick up the pieces, while others turn their backs, and all the while, a truth about that dreadful night begins to emerge.

Told through the eyes of ten local women, Grabowski’s Women and Children First is an exquisite portrait of grief and a powerful reminder of life’s interconnectedness. Touching on womanhood, class, and sexuality, ambition, disappointment, and tragedy, this novel is a stunning rendering of love and loss, and a bracing lesson from a phenomenal new literary talent that no one walks this earth alone.]]> 336 Alina Grabowski 1638930783 sandra. 0 to-read 3.33 2024 Women and Children First
author: Alina Grabowski
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum]]> 145624993 The Immortal Life ofHenriettaLacks, a page-turning 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last segregated asylums, that New York Times bestselling author Clint Smith describes as “a book that left me breathless.�

On a cold day in March of1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland.Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.

In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.

As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America’s new focus.

In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.
]]> 368 Antonia Hylton 1538723697 sandra. 0 to-read 4.25 2024 Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
author: Antonia Hylton
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
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date added: 2024/01/16
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]]> You Dreamed of Empires 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan � today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma � who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods � the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 Álvaro Enrigue 059354479X sandra. 0 to-read 3.76 2022 You Dreamed of Empires
author: Álvaro Enrigue
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/10
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]]> Ordinary Human Failings 62601701
FINALIST FOR THE FALLON BOOK CLUB SELECTION

When we look beyond the headlines, everyone has a story to tell

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" - ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and 'bad apples': the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.]]> 218 Megan Nolan 1787332500 sandra. 0 to-read 3.73 2023 Ordinary Human Failings
author: Megan Nolan
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz]]> 126918752 The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps.

When József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, his life expectancy was forty-five minutes. This was how long it took for the half-dead prisoners to be sorted into groups, stripped, and sent to the gas chambers. He beat the odds and survived the “selection,� which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”—the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution. But as Soviet and Allied troops closed in on the camps, local Nazi commanders—anxious about the possible consequences of outright murder—decided to leave the remaining prisoners to die.

Debreczeni survived the liberation of Auschwitz and immediately recorded his experiences in Cold Crematorium, one of the harshest, most merciless indictments of Nazism ever written. This haunting memoir, rendered in the precise and unsentimental prose of an accomplished journalist, is an eyewitness account of incomparable literary quality. It was published in the Hungarian language in 1950, but it was never translated, due to Cold War hostilities and rising antisemitism. More than 70 years later, this masterpiece that was nearly lost to time is now being published in more than 15 different languages for the first time, and will finally take its rightful place among the greatest works of Holocaust literature.]]> 248 József Debreczeni 1250290546 sandra. 0 to-read 4.54 1950 Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
author: József Debreczeni
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.54
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/03
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]]> <![CDATA[The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church]]> 126918658 The first definitive book that names the massive social movement of people leaving the white evangelical church—the exvangelicals

Growing up in a deeply evangelical family in the Midwest in the �80s and �90s, Sarah McCammon was strictly taught to fear God, obey him, and not question the faith. Persistently worried that her gay grandfather would go to hell unless she could reach him, or that her Muslim friend would need to be converted, and that she, too, would go to hell if she did not believe fervently enough, McCammon was a rule-follower and--most of the time--a true believer. But through it all, she was increasingly plagued by fears and deep questions as the belief system she'd been carefully taught clashed with her expanding understanding of the outside world.

After spending her early adult life striving to make sense of an unraveling worldview, by her 30s, she found herself face-to-face with it once again as she covered the Trump campaign for NPR, where she witnessed first-hand the power and influence that evangelical Christian beliefs held on the political right. McCammon also came to discover that she is among a rising generation of the children of evangelicalism who are growing up and fleeing the fold, who are thinking for themselves and deconstructing what feel like the “alternative facts� of their childhood.

Rigorously reported and deeply personal, The Exvangelicals is the story of the people who make up this generational tipping point, including McCammon herself. Part memoir, part investigative journalism, this is the first definitive book that names and describes the post-evangelical movement--identifying its origins, telling the stories of its members, and examining its vast cultural, social, and political impact.]]> 310 Sarah McCammon 1250284481 sandra. 0 to-read 4.20 2024 The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
author: Sarah McCammon
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
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]]> The Extinction of Irena Rey 172979818 From the International Booker Prize–winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, a propulsive, beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.

Eight translators arrive at a house in a forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets � and deceptions � of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking second outing by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.]]> 320 Jennifer Croft 1639731709 sandra. 0 to-read 3.18 2024 The Extinction of Irena Rey
author: Jennifer Croft
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/21
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]]> Julia 86508927
But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department—a mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith—when she sees him locking eyes with a superior from the Inner Party at the Two Minutes Hate. And when one day, finding herself walking toward Winston, she impulsively hands him a note—a potentially suicidal gesture—she comes to realise that she's losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world.

Seventy-five years after Orwell finished writing his iconic novel, Sandra Newman has tackled the world of Big Brother in a truly convincing way, offering a dramatically different, feminist narrative that is true to and stands alongside the original. For the millions of readers who have been brought up with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, here, finally, is a provocative, vital and utterly satisfying companion novel.]]> 400 Sandra Newman 0063265338 sandra. 0 to-read 3.72 2023 Julia
author: Sandra Newman
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Lady Waiting 195888782 The White Lotus meets The Talented Mr. Ripley in this high-spirited novel of a stolen Vermeer, a Polish transplant in LA, and the charismatic couple who seduce her into a misguided international heist

One bright Los Angeles day, a young Polish émigré named Viva is driving along the freeway when she’s flagged down by a dazzling, disheveled woman in green chiffon. The woman is Bobby Sleeper, a fellow Eastern European and an erstwhile art gallerist with a mysterious background and even more mysterious filmmaker husband. Within days the couple hire Viva as their assistant, then enlist her as an accomplice in an improbable scheme involving a long-lost Vermeer masterwork, a multi-million-dollar reward, and several shadowy ex-husbands.

AsBobby and her husband weave her ever more tightly into their web, Viva is swept up in an escapade that’s one part art heist, one part love triangle, and one part education of a felon. Entranced by their lifestyle, alarmed by their ramshackle scam, Viva realizes she’s out of her depth—and that only luck, cunning, and her own hustler’s instinct can save her from disaster. Careening from the canyons of LA to the canals of Venice, The Lady Waiting is a page-turning caper, a cavalcade of twenty-first-century sins—rapacious capitalism, shameless fraud, and atrocious behavior—and a showcase for three of the biggest and most unforgettable characters in recent fiction.]]> 352 Magdalena Zyzak 0593542940 sandra. 0 to-read 3.07 2024 The Lady Waiting
author: Magdalena Zyzak
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> Anita de Monte Laughs Last 127306192 New York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a mesmerizing novel about a first-generation Ivy League student who uncovers the genius work of a female artist decades after her suspicious death

1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn’t. By 1998 Anita’s name has been all but forgotten—certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret.

But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita’s story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.

Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love, and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.]]> 342 Xóchitl González 1250786215 sandra. 0 to-read 3.76 2024 Anita de Monte Laughs Last
author: Xóchitl González
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/28
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]]> Poland, a Green Land 61686764
Yaakov Fine’s practical wife and daughters are baffled by his decision to leave his flourishing dress shop for a ten-day trip to his family’s ancestral village in Poland. Struggling to emerge from a midlife depression, Yaakov is drawn to Szydowce, intrigued by the stories he'd heard as a child from his parents and their friends, who would wax nostalgic about their pastoral, verdant hometown in the decades before 1939. The horrific years that followed were relegated to the nightmares that shattered sleep and were not discussed during waking hours.
When he arrives in Krakow, Yaakov enjoys the charming sidewalk cafes and relaxed European atmosphere, so different from the hurly burly of Tel Aviv. And his landlady in Szydowce—beautiful, sensual Magda, with a tragic past of her own—enchants him with her recollections of his family. But when Yaakov attempts to purchase from the townspeople the desecrated tombstones that had been stolen from Szydowce’s plowed-under Jewish cemetery, a very different Poland emerges, one that shatters Yaakov’s idyllic view of the town and its people, and casts into sharp relief the tragic reality of Jewish life in Poland—past, present, and future.
In this novel of revelation and reconciliation, Aharon Appelfeld once again mines lived experience to create fiction of powerful, universal resonance.]]> 240 Aharon Appelfeld 0805243615 sandra. 0 to-read 3.75 2005 Poland, a Green Land
author: Aharon Appelfeld
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> Year of Wonders 4965
Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition.

As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. ]]> 304 Geraldine Brooks 0142001430 sandra. 5 4.00 2001 Year of Wonders
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2017/12/25
date added: 2023/11/11
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]]> Davita's Harp 14769

From the Paperback edition.]]> 371 Chaim Potok 0449911837 sandra. 0 to-read 4.02 1985 Davita's Harp
author: Chaim Potok
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Shipping News 7354
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why E. Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
(back cover)]]> 337 Annie Proulx 0743225422 sandra. 0 to-read 3.88 1993 The Shipping News
author: Annie Proulx
name: sandra.
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> This Boy 17615084 'The best memoir by a politician you will ever read' The TimesSchool on the Kings Road, Chelsea in the Swinging 60s, the rock-and-roll years, the race riots; this boy has seen it all. Alan Johnson's childhood was not so much difficult as unusual - particularly for a man who was destined to become Home Secretary. Not in respect of the poverty, which was shared with many of those living in Britain's post-war slums, but in its transition from being part of a two-parent family to having a single mother and then to no parents at all...This is essentially the story of two incredible women: Alan's mother, Lily, who battled against poor health, poverty, domestic violence and loneliness to try to ensure a better life for her children; and his sister, Linda, who had to assume an enormous amount of responsibility at a very young age and who fought to keep the family together and out of care when she herself was still only a child.This Boy is one man's story, but it is also the story of England and the West London slums which are hard to imagine in the capital today. No matter how harsh the details, Alan Johnson writes with a spirit of generous acceptance, of humour and openness which makes his book anything but a grim catalogue of miseries.________ PRAISE FOR THIS 'Moving and unforgettable' Sunday Times'Poignant' Telegraph'Eloquent' Guardian'Wonderful' Spectator'Tribute to two strong women' Daily Mail]]> 304 Alan Johnson 1448110483 sandra. 0 to-read 4.18 2013 This Boy
author: Alan Johnson
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> Against the Web 52462411 The Michael Brooks Show and co-host of the Majority Report, he lets his understanding of the new media environment direct his analysis of the newly risen conservative rebels who have taken YouTube by storm.

Brooks provides a theoretically rigorous but accessible critique of the most prominent "renegades" including Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Brett Weinstein while also examining the social, political and media environment that these rebels thrive in.]]> 96 Michael Brooks 1789042305 sandra. 0 to-read 4.07 2020 Against the Web
author: Michael Brooks
name: sandra.
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>