Kerry's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 05 Apr 2025 17:07:24 -0700 60 Kerry's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Mansfield Park 20622145
Fanny soon falls in love with him, but Edmund is, unfortunately, drawn to the shallow and worldly Mary Crawford. Fanny's quiet humility, steadfast loyalty, and natural goodness are matched against the wit and brilliance of her lovely rival. The tension is heightened when Henry Crawford, Mary's equally sophisticated and flirtatious brother, takes an interest in Fanny.

Jane Austen's subtle, satiric novel skillfully uses her characters' emotional relationships to explore the social and moral values by which they attempt to order their lives.]]> 17 Jane Austen Kerry 4 Mansfield Park was the one I missed, so I finally read it this year.

First, the narration: it was very nice. Ms. Ward did a very good job and the editing was flawless. However I do wish there had been a little more . . . something to it. A little personality. Normally I wouldn't be so picky, but there are plenty of options from which to choose when it comes to choosing a Jane Austen audiobook, so you need to bring your A game.

Okay, so the story. I liked it! I still don't know why I like Austen so much; I don't like reading romances otherwise. I liked Fanny Price, even if she does have crippling anxiety (which usually annoys the bejesus out of me.) And I honestly didn't know with whom she might end up, in the end! You never know who's going to have a secret personality and turn out to be the good guy or the bad guy. So that was fun. And the terrible people were terrible (like Mrs. Norris, oooooooh that Mrs. Norris!!) but most of the people were just . . . shallow. And not really EVIL, just shallow, until the end when they turned out to be pretty awful actually.

I have to compare this with Jane Eyre, which I just read. I like this WAY better. I'm not saying it IS better, just that I like it better. For all her silent suffering and lack of action, I like Fanny better than Jane. They both like to be helpful, but Jane is just so servile about it, you know? And sure, Austen doesn't really acknowledge that servants are actual people, but Brontë got so freaking hypocritical about it that it enraged me. And, of course, the "hero" of Jane Eyre was an ugly, misogynistic lunatic, whereas the men in Mansfield Park are constantly (well, towards the end of the book, anyway) asking for Fanny's opinion. At worst they're a bit aloof and dippy.

Although it would have helped both Fanny and Jane, in my opinion, if they had had the opportunity to get out and MEET people. I guess it's more difficult to stop being in love with a dude -- even if he's lame -- if he's the only dude you ever ever meet.

Anyway, I dunno. I liked it.]]> 3.81 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1814
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/07
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: about-a-girl, about-a-woman, audible, audiobook, female-author, romance
review:
So in 2008 (it is currently 2014) I decided to read a Jane Austen novel, since I never had. And then it turns out that I really liked her, so I read five of her six books before I guess I got bored. Mansfield Park was the one I missed, so I finally read it this year.

First, the narration: it was very nice. Ms. Ward did a very good job and the editing was flawless. However I do wish there had been a little more . . . something to it. A little personality. Normally I wouldn't be so picky, but there are plenty of options from which to choose when it comes to choosing a Jane Austen audiobook, so you need to bring your A game.

Okay, so the story. I liked it! I still don't know why I like Austen so much; I don't like reading romances otherwise. I liked Fanny Price, even if she does have crippling anxiety (which usually annoys the bejesus out of me.) And I honestly didn't know with whom she might end up, in the end! You never know who's going to have a secret personality and turn out to be the good guy or the bad guy. So that was fun. And the terrible people were terrible (like Mrs. Norris, oooooooh that Mrs. Norris!!) but most of the people were just . . . shallow. And not really EVIL, just shallow, until the end when they turned out to be pretty awful actually.

I have to compare this with Jane Eyre, which I just read. I like this WAY better. I'm not saying it IS better, just that I like it better. For all her silent suffering and lack of action, I like Fanny better than Jane. They both like to be helpful, but Jane is just so servile about it, you know? And sure, Austen doesn't really acknowledge that servants are actual people, but Brontë got so freaking hypocritical about it that it enraged me. And, of course, the "hero" of Jane Eyre was an ugly, misogynistic lunatic, whereas the men in Mansfield Park are constantly (well, towards the end of the book, anyway) asking for Fanny's opinion. At worst they're a bit aloof and dippy.

Although it would have helped both Fanny and Jane, in my opinion, if they had had the opportunity to get out and MEET people. I guess it's more difficult to stop being in love with a dude -- even if he's lame -- if he's the only dude you ever ever meet.

Anyway, I dunno. I liked it.
]]> <![CDATA[3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool]]> 174156154
The myth of the 60s depends on the 1950s being the before times of conformity, segregation, straightness—The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man. This all carries some truth, but it does nothing to explain how, in 1959, the great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity, led there by a number of Black geniuses so iconic they go by one name—Monk, Mingus, Rollins, Coltrane, and above all, Miles. 1959 saw Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the other members of Miles’s sextet come together to record what is widely considered the greatest jazz album of all time, and certainly the Kind of Blue .


3 Shades of Blue is James Kaplan’s magnificent account of the paths of the three giants Miles, Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959 and their path on from there. It’s a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the towns that gave jazz its home, from New York and LA to Philadelphia, Chicago and Kansas City. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange hothouses that can produce its full flowering. It’s a book about the great forebears of this golden age, particularly Charlie Parker, and the people, like Ornette Coleman, who would take the music down strange new paths. And it’s about why this period has never been replicated, why the world of jazz most people visit is a museum to it.


But above all this is a book about three very different men—their struggles, their choices, their tragedies, their greatness. Bill Evans had a gruesome downward spiral, John Coltrane took the mystic’s path into a space far away from mainstream concerns. Miles had three or four sea changes in him before the end. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan’s hands, an American Odyssey, with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America.]]> 496 James Kaplan 0525561005 Kerry 0 to-read 4.34 2024 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool
author: James Kaplan
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 Kerry 0 to-read 3.72 2024 Long Island Compromise
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism]]> 223436601 An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.�

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]> 400 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Kerry 0 to-read 4.33 2025 Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Tom Lake 216038747 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 320 Ann Patchett 0063327538 Kerry 0 to-read 3.79 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History, #1)]]> 39943621
Centuries before the events of A Game of Thrones, House Targaryen—the only family of dragonlords to survive the Doom of Valyria—took up residence on Dragonstone. Fire and Blood begins their tale with the legendary Aegon the Conqueror, creator of the Iron Throne, and goes on to recount the generations of Targaryens who fought to hold that iconic seat, all the way up to the civil war that nearly tore their dynasty apart.

What really happened during the Dance of the Dragons? Why did it become so deadly to visit Valyria after the Doom? What is the origin of Daenerys’s three dragon eggs? These are but a few of the questions answered in this essential chronicle, as related by a learned maester of the Citadel and featuring more than eighty all-new black-and-white illustrations by artist Doug Wheatley. Readers have glimpsed small parts of this narrative in such volumes as The World of Ice & Fire, but now, for the first time, the full tapestry of Targaryen history is revealed.

With all the scope and grandeur of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Fire and Blood is the ultimate game of thrones, giving readers a whole new appreciation for the dynamic, often bloody, and always fascinating history of Westeros.]]> 706 George R.R. Martin 152479628X Kerry 4 dragons, fromthelibrary 4.03 2018 Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History, #1)
author: George R.R. Martin
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: dragons, fromthelibrary
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants]]> 34272887 Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.

Read by the author.]]> 17 Robin Wall Kimmerer Kerry 0 4.44 2013 Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: audiobook, female-author, temporarily_on_hold
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City]]> 58442176 Without the nineteen upstate reservoirs that supply its water, New York City as we know it would not exist today.

From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties. This feat of engineering served to meet New York City’s ever-increasing need for water, sustaining its inhabitants and cementing it as a center of industry. West of the Hudson, it meant that twenty-six villages, with their farms, forest lands, orchards, and quarries, were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished, and submerged, profoundly altering ecosystems in ways we will never fully appreciate.

This paradox of victory and loss is at the heart of Nineteen Reservoirs, Lucy Sante’s meticulous account of how New York City secured its seemingly limitless fresh water supply, and why it cannot be taken for granted. In inimitable form, Sante plumbs the historical record to surface forgotten archives and images, bringing lost places back to life on the page. Her immaculately calibrated sensitivity honors both perspectives on New York City’s reservoir system and helps us understand the full import of its creation.

An essential history of the New York City region that will reverberate far beyond it, Nineteen Reservoirs examines universal divisions in our resources and priorities—between urban and rural, rich and poor, human needs and animal habitats. This is an unmissable account of triumph, tragedy, and unintended consequences.

With 29 present-day photographs by Tim Davis]]> 208 Lucy Sante 1615198652 Kerry 0 temporarily_on_hold 3.43 Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City
author: Lucy Sante
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.43
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: temporarily_on_hold
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Very Far Away From Anywhere Else]]> 201883 87 Ursula K. Le Guin 0553110810 Kerry 3 3.80 1976 Very Far Away From Anywhere Else
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1976
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves:
review:
A nice sweet little novella about being smart in high school, and friendship between boys and girls.
]]> <![CDATA[The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth]]> 54616040 Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: "cancel culture." At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony.

In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the "Constitution of Knowledge"--our social system for turning disagreement into truth.

By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do--and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.]]> 318 Jonathan Rauch 0815738862 Kerry 0 to-read 4.22 2021 The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
author: Jonathan Rauch
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> When You Reach Me 8466181 199 Rebecca Stead 0375850864 Kerry 0 to-read 4.19 2009 When You Reach Me
author: Rebecca Stead
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel (The Books of Earthsea)]]> 214504702 Ursula K. Le Guin’s timeless and revered A Wizard of Earthsea is reimagined in a richly expansive graphic novel by acclaimed artist Fred Fordham, creator of stunning adaptations To Kill a Mockingbird and Brave New World.

"The magic of Earthsea is primal; the lessons of Earthsea remain as potent, as wise, and as necessary as anyone could dream." —Neil Gaiman

Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long-held secrets and unleashed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tumultuous tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.

Experience the bestselling first adventure of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle as a masterly crafted graphic novel. Fred Fordham brings new life to Le Guin's iconic fantasy classic with his breathtaking illustrations and thoughtful text adaptation.]]> 288 Fred Fordham 0063285762 Kerry 0 to-read 4.14 2025 A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel (The Books of Earthsea)
author: Fred Fordham
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Night Watchman 46206688
Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation� bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination� that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run�?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.]]> 453 Louise Erdrich 0062671189 Kerry 3 4.06 2020 The Night Watchman
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:
A solid 3.5. Very nice, I recommend.
]]> <![CDATA[The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird]]> 52351749 A true-crime adventure about a rogue who trades in rare birds and their eggs—and the wildlife detective determined to stop him.

On May 3, 2010, an Irish national named Jeffrey Lendrum was apprehended at Britain’s Birmingham International Airport with a suspicious parcel strapped to his stomach. Inside were fourteen rare peregrine falcon eggs snatched from a remote cliffside in Wales.

So begins a tale almost too bizarre to believe, following the parallel lives of a globe-trotting smuggler who spent two decades capturing endangered raptors worth millions of dollars as race champions—and Detective Andy McWilliam of the United Kingdom’s National Wildlife Crime Unit, who’s hell bent on protecting the world’s birds of prey.

The Falcon Thief whisks readers from the volcanoes of Patagonia to Zimbabwe’s Matobo National Park, and from the frigid tundra near the Arctic Circle to luxurious aviaries in the deserts of Dubai, all in pursuit of a man who is reckless, arrogant, and gripped by a destructive compulsion to make the most beautiful creatures in nature his own.]]> 336 Joshua Hammer 1501191888 Kerry 3 3.81 2020 The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird
author: Joshua Hammer
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Breaking Up with Dairy: 100 Indulgent Plant-based Recipes for Cheese (and Butter, Cream, and Milk) Lovers Everywhere]]> 214175180
Cheese can be the breaking point that keeps many from breaking up from dairy—because let's face it, dairy is delicious. In Breaking Up With Dairy, Chef Bai shares over one hundred unbelievable plant-based dairy recipes.

Includes recipes that mimic beloved cheeses like Gorgonzola, Young Gruyere, Pepper-Jack, Parmesan, and more, which you can use in the following recipes:

-Baked Truffle Mac
-New York Style Spelt Bagels with Roasted Garlic Cream Cheese
-Breakfast Pizza Pockets with Hollandaise
-Mini Quiches
-Air-Fried Ricotta Balls with Ratatouille Sauce
-And so much more!

Breaking up with dairy doesn't have to feel like a loss with these mouth-watering substitute dishes!]]> 320 Bailey Ruskus 0306833522 Kerry 0 to-read 4.04 Breaking Up with Dairy: 100 Indulgent Plant-based Recipes for Cheese (and Butter, Cream, and Milk) Lovers Everywhere
author: Bailey Ruskus
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Dombey and Son 50827 880 Charles Dickens 0812967437 Kerry 0
Merged review:

I think I'm giving up on this. The narration is too weird and I'm just SO BORED and I don't pay attention to it at all. I tried to listen to too many classics in a row and I am all classic'ed out.]]> 3.94 1848 Dombey and Son
author: Charles Dickens
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1848
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: audible, audiobook, armchair_audies_2012, abandoned
review:
I think I'm giving up on this. The narration is too weird and I'm just SO BORED and I don't pay attention to it at all. I tried to listen to too many classics in a row and I am all classic'ed out.

Merged review:

I think I'm giving up on this. The narration is too weird and I'm just SO BORED and I don't pay attention to it at all. I tried to listen to too many classics in a row and I am all classic'ed out.
]]> No Fixed Address 25647189 In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu Sadhu, leaving behind family and wealth to live as a beggar; the pilgrims of Compostela walking away their sins; the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora; the Hajj. What could this ritual journeying be but symbolic, idealised versions of the foraging life? By taking to the road we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.

After many thousands of years, the nomads are disappearing, swept away by modernity. Robyn Davidson has spent a good part of her life with nomadic cultures. In this fascinating and moving essay she evokes a vanishing way of life, and notes a paradox: that even as classical nomads are disappearing, hypermobility has become the hallmark of contemporary life. In a time of environmental peril, she argues, the nomadic way with nature still offers valuable lessons. No Fixed Address is part lament, part evocation and part exhilarating speculative journey.]]> 64 Robyn Davidson 1863957731 Kerry 4 The Dispossessed and other Le Guin stories, and I wonder, now, that she hasn't written about a utopian planet where the population remained in the nomadic stage. Or a planet that was colonized by people who don't settle it per se, but remain nomads on its surface. (Or maybe she has done and I just haven't read it yet.)

I also realized that I know basically zero about the culture of indigenous Australians, and they are FASCINATING. According to this (Australian) author, they don't think about time in a linear manner, and also there is this concept of the "dreaming"/"Dreamtime" which is . . . I am unable to describe it here, but it's . . . well, very interesting. And difficult around which to wrap one's (Western) mind. I definitely want to read more about aboriginal culture & mysticism.

Merged review:

A very interesting essay on nomadism. Ultimately pretty depressing, because the takeaways seem to be 1) the move from nomadism to settlement & agriculture was where it all went wrong and 2) there's no way to go back. It did make me think about The Dispossessed and other Le Guin stories, and I wonder, now, that she hasn't written about a utopian planet where the population remained in the nomadic stage. Or a planet that was colonized by people who don't settle it per se, but remain nomads on its surface. (Or maybe she has done and I just haven't read it yet.)

I also realized that I know basically zero about the culture of indigenous Australians, and they are FASCINATING. According to this (Australian) author, they don't think about time in a linear manner, and also there is this concept of the "dreaming"/"Dreamtime" which is . . . I am unable to describe it here, but it's . . . well, very interesting. And difficult around which to wrap one's (Western) mind. I definitely want to read more about aboriginal culture & mysticism.]]> 3.78 2006 No Fixed Address
author: Robyn Davidson
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2017/12/11
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: audible, audiobook, female-author, non-fiction
review:
A very interesting essay on nomadism. Ultimately pretty depressing, because the takeaways seem to be 1) the move from nomadism to settlement & agriculture was where it all went wrong and 2) there's no way to go back. It did make me think about The Dispossessed and other Le Guin stories, and I wonder, now, that she hasn't written about a utopian planet where the population remained in the nomadic stage. Or a planet that was colonized by people who don't settle it per se, but remain nomads on its surface. (Or maybe she has done and I just haven't read it yet.)

I also realized that I know basically zero about the culture of indigenous Australians, and they are FASCINATING. According to this (Australian) author, they don't think about time in a linear manner, and also there is this concept of the "dreaming"/"Dreamtime" which is . . . I am unable to describe it here, but it's . . . well, very interesting. And difficult around which to wrap one's (Western) mind. I definitely want to read more about aboriginal culture & mysticism.

Merged review:

A very interesting essay on nomadism. Ultimately pretty depressing, because the takeaways seem to be 1) the move from nomadism to settlement & agriculture was where it all went wrong and 2) there's no way to go back. It did make me think about The Dispossessed and other Le Guin stories, and I wonder, now, that she hasn't written about a utopian planet where the population remained in the nomadic stage. Or a planet that was colonized by people who don't settle it per se, but remain nomads on its surface. (Or maybe she has done and I just haven't read it yet.)

I also realized that I know basically zero about the culture of indigenous Australians, and they are FASCINATING. According to this (Australian) author, they don't think about time in a linear manner, and also there is this concept of the "dreaming"/"Dreamtime" which is . . . I am unable to describe it here, but it's . . . well, very interesting. And difficult around which to wrap one's (Western) mind. I definitely want to read more about aboriginal culture & mysticism.
]]> <![CDATA[The Last Murder at the End of the World]]> 213570810
Outside the island there is nothing: the world was destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched.

On the island: it is idyllic. One hundred and twenty-two villagers and three scientists, living in peaceful harmony. The villagers are content to fish, farm and feast, to obey their nightly curfew, to do what they're told by the scientists.

Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. And then they learn that the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping the fog at bay. If the murder isn't solved within 107 hours, the fog will smother the island—and everyone on it.

But the security system has also wiped everyone's memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer—and they don't even know it.

And the clock is ticking.

From the bestselling author of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and The Devil and the Dark Water comes an inventive, high-concept murder mystery: an ingenious puzzle, an extraordinary backdrop, and an audacious solution.]]> 432 Stuart Turton 1464221847 Kerry 0 to-read 3.58 2024 The Last Murder at the End of the World
author: Stuart Turton
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Vegetarian 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.]]> 188 Han Kang 0553448188 Kerry 0 to-read 3.61 2007 The Vegetarian
author: Han Kang
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Cricket on the Hearth 19476784
The title creature is a sort of barometer of life at the home of John Peerybingle and his much younger wife Dot. When things go well, the cricket on the hearth chirps; it is silent when there is sorrow. Tackleton, a jealous old man, poisons John's mind about Dot, but the cricket through its supernatural powers restores John's confidence and all ends happily.]]> 4 Charles Dickens Kerry 2 audible, audiobook 3.14 1845 The Cricket on the Hearth
author: Charles Dickens
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.14
book published: 1845
rating: 2
read at: 2015/12/27
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: audible, audiobook
review:
Eh. Thus was okay. So... Dickensian, you know?
]]> <![CDATA[Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System]]> 201978334
Fixing the carnage on our roadways requires a change in mindset and a dramatic transformation of transportation. This goes for traffic engineers in particular because they are still the ones in charge of our streets.

In Killed by a Traffic Engineer, civil engineering professor Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought. While traffic engineers are not trying to cause deliberate harm to anyone, he explains, they are guilty of creating a transportation system whose designs remain largely based on plausible, but unproven, conjecture.

Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, Killed by a Traffic Engineer shows how traffic engineering “research� is outdated and unexamined (at its best) and often steered by an industry and culture considering only how to get from point A to B the fastest way possible, to the detriment of safety, quality of life, equality, and planetary health. Marshall examines our need for speed and how traffic engineers disconnected it from safety, the focus on capacity and how it influences design, blaming human error, relying on faulty data, how liability drives reporting, measuring road safety outcomes, and the education (and reeducation) of traffic engineers.

Killed by a Traffic Engineer is ultimately hopeful about what is possible once we shift our thinking and demand streets engineered for the safety of people, both outside and inside of cars. It will make you look at your city and streets—and traffic engineers� in a new light and inspire you to take action.]]> 424 Wes Marshall 1642833304 Kerry 0 to-read 4.30 Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System
author: Wes Marshall
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Book of Elsewhere 202950650
There have always been whispers. Legends. The warrior who cannot be killed. Who’s seen a thousand civilizations rise and fall. He has had many names: Unute, Child of Lightning, Death himself. These days, he’s known simply as “B.�

And he wants to be able to die.

In the present day, a U.S. black-ops group has promised him they can help with that. And all he needs to do is help them in return. But when an all-too-mortal soldier comes back to life, the impossible event ultimately points toward a force even more mysterious than B himself. One at least as strong. And one with a plan all its own.

A mind-blowing epic of ancient powers, modern war, and an outcast who cannot die. Combines Miéville’s singular style and creativity with Reeves’s haunting and soul-stirring narrative, unlike anything these two genre-bending pioneers have created before, inspired by the world of the BRZRKR comic books.]]> 352 Keanu Reeves 0593446593 Kerry 3 3.26 2024 The Book of Elsewhere
author: Keanu Reeves
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Metamorphosis and Other Stories]]> 7723 The Metamorphosis,� a story that is both harrowing and amusing, and a landmark of modern literature.

Bringing together some of Kafka’s finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the author’s artistry. �The Judgment,� which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and �The Stoker,� which became the first chapter of his novel Amerika, are here included. These two, along with �The Metamorphosis,� form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as “The Sons,� and they collectively present a devastating portrait of the modern family.

Also included are �In the Penal Colony,� a story of a torture machine and its operators and victims, and �A Hunger Artist,� about the absurdity of an artist trying to communicate with a misunderstanding public. Kafka’s lucid, succinct writing chronicles the labyrinthine complexities, the futility-laden horror, and the stifling oppressiveness that permeate his vision of modern life.]]> 224 Franz Kafka 1593080298 Kerry 3 audible, audiobook, german 4.08 1915 The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
author: Franz Kafka
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1915
rating: 3
read at: 2013/12/02
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: audible, audiobook, german
review:
Four stars for "The Metamorphosis," two for the other stories. A few of them (though I can't remember which ones) were intriguing, but most I just didn't get. The last, "The Penal Colony," was mostly a detailed description of an elaborate torture machine, and was difficult to listen to.
]]> <![CDATA[Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read]]> 46061743 FOREWORD BY ALI SMITH

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FRANCESCA WADE

Who better to serve as a guide to great books and their authors than Virginia Woolf?

In the early years of its existence, the Times Literary Supplement published some of the finest writers in English: T. S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper’s defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars.

The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad: all are here, in anonymously published pieces, in which may be glimpsed the thinking behind Woolf’s works of fiction and the enquiring, feminist spirit of A Room of One’s Own.

Here is Woolf the critical essayist, offering, at one moment, a playful hypothesis and, at another, a judgement laid down with the authority of a twentieth-century Dr Johnson. Here is Woolf working out precisely what’s great about Hardy, and how Elizabeth Barrett Browning made books a “substitute for living� because she was “forbidden to scamper on the grass�. Above all, here is Virginia Woolf the reader, whose enthusiasm for great literature remains palpable and inspirational today.]]> 256 Virginia Woolf 000835572X Kerry 0 to-read 3.85 2019 Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Kerry 0 to-read 4.52 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Last Murder at the End of the World]]> 216967150
Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. And then they learn that the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping the fog at bay. If the murder isn't solved within one hundred and seven hours, the fog will smother the island—and everyone on it.

But the security system has also wiped everyone's memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer—and they don't even know it...]]> 354 Stuart Turton 1728254655 Kerry 0 to-read 3.81 2024 The Last Murder at the End of the World
author: Stuart Turton
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Watership Down: The Graphic Novel]]> 60263192
“Every rabbit that stays behind is in great danger. We will welcome any rabbit who joins us.�

Watership Down is a classic tale of survival, hope, courage, and friendship that has delighted and inspired readers around the world for more than fifty years. Masterfully adapted by award-winning author James Sturm and gorgeously illustrated by bestselling artist Joe Sutphin, this spectacular graphic novel will delight old fans and inspire new ones, bringing the joy of Watership Down to a new generation of readers.]]> 384 James Sturm 1984857207 Kerry 0 to-read 4.48 2023 Watership Down: The Graphic Novel
author: James Sturm
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth #2)]]> 28118494
The season of endings grows darker as civilization fades into the long cold night. Alabaster Tenring � madman, world-crusher, savior � has returned with a mission: to train his successor, Essun, and thus seal the fate of the Stillness forever.

It continues with a lost daughter, found by the enemy.

It continues with the obelisks, and an ancient mystery converging on answers at last.

The Stillness is the wall which stands against the flow of tradition, the spark of hope long buried under the thickening ashfall. And it will not be broken.]]> 413 N.K. Jemisin 0316229261 Kerry 3 4.38 2016 The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth #2)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Behavior Matters for Cats and Dogs]]> 212401876 422 Frania Shelley-Grielen Kerry 0 to-read 4.20 Behavior Matters for Cats and Dogs
author: Frania Shelley-Grielen
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Paper Girls (Paper Girls, #4) 35989512
The mind-bending, time-warping adventure from BRIAN K. VAUGHAN and CLIFF CHIANG continues, as intrepid newspaper deliverer Tiffany is launched from the prehistoric past into the year 2000! In this harrowing version of our past, Y2K was even more of a cataclysm than experts feared, and the only person who can save the future is a 12-year-old girl from 1988.

Collects issues 16 through 20!]]> 128 Brian K. Vaughan 1534305106 Kerry 3 4.13 2018 Paper Girls (Paper Girls, #4)
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves: about-a-girl, comics, graphic_novel, scifi, timetravel
review:

]]> The Library at Mount Char 26892110
After all, she was a normal American herself, once.

That was a long time ago, of course—before the time she calls “adoption day,� when she and a dozen other children found themselves being raised by a man they learned to call Father.

Father could do strange things. He could call light from darkness. Sometimes he raised the dead. And when he was disobeyed, the consequences were terrible.

In the years since Father took her in, Carolyn hasn't gotten out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father's ancient Pelapi customs. They've studied the books in his library and learned some of the secrets behind his equally ancient power.

Sometimes, they've wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God.

Now, Father is missing. And if God truly is dead, the only thing that matters is who will inherit his library—and with it, power over all of creation.

As Carolyn gathers the tools she needs for the battle to come, fierce competitors for this prize align against her.

But Carolyn can win. She's sure of it. What she doesn't realize is that her victory may come at an unacceptable price—because in becoming a God, she's forgotten a great deal about being human.]]> 390 Scott Hawkins 0553418629 Kerry 0 to-read 4.06 2015 The Library at Mount Char
author: Scott Hawkins
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> ShĹŤgun (Asian Saga, #1) 57660223
Powerful and engrossing, capturing both the rich pageantry and stark realities of life in feudal Japan, ShĹŤgun is a critically acclaimed powerhouse of a book. Heart-stopping, edge-of-your-seat action melds seamlessly with intricate historical detail and raw human emotion. Endlessly compelling, this sweeping saga captivated the world to become not only one of the best-selling novels of all time but also one of the highest-rated television miniseries, as well as inspiring a nationwide surge of interest in the culture of Japan. Shakespearean in both scope and depth, ShĹŤgun is, as the New York Times put it, "...not only something you read--you live it." Provocative, absorbing, and endlessly fascinating, there is only one: ShĹŤgun.]]> 1210 James Clavell 0440178002 Kerry 4 historical, japan 4.46 1975 ShĹŤgun (Asian Saga, #1)
author: James Clavell
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: historical, japan
review:

]]> Flawless Girls 180634000
Younger sister Isla is back home within a day. She refuses to become one of the eerily sweet Alarie girls in their prim white dresses. Older sister Renata stays. When she returns months later, she’s unfailingly pleasant, unnervingly polite, and, Isla discovers, possibly murderous. And the same night she returns home, she vanishes.

As their grandmother uses every connection she has to find Renata, Isla re-enrolls, intent on finding out what happened to her sister. But the Alarie House is as exacting as it is opulent. It won’t give up its secrets easily, and neither will a mysterious, conniving girl who’s either controlling the house, or carrying out its deadly orders.

Tautly written, tense, and evocative, this is a stunning YA novel by award-winning and critically acclaimed author Anna-Marie McLemore.]]> 283 Anna-Marie McLemore 1250869625 Kerry 2 3.10 2024 Flawless Girls
author: Anna-Marie McLemore
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.10
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/10/14
shelves:
review:

]]> The Glass Hotel 45754981 From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events–a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients� accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.]]> 307 Emily St. John Mandel 0525521143 Kerry 2 3.66 2020 The Glass Hotel
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/10/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions]]> 59808205 Number One Is Walking is Steve Martin’s cinematic legacy―an illustrated memoir of his legendary acting career, with stories from his most popular films and artwork by New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss.

Steve Martin has never written about his career in the movies before. In Number One Is Walking, he shares anecdotes from the sets of his beloved films�Father of the Bride, Roxanne, The Jerk, Three Amigos, and many more―bringing readers directly into his world. He shares charming tales of antics, moments of inspiration, and exploits with the likes of Paul McCartney, Diane Keaton, Harrison Ford, and Chevy Chase. Martin details his forty years in the movie biz, as well as his stand-up comedy, banjo playing, writing, and cartooning, all with his unparalleled wit.

With gorgeously illustrated cartoons and single-panel “diversions� in Steve and Harry’s signature style, Number One Is Walking is full of the everyday moments that make up a movie star’s life, capturing Steve Martin’s singular humor and acclaimed career in film. The perfect gift from the team who brought you the #1 New York Times bestseller A Wealth of Pigeons.]]> 256 Steve Martin 1250815290 Kerry 2 iownthis 3.72 2022 Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions
author: Steve Martin
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: iownthis
review:

]]> Berezina 24683905 199 Sylvain Tesson 2352210895 Kerry 0 to-read 3.89 2015 Berezina
author: Sylvain Tesson
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World]]> 128747007
Emperor of Rome is not your usual chronological account of Roman rulers, such as the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Beard asks bigger questions: What power did emperors actually have? Was the Roman palace really so bloodstained? She tracks down the emperor at home, at the races, on his travels, even on his way to heaven. She introduces his wives and lovers, rivals and slaves, court jesters and soldiers―and the ordinary people who pressed begging letters into his hands.

Emperor of Rome goes directly to the heart of Roman (and our own) fantasies about what it was to be Roman, offering an account of Roman history as it has never been presented before. 160 images; 16-page color insert]]> 493 Mary Beard 0871404222 Kerry 0 to-read 4.07 2023 Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World
author: Mary Beard
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Shock Induction 207299641 From the bestselling author of Fight Club comes a dark, satirical parable about a string of mysterious high school disappearances, the seedy underbellies of billionaires, and the tough choices we make in the face of an uncertain future. In Shock Induction, the best and brightest students at a seemingly reputable high school are disappearing. Every day it seems another overachiever is lost to an apparent suicide. But something far more sinister is lurking beneath the surface. These kids have been under surveillance since birth, monitored and measured by an online service called “Greener Pastures.� It’s here, in Greener Pastures, that billionaires observe and recruit the next generation of talent. The highest test scores, the best grades, and the most niche extracurriculars just might land these teenagers an enticing offer at auction. A couple billion dollars in exchange for the remainder of your life and intellectual labor sounds like a pretty fair deal—doesn’t it? In a high school only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine, students must choose between the risk of following their dreams or the security of money and a lifetime of servitude to the world’s wealthiest and most elite—but how much of a choice do they truly have?]]> 240 Chuck Palahniuk 1668021447 Kerry 0 to-read 3.15 2024 Shock Induction
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Balanced Beekeeping I: Building a Top Bar Hive]]> 20459069 97 Philip Chandler 1291620397 Kerry 4 how-to, iownthis, bees
He has some mind-blowing ideas about ventilation (don't need it!) and natural pest control (let other little buggies grow in the hive, they'll take care of it!) that are wildly different from your standard common advice re: Langstroth hives. It'll be interesting to try some new things and see how it goes!

Oh and I should note that only the last chapter or so is actually legitimately, like, instructions for building the hive. The preceding chapters describe WHY the hive is designed the way it is and why he made some changes to the traditional African design. And it makes a lot of sense. Sometimes in the early chapters I was like "wait what is he talking about ??" and "wait but how do you . . . " but I was patient and all my questions were answered eventually.]]> 4.19 2013 Balanced Beekeeping I: Building a Top Bar Hive
author: Philip Chandler
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: how-to, iownthis, bees
review:
This was good, and quite convincing. I really do want to try to build and then use a top bar hive. The information in here is straightforward and he doesn't repeat himself a bunch of times in order to pad out the page count. It is short, but that's good, because there's a part II (though I don't own that one yet).

He has some mind-blowing ideas about ventilation (don't need it!) and natural pest control (let other little buggies grow in the hive, they'll take care of it!) that are wildly different from your standard common advice re: Langstroth hives. It'll be interesting to try some new things and see how it goes!

Oh and I should note that only the last chapter or so is actually legitimately, like, instructions for building the hive. The preceding chapters describe WHY the hive is designed the way it is and why he made some changes to the traditional African design. And it makes a lot of sense. Sometimes in the early chapters I was like "wait what is he talking about ??" and "wait but how do you . . . " but I was patient and all my questions were answered eventually.
]]> <![CDATA[The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories]]> 23066290
This collection also includes the stories "The Giant Wistaria", "According to Solomon", "The Boys and the Butter", "Her Housekeeper", "Martha's Mother", "A Middle-Sized Artist", "An Offender", "When I Was a Witch", "The Cottagette", "Making a Living", and "Mr. Robert Grey Sr."

Public Domain (P)2011 Tantor]]> 5 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Kerry 4 3.89 The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.89
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2014/08/28
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: about-a-woman, audible, audiobook, female-author, short_fiction
review:

]]> Paradise 1399975 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Toni Morrison's Paradise takes place in the tiny farming community of Ruby, Oklahoma, which its residents proudly proclaim "the one all-black town worth the pain." Settled by nine African American clans during the 1940s, the town represents a small miracle of self-reliance and community spirit. Readers might be forgiven, in fact, for assuming that Morrison's title refers to Ruby itself, which even during the 1970s retains an atmosphere of neighborliness and small-town virtue. Yet Paradises are not so easily gained. As we soon discover, Ruby is fissured by ancestral feuds and financial squabbles, not to mention the political ferment of the era, which has managed to pierce the town's pious isolation. In the view of its leading citizens, these troubles call for a scapegoat. And one readily exists: the Convent, an abandoned mansion not far from town--or, more precisely, the four women who occupy it, and whose unattached and unconventional status makes them the perfect targets for patriarchal ire. ("Before those heifers came to town," the men complain, "this was a peaceable kingdom.") One July morning, then, an armed posse sets out from Ruby for a round of ethical cleansing.

Paradise actually begins with the arrival of these vigilantes, only to launch into an intricate series of flashbacks and interlaced stories. The cast is large--indeed, it seems as though we must have met all 360 members of Ruby's populace--and Morrison knows how to imprint even the minor players on our brains. Even more amazing, though, are the full-length portraits she draws of the four Convent dwellers and their executioners: rich, rounded, and almost painful in their intimacy. This richness--of language and, ultimately, of human understanding--combats the aura of saintliness that can occasionally mar Morrison's fiction. It also makes for a spectacular piece of storytelling, in which such biblical concepts as redemption and divine love are no postmodern playthings but matters of life and (in the very first sentence, alas) death.

]]> 575 Toni Morrison 0679433740 Kerry 0 to-read 3.61 1997 Paradise
author: Toni Morrison
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Dust Tracks on a Road 52432397 "Told in gutsy language...her story is an encouraging and enjoyable one for any member of the human race." � N.Y. Review of Books.

First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston's candid, funny, bold and poignant autobiography, an imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. As compelling as her acclaimed fiction, Hurston's very personal literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life–public and private–of an extraordinary artist, anthropologist, chronicler, and champion of the black experience in America. Full of the wit and wisdom of a proud, spirited woman who started off low and climbed hight, Dust Tracks on a Road is a rare treasure from one of literature's most cherished voices.]]> 12 Zora Neale Hurston Kerry 0
What can I say, I never listen to audiobooks anymore (I'd fall too far behind on my very important podcast-listening) and as always, I struggle with non-fiction. If I'm honest, I'm unlikely to come back to this one.]]> 4.00 1942 Dust Tracks on a Road
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1942
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: abandoned, about-a-girl, about-a-woman, african-american, audible, audiobook, autobiography, female-author
review:
Started listening 2/6/21, last listened 6/21/21, ~43% complete

What can I say, I never listen to audiobooks anymore (I'd fall too far behind on my very important podcast-listening) and as always, I struggle with non-fiction. If I'm honest, I'm unlikely to come back to this one.
]]> Orlando 46133 An alternative cover edition exists here.

In her most exuberant, most fanciful novel, Woolf has created a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, Orlando is a young nobleman at the beginning of the story-and a modern woman three centuries later.
The source of a critically acclaimed 1993 feature film directed by Sally Potter]]> 333 Virginia Woolf Kerry 0
This was a Book Club book, but first I wasn't going to make it to that particular meeting (I had intended to read the book anyway) and then Book Club fizzled out.

I love Virginia Woolf's other work that I've read, like Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own (I think about the latter a LOT), but this one was a bit different and very dry, I thought. But it's still by my bed, I'm still pretending I'll get back to it someday.

(This "review" written 9/10/24)]]> 3.88 1928 Orlando
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1928
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: 11booksclub, female-author, iownthis, temporarily_on_hold
review:
Started 1/3/22, last read 3/1/22, got through ~40% of it

This was a Book Club book, but first I wasn't going to make it to that particular meeting (I had intended to read the book anyway) and then Book Club fizzled out.

I love Virginia Woolf's other work that I've read, like Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own (I think about the latter a LOT), but this one was a bit different and very dry, I thought. But it's still by my bed, I'm still pretending I'll get back to it someday.

(This "review" written 9/10/24)
]]> How to Be an Antiracist 40265832 How to be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.

In this book, Kendi weaves together an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society.]]> 305 Ibram X. Kendi 0525509283 Kerry 0
Dang, I got through more than 64% of this one! I should pick it up back up again . . . as always, I struggle to finish non-fiction books. Sorry!]]> 4.36 2019 How to Be an Antiracist
author: Ibram X. Kendi
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: abandoned, african-american, iownthis, non-fiction
review:
Started 6/21/21, last read 6/29/21

Dang, I got through more than 64% of this one! I should pick it up back up again . . . as always, I struggle to finish non-fiction books. Sorry!
]]> <![CDATA[So You Want to Talk About Race]]> 41717572 In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America

Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy--from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans--has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair--and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?

In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to "model minorities" in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.]]> 256 Ijeoma Oluo 1580058825 Kerry 0
I want to be a good yt person and read this but I struggle to finish non-fiction and I didn't succeed in finishing this. I feel guilty about it! I still own it, maybe I'll come back to it.

I do follow Ijeoma Oluo on social media now, I don't always love what she says but we generally agree.]]> 4.56 2018 So You Want to Talk About Race
author: Ijeoma Oluo
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: iownthis, abandoned, female-author, non-fiction, african-american
review:
Started reading 2/9/21, last read 2/25/21

I want to be a good yt person and read this but I struggle to finish non-fiction and I didn't succeed in finishing this. I feel guilty about it! I still own it, maybe I'll come back to it.

I do follow Ijeoma Oluo on social media now, I don't always love what she says but we generally agree.
]]> <![CDATA[Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink]]> 28504447 Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink is the long-awaited memoir from Elvis Costello, one of rock and roll's most iconic stars.

Born Declan Patrick MacManus, Elvis Costello was raised in London and Liverpool, grandson of a trumpet player on the White Star Line and son of a jazz musician who became a successful radio dance band vocalist. Costello went into the family business and had taken the popular music world by storm before he was twenty-four.

Costello continues to add to one of the most intriguing and extensive songbooks of the day. His performances have taken him from a cardboard guitar in his front room to fronting a rock and roll band on your television screen and performing in the world's greatest concert halls in a wild variety of company. Unfaithful Music describes how Costello's career has somehow endured for almost four decades through a combination of dumb luck and animal cunning, even managing the occasional absurd episode of pop stardom.

This memoir, written with the same inimitable touch as his lyrics, and including dozens of images from his personal archive, offers his unique view of his unlikely and sometimes comical rise to international success, with diversions through the previously undocumented emotional foundations of some of his best known songs and the hits of tomorrow. The book contains many stories and observations about his renowned co-writers and co-conspirators, though Costello also pauses along the way for considerations on the less appealing side of infamy.

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is destined to be a classic, idiosyncratic memoir of a singular man.]]> 688 Elvis Costello 0399185763 Kerry 0
Started 3/3/24, last read 3/16/24]]> 3.59 2015 Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
author: Elvis Costello
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: temporarily_on_hold, autobiography, music
review:
I'm going to have to put this on hold for a bit. It's LONG and intimidating and not written . . . linearly? But I will try to get back to it, I swear.

Started 3/3/24, last read 3/16/24
]]> The Planetary Omnibus 17884045 Planetary has been hailed as a timeless story that turned modern superhero conventions on their heads.
Written by Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan) and with stunning art by John Cassaday (Astonishing X-Men), this critically acclaimed, landmark series took a look at the inter-dimensional peace-keeping force known as Planetary.
The trio on the ground includes Elijah Snow, a hundred-year-old man, Jakita Wagner, an extremely powerful woman, and The Drummer, a man with the ability to communicate with machines. Tasked with tracking down evidence of super-human activity, these mystery archaeologists uncover unknown paranormal secrets and histories, such as a World War II supercomputer that can access other universes, a ghostly spirit of vengeance, and a lost island of dying monsters.

Collecting: Planetary 1-27, Preview; Planetary/Authority: Ruling the World; Planetary/JLA: Terra Occulta; Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth]]> 825 Warren Ellis 1401242383 Kerry 0 to-read 4.45 2011 The Planetary Omnibus
author: Warren Ellis
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned]]> 200133260
In the wake of World War II, with America ascendant and the Soviet Union devastated by the conflict, the Space Race should have been over before it started. But the underdog Soviets scored a series of victories--starting with the 1957 launch of Sputnik and continuing in the years following--that seemed to achieve the impossible. It was proof, it seemed, that the USSR had manpower and collective will that went beyond America's material advantages. They had asserted themselves as a world power.

But in  The Wrong Stuff , John Strausbaugh tells a different story. These achievements were amazing, yes, but they were also PR victories as much as scientific ones. The world saw a Potemkin spaceport; the internal facts were much sloppier, less impressive, more dysfunctional. The Soviet supply chain was a disaster, and many of its machines barely worked. The cosmonauts aboard its iconic launch of the Vostok 1 rocket had to go on a special diet, and take off their space suits, just to fit inside without causing a failure. Soviet scientists, under intense government pressure, had essentially made their rocket out of spit and band aids, and hurried to hide their work as soon as their worldwide demonstration was complete.

With a witty eye for detail and a gift for storytelling, John Strausbaugh takes us behind the Iron Curtain, and shows just how little there was to find there.
Ěý±Ő±Ő> 272 John Strausbaugh 1541703340 Kerry 0 to-read 3.95 The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned
author: John Strausbaugh
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.95
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The City and Its Uncertain Walls]]> 209192695 From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.]]> 449 Haruki Murakami 0593801970 Kerry 0 to-read 3.73 2023 The City and Its Uncertain Walls
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Beautyland 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

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

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

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Kerry 0 to-read 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere]]> 207294745 A brutally honest and hilariously frenetic memoir about show business, mental health, and the comfort of rigid belief systems—from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, to Suzuki violin training, to Richard Simmons, to 12-step programs.

Maria Bamford is a comedian’s comedian (an outsider among outsiders) and has forever fought to find a place to belong. From struggling with an eating disorder as a child of the 1980s, to navigating a career in the arts (and medical debt and psychiatric institutionalization), she has tried just about every method possible to not only be a part of the world, but to want to be a part of it.

In Bamford’s signature voice, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, brings us on a quest to participate in something. With sincerity and transparency, she recounts every anonymous fellowship she has joined (including but not limited to: Debtors Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous), every hypomanic episode (from worrying about selling out under capitalism to enforcing union rules on her Netflix TV show set to protect her health), and every easy 1-to-3-step recipe for fudge in between.

Singular and inimitable, Bamford’s memoir explores what it means to keep going, and to be a member of society (or any group she’s invited to) despite not being very good at it. In turn, she hopes to transform isolating experiences into comedy that will make you feel less alone (without turning into a cult following).]]> 288 Maria Bamford 1982168579 Kerry 0 to-read 3.44 2023 Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere
author: Maria Bamford
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The River 40216324 The story of two college friends on a wilderness canoe trip—of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence

Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing.

When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey.

When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman?]]> 253 Peter Heller 0525521879 Kerry 0 to-read 3.78 2019 The River
author: Peter Heller
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)]]> 34314712 THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS FOR THE LAST TIME.

IT STARTS WITH THE GREAT RED RIFT
across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun.

IT STARTS WITH DEATH,
with a murdered son and a missing daughter.

IT STARTS WITH BETRAYAL
and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.

This is the Stillness, a land familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.]]> 449 N.K. Jemisin 0316229296 Kerry 3 Middlemarch), but still! Anyway.)

I read it really quickly, it is exciting and interesting and I like the world building. It's a bit darker than I like things to be these days -- it ends on a pretty grim note -- but that's okay. I'm looking forward to reading the next in the trilogy, though I'll have to have good luck at a used bookstore, as my library doesn't have it (womp womp). Three point five stars.

[spoilers removed]]]> 4.36 2015 The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/05
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves: scifi, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, female-author, about-a-woman, about-a-girl, alternate_earth, iownthis
review:
It's been a while since I read a book like this -- a nice modern weird fantasy/scifi book. (I just checked, and every novel I've read so far in 2024 was published earlier than 1975. There are only five of them (four science fiction and one Middlemarch), but still! Anyway.)

I read it really quickly, it is exciting and interesting and I like the world building. It's a bit darker than I like things to be these days -- it ends on a pretty grim note -- but that's okay. I'm looking forward to reading the next in the trilogy, though I'll have to have good luck at a used bookstore, as my library doesn't have it (womp womp). Three point five stars.

[spoilers removed]
]]> In Cold Blood 15799209 Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time.

From the Modern Library's new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany's and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories.

Truman Capote's masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the "new journalism." Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. "I thought he was a very nice gentleman," he says of Herb Clutter. "Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat." Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers' flight, Capote's account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.]]> 396 Truman Capote 0812994388 Kerry 0 to-read 4.19 1966 In Cold Blood
author: Truman Capote
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain]]> 327261 399 Charles Dickens 0192545140 Kerry 3 fromthelibrary, abandoned A Christmas Carol. I am glad I read that one, though. Although it's such a short "book" (I think it actually qualifies as a novella) that pretty much everything in it is familiar -- all the little details, for example Marley holding his jaw together with a cloth -- from all the various adaptations. It's not like Dune or something where everything is different and you can revel in the differences.

Anyway it was okay. It's funny how he doesn't ever mention Jesus. Religion is not really important in Dickens' Christmas. I saw someone say on the internet the other day that Dickens is the real reason for the season -- we celebrate the way we do because of this story. Is that true? I am not sure! I can see it, though.]]> 3.94 1848 Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
author: Charles Dickens
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1848
rating: 3
read at: 2014/12/18
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: fromthelibrary, abandoned
review:
I'm not sure how to rate this since I only read the first of four (five?) stories, A Christmas Carol. I am glad I read that one, though. Although it's such a short "book" (I think it actually qualifies as a novella) that pretty much everything in it is familiar -- all the little details, for example Marley holding his jaw together with a cloth -- from all the various adaptations. It's not like Dune or something where everything is different and you can revel in the differences.

Anyway it was okay. It's funny how he doesn't ever mention Jesus. Religion is not really important in Dickens' Christmas. I saw someone say on the internet the other day that Dickens is the real reason for the season -- we celebrate the way we do because of this story. Is that true? I am not sure! I can see it, though.
]]> People Hacker 61271741 'From an early age, locked doors, high fences and the secrets kept by businesses, buildings and people, fascinated me. I wanted to find out what they wanted to hide away.'

A burglar for hire, con-artist and expert in deception and physical infiltration � Jenny Radcliffe is a professional people hacker. After being schooled in the art of breaking and entering by her family, she became an expert social engineer, doing an insider’s job to exploit the flaws and weaknesses in top-grade security operations.

In People Hacker, Jenny reveals how she uses her inimitable blend of psychology, stagecraft and charm to gain access to top-grade private and commercial properties. From the back streets of Liverpool to the City of London's Square Mile, across rooftops, cellars and staircases in Europe to the mansions of gangsters in the Far East, Jenny has risked it all to earn the title â€People Hackerâ€�.

This is Jenny insider’s account of how her working-class upbringing, northern sense of humour and femininity in a male-dominated industry all helped her to become one of the most sought-after social engineers in the world. Told in her trademark colourful style, and packed full of stories of the crazy and dangerous situations she has found herself in along the way, Jenny shines a light on the security mistakes we all make â€� and how to avoid them. Ěý±Ő±Ő> Jenny Radcliffe 1398522589 Kerry 0 to-read 3.92 People Hacker
author: Jenny Radcliffe
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery]]> 202102017 “If you are at all curious about the brain or the surgeons who operate on it, Gray Matters is a must read and Dr. Theodore Schwartz is the perfect guide, a master brain surgeon and superbly talented writer. I have not read a better biography of our shared profession, and in Schwartz's talented hands, the most enigmatic 3 1/2 pounds of tissue in the known universe comes to light in remarkable and revelatory ways.�
—Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, and New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age

A popular biography of brain surgery, by one of its preeminent practitioners

We’ve all heard the phrase “it’s not brain surgery.� But what exactly is brain surgery? It’s a profession that is barely a hundred years old and profoundly connects two human beings, but few know how it works, or its history. How did early neurosurgeons come to understand the human brain—an extraordinarily complex organ that controls everything we do, and yet at only three pounds is so fragile? And how did this incredibly challenging and lifesaving specialty emerge?

In this warm, rigorous, and deeply insightful book, Dr. Theodore H. Schwartz explores what it’s like to hold the scalpel, wield the drill, extract a tumor, fix a bullet hole, and remove a blood clot—when every second can mean life or death. Drawing from the author’s own cases, plus media, sports, and government archives, this seminal work delves into all the brain-related topics that have long-consumed public curiosity, like what really happened to JFK, President Biden’s brain surgery, and the NFL’s management of CTE. Dr. Schwartz also surveys the field’s latest incredible advances and discusses the philosophical questions of the unity of the self and the existence of free will.

A neurosurgeon as well as a professor of neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medical Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital, one of the busiest and most highly ranked neurosurgery centers in the world, Dr. Schwartz tells this story like no one else could. Told through anecdote and clear explanation, this is the ultimate cultural and scientific history of a literally mind-blowing human endeavor, one that cuts to the core of who we are.]]> 512 Theodore H. Schwartz 0593474104 Kerry 0 to-read 4.34 Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery
author: Theodore H. Schwartz
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.34
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction]]> 429983 250 Ursula K. Le Guin 0060168358 Kerry 0 to-read 4.25 1979 The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> We Should All Be Feminists 23602569 Americanah, offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century, one rooted in inclusion and awareness. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman now—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.]]> 52 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 110191176X Kerry 0 to-read 4.46 2012 We Should All Be Feminists
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King #1-5)]]> 23253964
The Sword in the Stone
The Witch in the Wood
The Ill-Made Knight
The Candle in the Wind
The Book of Merlyn

Exquisite comedy offsets the tradegy of Arthur’s personal doom as White brings to life the major British epic of all time with brilliance, grandeur, warmth and charm.]]> 34 T.H. White Kerry 4 3.67 The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King #1-5)
author: T.H. White
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.67
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2016/07/10
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves: audible, audiobook, fantasy, magic, messiah_complex
review:

]]> The Elephant Whisperer 22453645
As Lawrence risked his life to create a bond with the troubled elephants and persuade them to stay on his reserve, he came to realize what a special family they were, from the wise matriarch Nana, who guided the herd, to her warrior sister Frankie, always ready to see off any threat, and their children who fought so hard to survive.

With unforgettable characters and exotic wildlife, this is an enthralling book that will appeal to animal lovers and adventurous souls everywhere.]]> 11 Lawrence Anthony Kerry 0 4.40 2009 The Elephant Whisperer
author: Lawrence Anthony
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves: audible, audiobook, africa, non-fiction, abandoned
review:

]]> The Ballad of Black Tom 26975675 One of NPR's Best Books of 2016, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, the British Fantasy Award, the This is Horror Award for Novella of the Year, and a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards

People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.

Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.

A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?]]> 154 Victor LaValle 0765386615 Kerry 2 11booksclub 4.06 2016 The Ballad of Black Tom
author: Victor LaValle
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2016/05/20
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves: 11booksclub
review:

]]> The Dispossessed 894464
In her most ambitious and prophetic novel to date, Ursula K. Le Guin has produced a stunning tour de force � the spellbinding story of Shevek, a brilliant physicist who single-handedly attemps to re-unite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust.

Anarres, Shevek's homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic utopian civilization; Urras, the mother planet, is a world very similar to Earth, with its warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Shevek risks everything in a courageous visit to Urras � to learn, to teach, to share. But his gift becomes a threat... and in the profound conflict which ensues, Shevek must re-examine his philosophy of life.

Cover illustration by Alex Ebel

]]> 311 Ursula K. Le Guin 0380003821 Kerry 5 4.20 1974 The Dispossessed
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/12
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: iownthis, favorites, female-author, scifi, utopia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder]]> 199344846
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are.

What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.

Knife is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.]]> 209 Salman Rushdie 0593730240 Kerry 0 to-read 3.99 2024 Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Comfort of Ghosts (Maisie Dobbs, #18)]]> 199703402
The Comfort of Ghosts completes Jacqueline Winspear’s ground-breaking and internationally bestselling series.

“An outstanding historical series.”—The New York Times

“Winspear is a brilliant writer, mixing the history and the mystery with the psychology of criminals and victims.”—The Historical Novel Society

Psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs unravels a profound mystery from her past in a war-torn nation grappling with its future.

London, 1945: Four adolescent orphans with a dark wartime history are squatting in a vacant Belgravia mansion—the owners having fled London under heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Psychologist and Investigator Maisie Dobbs visits the mansion on behalf of the owners and discovers that a demobilized soldier, gravely ill and reeling from his experiences overseas, has taken shelter with the group.

Maisie’s quest to bring comfort to the youngsters and the ailing soldier brings to light a decades-old mystery concerning Maisie’s first husband, James Compton, who was killed while piloting an experimental fighter aircraft. As Maisie unravels the threads of her dead husband’s life, she is forced to examine her own painful past and question beliefs she has always accepted as true.

The award-winning Maisie Dobbs series has garnered hundreds of thousands of followers, readers drawn to a woman who is of her time, yet familiar in ours—and who inspires with her resilience and capacity for endurance. This final assignment of her own choosing not only opens a new future for Maisie and her family, but serves as a fascinating portrayal of the challenges facing the people of Britain at the close of the Second World War.]]> 342 Jacqueline Winspear 1641296062 Kerry 0 to-read 4.26 2024 The Comfort of Ghosts (Maisie Dobbs, #18)
author: Jacqueline Winspear
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Prophet Song 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what � or who � is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Kerry 0 to-read 4.03 2023 Prophet Song
author: Paul Lynch
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Look to Windward (Culture, #7)]]> 12016
Also journeying to Masaq' is Major Quilan, an emissary from the war-ravaged world of Chel. In the aftermath of the conflict that split his world apart, most believe he has come to Masaq' to bring home Chel's most brilliant star & self-exiled dissident, the honored Composer Ziller. Ziller claims he will do anything to avoid a meeting with Quilan, who he suspects has come to murder him. But the Major's true assignment will have far greater consequences than the death of a mere political dissident, as part of a conspiracy more ambitious than even he can know--a mission his superiors have buried so deeply in his mind that even he can't remember it.

Hailed by SFX magazine as "an excellent hopping-on point if you've never read a Banks SF novel before," Look to Windward is an awe-inspiring immersion into the wildly original, vividly realized civilization Banks calls the Culture.]]> 496 Iain M. Banks 0743421922 Kerry 0 to-read 4.20 2000 Look to Windward (Culture, #7)
author: Iain M. Banks
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> If Beale Street Could Talk 206571250 224 James Baldwin 0593688988 Kerry 0 to-read 4.40 1974 If Beale Street Could Talk
author: James Baldwin
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Gilgamesh 25305121
In the ancient city of Uruk, the tyrannical King Gilgamesh tramples citizens "like a wild bull". The gods send an untamed man named Enkidu to control the ruthless king, but after fighting, Enkidu and Gilgamesh become great friends and embark on a series of adventures. They kill fearsome creatures before Enkidu succumbs to disease, leaving Gilgamesh despondent and alone. Eventually, Gilgamesh moves forward, and his quest becomes a soul-searching journey of self-discovery.

Mitchell's treatment of this extraordinary work is the finest yet, surpassing previous versions in its preservation of the wisdom and beauty of the original.]]> Anonymous Kerry 5 audible, audiobook 4.00 -1200 Gilgamesh
author: Anonymous
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.00
book published: -1200
rating: 5
read at: 2014/07/31
date added: 2024/06/16
shelves: audible, audiobook
review:

]]> The Silmarillion 77687 Tolkien considered THE SILMARILLION his most important work, and, though it was published last and posthumously, this great collection of tales and legends clearly sets the stage for all his other writing. The story of the creation of the world and of the the First Age, this is the ancient drama to which the characters in THE LORD OF THE RINGS look back and in whose events some of them, such as Elrond and Galadriel, took part. The three Silmarils were jewels created by Feanor, most gifted of the Elves. Within them was imprisoned the Light of the Two Trees of Valinor before the Trees themselves were destroyed by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. Thereafter, the unsullied Light of Valinor lived on only in the Silmarils, but they were seized by Morgoth and set in his crown, which was guarded in the impenetrable fortress of Angband in the north of Middle-earth. THE SILMARILLION is the history of the rebellion of Feanor and his kindred against the gods, their exile from Valinor and return to Middle-earth, and their war, hopeless despite all their heroism, against the great Enemy.
This second edition features a letter written by J.R.R. Tolkien describing his intentions for the book, which serves as a brilliant exposition of his conception of the earlier Ages of Middle-earth.]]> 458 J.R.R. Tolkien Kerry 0 temporarily_on_hold 3.86 1977 The Silmarillion
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: temporarily_on_hold
review:
I tried to read this for a second time in 2023 (after reading it the first time in 2013/14) but it's sloooow going so when I had to stop to read something else, I lost momentum. I'll probably pick it up again someday.
]]> <![CDATA[Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond]]> 18432560 Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond is a groundbreaking speculative fiction anthology that showcases the work from some of the most talented writers inside and outside speculative fiction across the globe—including Junot Diaz, Victor LaValle, Lauren Beukes, N. K. Jemisin, Rabih Alameddine, S. P. Somtow, and more. These authors have earned such literary honors as the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker, among others.]]> 366 Bill Campbell 0989141144 Kerry 0 3.97 2013 Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond
author: Bill Campbell
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: abandoned, scifi, short_fiction, african-american, iownthis
review:
I read the first few stories in this and was actually pretty disappointed, so I put it down and never picked it up again. Maybe I'll try again some day?
]]> Saga, Volume 11 29237226
Collects SAGA #61-66]]> 153 Brian K. Vaughan 1534345930 Kerry 4 about-a-girl, comics, war 4.25 2023 Saga, Volume 11
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/30
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: about-a-girl, comics, war
review:
It's hard to review these, I read them so fast. And there are so many characters at this point, he adds two every time he kills off one, it seems like. I liked it I guess? The art still rules. Hazel isn't annoying so that's good I guess. Petrichor (sp?) might be my favorite at this time. Did she die in this one? I can't remember already and it's only been twelve days since I finished it. People are always getting shot at the end of an issue and then it's a tossup as to whether it's a mortal wound or not.
]]> <![CDATA[9th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F]]> 6384053
Bernie the Faust (1963) by Williamm Tenn (novelette )
Fortress Ship (1963) by Fred Saberhagen [Berserker] (short story)
Mr. Waterman (1961) by Peter Redgrove (short story)
Mrs. Pigafetta Swims Well (1963) by Reginald Bretnor (short story)
Tree Trunks (1963) by John Gallagher (cartoon)
They Don't Make Life Like They Used To (1963) by Alfred Bester (novelette)
The Great Nebraska Sea (1963) by Allan Danzig (short story)
The Faces Outside (1963) by Bruce McAllister (short story)
A Slight Case of Limbo (1963) by Lloyd Biggle Jr (short story)
237 Talking Statues Etc. (1963) by Fritz Leiber (short story)
The Jazz Machine (1962) by Richard Matheson (poem)
Mourning Song (1963) by Charles Beaumont (short story)
The Jewbird (1963) by Bernard Malamud (short story)
On the 4th Planet (1963) by J.F. Bone (short story)
Poppa Needs Shorts (1964) by Walt Richmond and Leigh Richmond (short story)
Double Standard (1963) by Fredric Brown (short story)
Interview (1963) by Frank A. Javor (short story)
8 O'Clock in the Morning (1963) by Ray Nelson (short story)
Where Is Everybody? (1963) by Ben Bova (essay)
The Earth Dwellers (1963) by André Maurois (novelette)
The Nobel Prize Winners (1963) by W.J.J. Gordon (short story)
Hot Planet (1963) by Hal Clement (short story)
Confessions of the First Number '63 by Cliff Owsley (short story)
The Ming Vase '63 by E.C. Tubb (short story)
A Bargain with Cashel (1963) by Gerald Kersh (short story)
Drunkboat (1963) by Cordwainer Smith [Instrumentality] (novelette)
Summation: SF 1963 (1964) by Judith Merril (essay)
Books (1964) by Anthony Boucher (essay)
Honorable Mentions (1964) by Judith Merril (essay)]]> 384 Judith Merril 0240097750 Kerry 4
When you read classic science fiction, of course you have to make some allowances. But I am not willing to make too many! I famously have little patience for bullshit sexist tropes, etc, no matter how foundational the book. And I don't know if it's because the editor of this collection is a woman or what, but with these stories I can just READ them. I don't have to explain away too many details in my head.

I'm pretty sure I finished this collection in the fall of 2021, even if I'm just getting around to writing this review in June 2024. A couple of years ago I was in a used bookstore on vacation that had an impressive science fiction section, and I was thrilled to find a BUNCH of these from various years, so I snagged a few. I couldn't be happier with them. Love you, Judith Merril!!]]> 3.79 1964 9th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F
author: Judith Merril
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1964
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/05
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: iownthis, scifi, short_fiction
review:
This is an amazing collection. I really like classic scifi, and this is a wonderful contemporary collection of short stories from 1965.

When you read classic science fiction, of course you have to make some allowances. But I am not willing to make too many! I famously have little patience for bullshit sexist tropes, etc, no matter how foundational the book. And I don't know if it's because the editor of this collection is a woman or what, but with these stories I can just READ them. I don't have to explain away too many details in my head.

I'm pretty sure I finished this collection in the fall of 2021, even if I'm just getting around to writing this review in June 2024. A couple of years ago I was in a used bookstore on vacation that had an impressive science fiction section, and I was thrilled to find a BUNCH of these from various years, so I snagged a few. I couldn't be happier with them. Love you, Judith Merril!!
]]> <![CDATA[On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals]]> 396927
With On Talking Terms With Dogs you can learn to recognize these signals and use them yourself to interact with your dog.

Norwegian dog trainer and behaviorist Turid Rugaas has made it her life work to study canine social interaction. She coined the phrase calming signals to describe the social skills, sometimes referred to as body language, that dogs use to avoid conflict, invite play, and communicate a wide range of information to other dogs and also humans.

Every dog needs his human to read this book!]]> 79 Turid Rugaas 1929242360 Kerry 4 second review, June 2024: An interesting little book! Mostly it's like, yawn, and turn to the side. That's how you calm a dog, and that's how they try to calm you if they don't like what's going on.

I actually pulled this book out because Myrtle snaps her little jaws at us sometimes and I was wondering what that meant. I think she mostly does it when we're not facing her so I guess she just wants to get our attention? She also barks at us when her dinner is late which I find hilarious.

first review, June 2014: This was interesting. It made me feel badly about how we train Indiana, a little bit. I think that she is actually worse at interacting with other dogs than when we first got her, and I think that that is our fault: now that we know she has the capacity to get all hot & bothered, we tense up when another dog comes around, and proactively try to discipline her before she actually does something wrong. I'm trying to untrain myself and deal with the situation in other ways, because of reading this book.

This book is really simplistic in a lot of ways, and not all that practical for day-to-day life (as opposed to controlled interactions.) But I still think it will be really helpful.

Also I totally want to look like the author when I grow up. Crazy long gray hair, Scandinavian sweaters. Talking to dogs. You know.]]> 4.32 2005 On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals
author: Turid Rugaas
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/11
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: dogs, non-fiction, how-to, female-author
review:
second review, June 2024: An interesting little book! Mostly it's like, yawn, and turn to the side. That's how you calm a dog, and that's how they try to calm you if they don't like what's going on.

I actually pulled this book out because Myrtle snaps her little jaws at us sometimes and I was wondering what that meant. I think she mostly does it when we're not facing her so I guess she just wants to get our attention? She also barks at us when her dinner is late which I find hilarious.

first review, June 2014: This was interesting. It made me feel badly about how we train Indiana, a little bit. I think that she is actually worse at interacting with other dogs than when we first got her, and I think that that is our fault: now that we know she has the capacity to get all hot & bothered, we tense up when another dog comes around, and proactively try to discipline her before she actually does something wrong. I'm trying to untrain myself and deal with the situation in other ways, because of reading this book.

This book is really simplistic in a lot of ways, and not all that practical for day-to-day life (as opposed to controlled interactions.) But I still think it will be really helpful.

Also I totally want to look like the author when I grow up. Crazy long gray hair, Scandinavian sweaters. Talking to dogs. You know.
]]> Glengarry Glen Ross 23240467
A 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama.

An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance

Joe Mantegna as Ricky Roma
Gordon Clapp as David Moss
Kyle Colerider-Krugh as Detective Baylen
Richard Dreyfuss as Shelly Levine
John Getz as James Lingk
Richard Schiff as George Aaronow
Josh Stamberg as John Williamson
Directed by Eric Simonson. Recorded by L.A. Theatre Works before a live audience.]]> 1 David Mamet Kerry 2 audible, audiobook, play
But it turns out that Glengarry Glen Ross is about (white) men talking about making money, which is basically the Venn diagram of things about which I do not care.

So . . . this is a bunch of men talking to each other about selling things, and how much they want to do that, and how much they love it when it's going well, and hate it when it isn't. Mostly they tear each other down, though sometimes they back each other up. (I liked those parts best.) It's hard to tell people apart who aren't Richard Dreyfuss, but that doesn't really matter. Because they're really all the same.

It's short.]]> 3.58 1983 Glengarry Glen Ross
author: David Mamet
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1983
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: audible, audiobook, play
review:
I decided to listen to this because it was short, and because I've never seen Glengarry Glen Ross, and it's one of those things in the cultural zeitgeist with which I should be familiar.

But it turns out that Glengarry Glen Ross is about (white) men talking about making money, which is basically the Venn diagram of things about which I do not care.

So . . . this is a bunch of men talking to each other about selling things, and how much they want to do that, and how much they love it when it's going well, and hate it when it isn't. Mostly they tear each other down, though sometimes they back each other up. (I liked those parts best.) It's hard to tell people apart who aren't Richard Dreyfuss, but that doesn't really matter. Because they're really all the same.

It's short.
]]> The Book of Night Women 28479460 both beautifully written and devastating�, 'The Book of Night Women' is a startling, hard-edged dissection of slavery � a tour de force of voice and storytelling.
At the heart of the novel is the extraordinary character of Lilith, a spirited slave girl struggling to transcend the violence into which she is born, her story narrated in one of the boldest literary voices to grace the page. Overflowing with high drama and heartbreak, at its centre is the conspiracy of the Night Women, a clandestine council of fierce slave women plotting an island-wide revolt. Rebellions simmer, incidents of sadism and madness run rampant, and the tangled web of power relationships dramatically unravels amid dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion.

Listening Length: 15 hours and 45 minutes]]> 16 Marlon James Kerry 4 4.56 2009 The Book of Night Women
author: Marlon James
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2018/02/27
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: audible, audiobook, about-a-woman, african-american
review:

]]> The God Delusion 24855805
Discover magazine recently called Richard Dawkins "Darwin's Rottweiler" for his fierce and effective defense of evolution. Prospect magazine voted him among the top three public intellectuals in the world (along with Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky). Now Dawkins turns his considerable intellect on religion, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes.

He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly.

Dawkins has fashioned an impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion, to be embraced by anyone who sputters at the inconsistencies and cruelties that riddle the Bible, bristles at the inanity of "intelligent design", or agonizes over fundamentalism in the Middle East or Middle America.

©2006 Richard Dawkins; (P)2006 Tantor Media, Inc.]]> 14 Richard Dawkins Kerry 3 4.01 2006 The God Delusion
author: Richard Dawkins
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2014/01/19
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: audible, audiobook, non-fiction, religion, atheism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English]]> 24853109
A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar. Why do we say "I am reading a catalog" instead of "I read a catalog"? Why do we say "do" at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history.

Covering such turning points as the little-known Celtic and Welsh influences on English, the impact of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, and the Germanic invasions that started it all during the fifth century A.D., John McWhorter narrates this colorful evolution with vigor.

Drawing on revolutionary genetic and linguistic research, as well as a cache of remarkable trivia about the origins of English words and syntax patterns, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue ultimately demonstrates the arbitrary, maddening nature of English - and its ironic simplicity due to its role as a streamlined lingua franca during the early formation of Britain. This is the book that language aficionados worldwide have been waiting for. (And no, it's not a sin to end a sentence with a preposition.)

©2008 John McWhorter; (P)2009 Audible, Inc.]]> 6 John McWhorter Kerry 4
It lost a star because of what my buddy Kevin says; his attitude about his theories (and how they are DEFINITELY RIGHT) got the Spock Eyebrow from me every once in a while. But it didn't bother me so much. Just the one star.

And by the way, "Meaningless Do" will be the name of my DJ+drummer duo. ]]> 3.74 2008 Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English
author: John McWhorter
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2015/03/06
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: audible, audiobook, non-fiction, language
review:
So, I liked this a lot. It was fun. And I'm glad the author read his own book; you could totally tell that he was reading his own words. (And I trusted him to say things in other languages.) You know how a lot of non-fiction books should have stayed just magazine articles? This was not one of them.

It lost a star because of what my buddy Kevin says; his attitude about his theories (and how they are DEFINITELY RIGHT) got the Spock Eyebrow from me every once in a while. But it didn't bother me so much. Just the one star.

And by the way, "Meaningless Do" will be the name of my DJ+drummer duo.
]]> Persuasion 13479915
Juliet Stevenson reads this unabridged recording with her customary clarity and particular understanding for the words and world of Jane Austen.

8 hrs. 43 min.]]> 9 Jane Austen Kerry 5 4.15 1817 Persuasion
author: Jane Austen
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1817
rating: 5
read at: 2014/11/15
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: about-a-woman, audible, audiobook, female-author
review:

]]> Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) 15740469
In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research & cutting-edge science in the 1st of a trilogy chronicling the colonization of Mars:

For eons, sandstorms have swept the desolate landscape. For centuries, Mars has beckoned humans to conquer its hostile climate. Now, in 2026, a group of 100 colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.

John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers & Arkady Bogdanov lead a terraforming mission. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage & madness. For others it offers an opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. For the genetic alchemists, it presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life & death. The colonists orbit giant satellite mirrors to reflect light to the surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth. Massive tunnels, kilometers deep, will be drilled into the mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves & friendships will form & fall to pieces--for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

Brilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope & ingenuity, Red Mars is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in evolution, creating a world in its entirety. It shows a future, with both glory & tarnish, that awes with complexity & inspires with vision.]]> 24 Kim Stanley Robinson Kerry 4 audible, audiobook, scifi 3.34 1992 Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)
author: Kim Stanley Robinson
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.34
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2016/05/09
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: audible, audiobook, scifi
review:

]]> Dracula 13493042
This production of Dracula is presented by what is possibly the best assemblage of narrating talent ever for one audiobook: Emmy Award nominees Alan Cumming and Tim Curry plus an all-star cast of Audie award-winners Simon Vance (The Millenium Trilogy), Katherine Kellgren (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), Susan Duerden (The Tiger’s Wife), John Lee (Supergods) and customer favorites Graeme Malcolm (Skippy Dies), Steven Crossley (The Oxford Time Travel series), Simon Prebble (The Baroque Cycle), James Adams (Letters to a Young Contrarian), Nicola Barber (The Rose Garden), Victor Villar-Hauser (Fun Inc.), and Marc Vietor (1Q84).

LENGTH
15 hrs and 28 mins]]> 16 Bram Stoker Kerry 3 3.95 1897 Dracula
author: Bram Stoker
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1897
rating: 3
read at: 2013/04/11
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: audible, audiobook, armchair_audies_2012
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Ramayana: A Modern Retelling of the Great Indian Epic]]> 141153 The great Indian epic rendered in modern prose

India's most beloved and enduring legend, the Ramayana is widely acknowledged to be one of the world's great literary masterpieces. Still an integral part of India's cultural and religious expression, the Ramayana was originally composed by the Sanskrit poet Valmiki around 300 b.c. The epic of Prince Rama's betrayal, exile, and struggle to rescue his faithful wife, Sita, from the clutches of a demon and to reclaim his throne has profoundly affected the literature, art, and culture of South and Southeast Asia-an influence most likely unparalleled in the history of world literature, except, possibly, for the Bible. Throughout the centuries, countless versions of the epic have been produced in numerous formats and languages. But previous English versions have been either too short to capture the magnitude of the original; too secular in presenting what is, in effect, scripture; or dry, line-by-line translations. Now novelist Ramesh Menon has rendered the tale in lyrical prose that conveys all the beauty and excitement of the original, while making this spiritual and literary classic accessible to a new generation of readers.
]]> 697 Ramesh Menon 0865476950 Kerry 0 to-read 4.29 1957 The Ramayana: A Modern Retelling of the Great Indian Epic
author: Ramesh Menon
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Middlemarch 1474235 Middlemarch is George Eliot's masterpiece, a Victorian novel on the grandest scale. Originally published in serial form in Blackwood's Magazine in 1871-1872, it was at once a critical and popular success. 'No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative,' V. S. Pritchett noted. Set in a fictional Midlands town, the novel chronicles nineteenth-century English provincial life through its precisely delineated characters, weaving many stories into one richly textured tapestry. Eliot renders her vast cast with cool irony and intelligence: Dorothea Brooke, the 'latter-day St. Theresa,' intense, impassioned, and frustrated; Tertius Lydgate, the idealistic young doctor who comes to Middlemarch fired with the desire to spread the new science of medicine; Fred Vincy and his spoiled, pretentious sister Rosamond; Casaubon, Dorothea's elderly husband, for whom she feels at first awe and finally pity; and the many lesser characters who people this epic in a small landscape. Unsurpassed in its depiction of human nature, Middlemarch is one of the great works of world literature.]]> 799 George Eliot 067960118X Kerry 4 fromthelibrary 4.17 1872 Middlemarch
author: George Eliot
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1872
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/28
date added: 2024/05/29
shelves: fromthelibrary
review:

]]> Last House 196774466 "An ambitious historical epic that doubles as an intimate family saga. Jessica Shattuck captures and connects it all—the imperial ambitions of the postwar generation, the rebellion of their offspring in the Sixties, and the fallout we’re still sifting through today. . . . This is a wide-ranging novel to savor.� � TOM PERROTTA

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle comes a sweeping story of a nation on the rise, and one family’s deeply complicated relationship to the resource that built their fortune and fueled their greatest tragedy, perfect for fans of The Dutch House and Great Circle.

It’s 1953, and for Nick Taylor, WWII veteran turned company lawyer, oil is the key to the future. He takes the train into the city for work and returns to the peaceful streets of the suburbs and to his wife, Bet, former codebreaker now housewife, and their two children, Katherine and Harry. Nick comes from humble origins but thanks to his work for American Oil, he can provide every comfort for his family, including Last House, a secluded country escape. Deep in the Vermont mountains, the Taylors are free from the stresses of modern life. Bet doesn’t have to worry about the Russian H-bombs that haunt her dreams, and the children roam free in the woods. Last House is a place that could survive the end of the world.

It’s 1968, and America is on the brink of change. Protestors fill the streets to challenge everything from the Vietnam War to racism in the wake of MLK’s shooting—to the country's reliance on Big Oil. As Katherine makes her first forays into adult life, she’s caught up in the current of the time and struggles to reconcile her ideals with the stable and privileged childhood her Greatest Generation parents worked so hard to provide. But when the Movement shifts in a more radical direction, each member of the Taylor family will be forced to reckon with the consequences of the choices they’ve made for the causes they believed in.

Spanning multiple generations and nearly eighty years, Last House tells the story of one American family during an age of grand ideals and even greater downfalls. Set against the backdrop of our nation’s history, this is an emotional tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance and what we owe each other—and captures to stunning effect the gravity of time, the double edge of progress, and the hubris of empire.]]> 321 Jessica Shattuck 0062979892 Kerry 0 to-read 3.53 2024 Last House
author: Jessica Shattuck
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> Polostan (Bomb Light, #1) 199793426 Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.]]> 303 Neal Stephenson 0062334492 Kerry 0 to-read 3.70 2024 Polostan (Bomb Light, #1)
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> The Blue World 40874 190 Jack Vance 0575073489 Kerry 0 to-read 3.92 1966 The Blue World
author: Jack Vance
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women]]> 123177760
We start with Romulus, go on to Brutus overthrowing Tarquin, bounce through an appallingly tedious list of battles and generals and consuls, before emerging into the political stab-fest of the late Republic. From there, it runs through all the emperors, occasionally mentioning a wife or mother to show how bad things get when women get out of control, until Constantine invents Christianity and then Attila the Hun comes and ruins everything. But the history of Rome and empire is so much more than these Important Things.

In this alternative history, Emma Southon traces the story of the Roman Empire through women: Vestal Virgins and sex workers, business owners and poets, martyrs and saints. Each gives a different perspective on women’s lives and how they changed, across time and across class lines.]]> 336 Emma Southon 0861542312 Kerry 0 to-read 4.23 2023 A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women
author: Emma Southon
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> Replay 341735
And when he woke and he was 18 again, with all his memories of the next 25 years intact. He could live his life again, avoiding the mistakes, making money from his knowledge of the future, seeking happiness.

Until he dies at 43 and wakes up back in college again...]]> 311 Ken Grimwood 068816112X Kerry 0 to-read 4.16 1987 Replay
author: Ken Grimwood
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Last Murder at the End of the World]]> 136276877
Outside the island there is nothing: the world was destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched.

On the island: it is idyllic. One hundred and twenty-two villagers and three scientists, living in peaceful harmony. The villagers are content to fish, farm and feast, to obey their nightly curfew, to do what they're told by the scientists.

Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. And then they learn that the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping the fog at bay. If the murder isn't solved within 107 hours, the fog will smother the island—and everyone on it.

But the security system has also wiped everyone's memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer—and they don't even know it.

And the clock is ticking.

From the bestselling author of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and The Devil and the Dark Water comes an inventive, high-concept murder mystery: an ingenious puzzle, an extraordinary backdrop, and an audacious solution.]]> 368 Stuart Turton Kerry 0 to-read 3.63 2024 The Last Murder at the End of the World
author: Stuart Turton
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/30
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]]> Dark Matter 205181201 A mindbending, relentlessly surprising thriller from the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy.

Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters.

"Are you happy with your life?"

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend."

In this world he's woken up to, Jason's life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that's the dream?

And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could've imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human--a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we'll go to claim the lives we dream of.]]> 368 Blake Crouch 0593875737 Kerry 0 to-read 4.07 2016 Dark Matter
author: Blake Crouch
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/29
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]]> <![CDATA[In the Service of the Shogun: The Real Story of William Adams]]> 201198845 This is the first full biography of Adams based on original Dutch, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese sources, and includes much previously unknown information. Frederik Cryns tells the authentic story of Adams’s chequered life in its historical context, taking us on a compelling journey into Adams’s complex inner feelings and cosmopolitan heart.]]> 256 Frederik Cryns 1789148642 Kerry 0 to-read 3.69 In the Service of the Shogun: The Real Story of William Adams
author: Frederik Cryns
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.69
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> Friends & Dark Shapes 55686936
Sydney’s inner city is very much its own place, yet also a stand in for gentrifying inner-city suburbs the world over. Here, four young housemates struggle to untangle their complicated relationships while a poignant story of loss, grieving, and recovery unfolds.

The nameless narrator of this story has recently lost her father and now her existence is split in two: she conjures the past in which he was alive and yet lives in the present, where he is not. To others, she appears to have it all together, but the grief she still feels creates an insurmountable barrier between herself and others, between the life she had and the one she leads.

Wry, relatable, lyrical, and beautifully told, a book about politics, desire, youth, relationships and friends, Friends and Dark Shapes introduces a bold new Australian voice to American readers.]]> 288 Kavita Bedford 1922330477 Kerry 0 to-read 3.77 2021 Friends & Dark Shapes
author: Kavita Bedford
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/12
shelves: to-read
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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 Kerry 0 to-read 4.37 2024 Nuclear War: A Scenario
author: Annie Jacobsen
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare]]> 184419
As Jonathan Lethem remarks in his Introduction, The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton's nutty agenda is really quite simple: to expose moral relativism and parlor nihilism for the devils he believes them to be. This wouldn't be interesting at all, though, if he didn't also show such passion for giving the devil his due. He animates the forces of chaos and anarchy with every ounce of imaginative verve and rhetorical force in his body.]]> 182 G.K. Chesterton 0375757910 Kerry 0 to-read 3.85 1908 The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
author: G.K. Chesterton
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1908
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/11
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]]> Man Alone 3305485 Man Alone is one of the foundation stones of New Zealand literature. Almost all copies of the first edition, published in England in 1939, were destroyed in the Blitz. When it was republished in New Zealand in 1949, after the author’s suicide in Cairo in 1945, the publisher Paul’s Book Arcade made a number of changes for unknown reasons. This edition restores John Mulgan’s original text for the first time. Johnson, an English WWI veteran, comes to New Zealand to find a new life. In Auckland he is caught up in the Great Depression riots, and heads south to the central North Island, where he work as a farm hand. An affair with his boss’s wife and the accidental killing of his boss cause him to flee across rough hill country, and by the end of the novel he is contemplating leaving the country to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Man Alone is a portrait of an existential loner, and a testament to the necessity of comradeship in times of hardship. Cover: Selwyn & Blount dustjacket, 1939 (private collection)]]> 205 John Mulgan 0140132392 Kerry 0 to-read 3.64 1939 Man Alone
author: John Mulgan
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1939
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/10
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]]> The Skin and Its Girl 205064682 A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great aunt’s secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage.

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis� centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of all Rummani lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

Decades later, Betty returns to her Aunt Nuha’s gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she’s every known or should she follow her heart for the woman she loves, perpetuating her family’s cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt’s complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family emigrate to the U.S. But as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.

The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us—and even wield the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.]]> 368 Sarah Cypher 0593499557 Kerry 0 to-read 3.77 2023 The Skin and Its Girl
author: Sarah Cypher
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> Against a Dark Background 422452
Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilization based around the planet Golter. On an island with a glass shore - relic of some even more ancient conflict - she discovers she is to be hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes she is the last obstacle before their faith's apotheosis. She has to run, knowing her only hope of finally escaping the Huhsz is to find the last of the ancient, apocalyptically powerful but seemingly cursed Lazy Guns. But that is just the first as well as the final step on a search that takes her on an odyssey through the exotic Golterian system and results in both a trail of destruction and a journey into her own past, as well as that of her family and the system itself; a journey that changes everything.]]> 480 Iain M. Banks 1857230310 Kerry 0 4.13 1993 Against a Dark Background
author: Iain M. Banks
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/20
date added: 2024/03/20
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review:

]]> The Cosmic Rape 872339 160 Theodore Sturgeon 0671829343 Kerry 0 iownthis, to-read 3.45 1958 The Cosmic Rape
author: Theodore Sturgeon
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/20
shelves: iownthis, to-read
review:

]]> Revenge of the Librarians 59808600
Tom Gauld returns with his wittiest and most trenchant collection of literary cartoons to date. Perfectly composed drawings are punctuated with the artist’s signature brand of humour, hitting high and low. After all, Gauld is just as comfortable taking jabs at Jane Eyre and Game of Thrones .

Some particularly favoured targets include the pretentious procrastinating novelist, the commercial mercenary of the dispassionate editor, the willful obscurantism of the vainglorious poet. Quake in the presence of the stack of bedside books as it grows taller! Gnash your teeth at the ever-moving deadline that the writer never meets! Quail before the critic’s incisive dissection of the manuscript! And most importantly, seethe with envy at the paragon of creative productivity!

Revenge of the Librarians contains even more murders, drubbings, and castigations than The Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, Baking For Kafka, or any other collections of mordant scribblings by the inimitably excellent Gauld.]]> 180 Tom Gauld 1770466169 Kerry 0 to-read 3.96 2022 Revenge of the Librarians
author: Tom Gauld
name: Kerry
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Erasure 10889783
Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto , a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies―his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before.

In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is―under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh―and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.]]> 265 Percival Everett 1555975992 Kerry 0 to-read 4.21 2001 Erasure
author: Percival Everett
name: Kerry
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>