en-US Fri, 11 Apr 2025 23:06:32 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 175678711
The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.]]> 272 Bothayna Al-Essa 1632063344 Aileen 0 to-read 3.94 2019
author: Bothayna Al-Essa
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
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]]> 6493208
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored� ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia � a land of wooden quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo � to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality� until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family � past and present � is inextricably connected to the history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.]]> 370 Rebecca Skloot 1400052173 Aileen 0 to-read 4.12 2010
author: Rebecca Skloot
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> 960
A devastating new weapon of destruction.
When world-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to a Swiss research facility to analyze a mysterious symbol -- seared into the chest of a murdered physicist -- he discovers evidence of the unimaginable: the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati...the most powerful underground organization ever to walk the earth. The Illuminati has now surfaced to carry out the final phase of its legendary vendetta against its most hated enemy -- the Catholic Church.

Langdon's worst fears are confirmed on the eve of the Vatican's holy conclave, when a messenger of the Illuminati announces they have hidden an unstoppable time bomb at the very heart of Vatican City. With the countdown under way, Langdon jets to Rome to join forces with Vittoria Vetra, a beautiful and mysterious Italian scientist, to assist the Vatican in a desperate bid for survival.
Embarking on a frantic hunt through sealed crypts, dangerous catacombs, deserted cathedrals, and even the most secretive vault on earth, Langdon and Vetra follow a 400-year-old trail of ancient symbols that snakes across Rome toward the long-forgotten Illuminati lair...a clandestine location that contains the only hope for Vatican salvation.

An explosive international thriller, Angels & Demons careens from enlightening epiphanies to dark truths as the battle between science and religion turns to war.]]> 736 Dan Brown 1416524797 Aileen 3 3.95 2000
author: Dan Brown
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> 60929
The Oankali survive by genetically merging with primitive civilizations—whether their new hosts like it or not. For the first time since the nuclear holocaust, Earth will be inhabited. Grass will grow, animals will run, and people will learn to survive the planet’s untamed wilderness. But their children will not be human. Not exactly.]]> 248 Octavia E. Butler 0446603775 Aileen 0 to-read 4.15 1987
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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]]> 60932 Parable of the Sower continues the story of Lauren Olamina in socially and economically depressed California in the 2030s. Convinced that her community should colonize the stars, Lauren and her followers make preparations. But the collapse of society and rise of fanatics result in Lauren's followers being enslaved, and her daughter stolen from her. Now, Lauren must fight back to save the new world order.]]> 448 Octavia E. Butler 0446610380 Aileen 4 4.31 1998
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
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]]> 52397
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.]]> 345 Octavia E. Butler 0446675504 Aileen 5 4.21 1993
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/12
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]]> 61003 86 Robert Paul Wolff 0520215737 Aileen 0 to-read 3.58 1970
author: Robert Paul Wolff
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/08
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]]> 216363
This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.]]> 259 Philip K. Dick 0679740678 Aileen 0 to-read 3.64 1962
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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]]> 207294076 From Yale professor and bestselling author of How Fascism Works, a searing confrontation with the authoritarian right’s efforts to annihilate public education, silence teachers, and use taxpayer money to undo a century of work to advance social justice action on race, gender, sexuality, and class.Combining historical research with an in-depth analysis of our modern political landscape, Erasing History issues a dire warning for America and the the worst fascist movements of humanity’s past began in schools; the same place so many of today’s right-wing political parties have trained their most vicious attacks. Donald Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recip Erdogan, and Argentina’s Javier Milei have all reached the same if you want to roll back the clock on civil rights, equity, and inclusion, a great place to start is in our schools. Yale professor Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the right’s tactics and traces their inspirations and funding back to some of the most dangerous ideas of human history. He shows that hearts and minds are won in our elementary schools, high schools, and universities—and that governments are currently ill-prepared to do the work of uprooting fascist policies being foisted upon our children through school boards, in courtrooms, and in the boardrooms of the companies trusted to train our teachers and create the materials they’ll share with their students. Deeply informed and urgently needed, this book is a vibrant call to action for lovers of democracy worldwide.]]> 256 Jason F. Stanley 1668056917 Aileen 0 to-read 4.30 2024
author: Jason F. Stanley
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Aileen 5 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> 52879286 From the author of Utopia For Realists, a revolutionary argument that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the greatest factor in our success

If one basic principle has served as the bedrock of bestselling author Rutger Bregman's thinking, it is that every progressive idea -- whether it was the abolition of slavery, the advent of democracy, women's suffrage, or the ratification of marriage equality -- was once considered radical and dangerous by the mainstream opinion of its time. With Humankind, he brings that mentality to bear against one of our most entrenched ideas: namely, that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested.

By providing a new historical perspective of the last 200,000 years of human history, Bregman sets out to prove that we are in fact evolutionarily wired for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens. Bregman systematically debunks our understanding of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment, and the Kitty Genovese "bystander effect."

In place of these, he offers little-known true stories: the tale of twin brothers on opposing sides of apartheid in South Africa who came together with Nelson Mandela to create peace; a group of six shipwrecked children who survived for a year and a half on a deserted island by working together; a study done after World War II that found that as few as 15% of American soldiers were actually capable of firing at the enemy.

The ultimate goal of Humankind is to demonstrate that while neither capitalism nor communism has on its own been proven to be a workable social system, there is a third option: giving "citizens and professionals the means (left) to make their own choices (right)." Reorienting our thinking toward positive and high expectations of our fellow man, Bregman argues, will reap lasting success. Bregman presents this idea with his signature wit and frankness, once again making history, social science and economic theory accessible and enjoyable for lay readers.]]> 462 Rutger Bregman 0316418536 Aileen 0 to-read 4.37 2019
author: Rutger Bregman
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2019
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]]> 44436221 A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration�Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.]]> 288 Charles Yu Aileen 0 to-read 3.95 2020
author: Charles Yu
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 18521 A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction. The essay is seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.]]> 112 Virginia Woolf Aileen 0 to-read 4.21 1929
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1929
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]]> 43706465 Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this groundbreaking history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation.

Tracing the intertwined histories of the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, Davis examines the racism and class prejudice inherent in so much of white feminism, and in doing so brings to light new pioneering heroines, from field slaves to mill workers, who fought back and refused to accept the lives into which they were born.

'The power of her historical insights and the sweetness of her dream cannot be denied' The New York Times]]> 247 Angela Y. Davis 0241408407 Aileen 0 to-read 4.58 1981
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.58
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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]]> 66087062 A woman risks everything to end her family’s centuries-old curse, solve her mother’s disappearance, and find love in this mesmerizing novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Spells for Forgetting.

In the small mountain town of Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is waiting for fate to find her. The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm—and the mysterious curse that has plagued their family line. The whole town remembers the madness that led to Susanna Farrow’s disappearance, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother and haunted by rumors.

It’s been a year since June started seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. Faint wind chimes, a voice calling her name, and a mysterious door appearing out of nowhere—the signs of what June always knew was coming. But June is determined to end the curse once and for all, even if she must sacrifice finding love and having a family of her own.

After her grandmother’s death, June discovers a series of cryptic clues regarding her mother’s decades-old disappearance, except they only lead to more questions. But could the door she once assumed was a hallucination be the answer she’s been searching for? The next time it appears, June realizes she can touch it and walk past the threshold. And when she does, she embarks on a journey that will not only change both the past and the future, but also uncover the lingering mysteries of her small town and entangle her heart in an epic star-crossed love.

With The Unmaking of June Farrow, Adrienne Young delivers a brilliant novel of romance, mystery, and a touch of the impossible—a story you will never forget.]]> 320 Adrienne Young 0593598679 Aileen 0 to-read, curious-about 4.13 2023
author: Adrienne Young
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> 56301206
Discover the glittering Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century USA, and the artist who really invented the Readymade. Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of post-War artists in Latin America, and the women artists defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned, and your eyes opened to many art forms often overlooked or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan this is the history of art as it's never been told before.]]> 352 Katy Hessel 1788167406 Aileen 0 to-read 4.31 2022
author: Katy Hessel
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> 215020997 London, 1837.
Boston, 2019.

Three young women, their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories tangling like roots.

One grows high, and one grows deep, and one grows wild.

And all of them grow teeth.]]> 560 Victoria E. Schwab 1035064642 Aileen 0 to-read 4.38 2025
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
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]]> 43822024
In this pulse-pounding conclusion to New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy, constitutions are tested and old friends are brought back from the dead.]]> 625 Neal Shusterman 1481497065 Aileen 3 4.16 2019
author: Neal Shusterman
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/19
date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> 59808603 Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future.

Rumors begin to spread of a species of hyperintelligent, dangerous octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them.

The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, off from the world. Dr. Nguyen joins DIANIMA’s team on the islands: a battle-scarred security agent and the world’s first android.

The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. The stakes are high: there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of the octopuses� advancements, and as Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves.

But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.

A near-future thriller about the nature of consciousness, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a dazzling literary debut and a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humankind’s legacy.]]> 456 Ray Nayler 0374605955 Aileen 3 3.87 2022
author: Ray Nayler
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> 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 Aileen 0 to-read 4.06 2015
author: Scott Hawkins
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 75302266 Angharad—Emrys Myrddin’s epic about a mortal girl who falls in love with the Fairy King, then destroys him—is the only thing keeping her afloat. So when Myrddin’s family announces a contest to redesign the late author’s estate, Effy feels certain it’s her destiny.

But musty, decrepit Hiraeth Manor is an impossible task, and its residents are far from welcoming. Including Preston Héloury, a stodgy young literature scholar determined to expose Myrddin as a fraud. As the two rivals piece together clues about Myrddin’s legacy, dark forces, both mortal and magical, conspire against them—and the truth may bring them both to ruin.]]> 378 Ava Reid 0063211505 Aileen 0 to-read 3.73 2023
author: Ava Reid
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 202102084 From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ava Reid comes a reimagining of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most famous villainess, giving her a voice, a past, and a power that transforms the story men have written for her.

The Lady knows the stories: how her eyes induce madness in men.Ěý

The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed.ĚýĚý

The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of strategy, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive.Ěý

But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armor. She does not know that her magic is greater and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world.Ěý

She does not know this yet. But she will.]]> 320 Ava Reid 0593722566 Aileen 0 to-read 3.47 2024
author: Ava Reid
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 485894 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 0553213695 / 9780553213690

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes."

With it's startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man."]]> 201 Franz Kafka 0553213695 Aileen 0 to-read 3.90 1915
author: Franz Kafka
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1915
rating: 0
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]]> 62030429 Now experience where the hit movie from Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon-ho, starring Robert Pattinson, started in Mickey7 (the inspiration for the film Mickey 17).

Dying isn’t any fun…but at least it’s a living.

Mickey7 is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there’s a mission that’s too dangerous—even suicidal—the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal…and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it.

On a fairly routine scouting mission, Mickey7 goes missing and is presumed dead. By the time he returns to the colony base, surprisingly helped back by native life, Mickey7’s fate has been sealed. There’s a new clone, Mickey8, reporting for Expendable duties. The idea of duplicate Expendables is universally loathed, and if caught, they will likely be thrown into the recycler for protein.

Mickey7 must keep his double a secret from the rest of the colony. Meanwhile, life on Niflheim is getting worse. The atmosphere is unsuitable for humans, food is in short supply, and terraforming is going poorly. The native species are growing curious about their new neighbors, and that curiosity has Commander Marshall very afraid. Ultimately, the survival of both lifeforms will come down to Mickey7.

That is, if he can just keep from dying for good.]]> 369 Edward Ashton 3641280540 Aileen 0 to-read 3.72 2022
author: Edward Ashton
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 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 Aileen 0 to-read 4.52 2024
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Aileen 4 what a ride lol 4.17 1992
author: Donna Tartt
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/12/29
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what a ride lol
]]> 4214 460 Yann Martel 0770430074 Aileen 5 3.94 2001
author: Yann Martel
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 43758 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

In 1976, a uniquely seductive world of vampires was unveiled in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire . . . in 1985, a wild and voluptous voice spoke to us, telling the story of The Vampire Lestat.ĚýĚý±ő˛Ô The Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice continues her extraordinary "Vampire Chronicles" in a feat of mesmeric storytelling, a chillingly hypnotic entertainment in which the oldest and most powerful forces of the night are unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

Three brilliantly colored narrative threads intertwine as the story unfolds:

- The rock star known as Vampire Lestat, worshipped by millions of spellbound fans, prepares for a concert in San Francisco.ĚýĚýAmong the audience--pilgrims in a blind swoon of adoration--are hundreds of vampires, creatures who see Lestat as a "greedy fiend risking the secret prosperity of all his kind just to be loved and seen by mortals," fiends themselves who hate Lestat's power and who are determined to destroy him . . .

- The sleep of certain men and women--vampires and mortals scattered around the world--is haunted by a vivid, mysterious dream: of twins with fiery red hair and piercing green eyes who suffer an unspeakable tragedy.ĚýĚýIt is a dream that slowly, tauntingly reveals its meaning to the dreamers as they make their way toward each other--some to be destroyed on the journey, some to face an even more terrifying fate at journey's end . . .

- Akasha--Queen of the Damned, mother of all vampires, rises after a 6,000 year sleep and puts into motion a heinous plan to "save" mankind from itself and make "all myths of the world real" by elevating herself and her chosen son/lover to the level of the gods: "I am the fulfillment and I shall from this moment be the cause" . . .

These narrative threads wind sinuously across a vast, richly detailed tapestry of the violent, sensual world of vampirism, taking us back 6,000 years to its beginnings.ĚýĚýAs the stories of the "first brood" of blood drinkers are revealed, we are swept across the ages, from Egypt to South America to the Himalayas to all the shrouded corners of the globe where vampires have left their mark. Vampires are created--mortals succumbing to the sensation of "being emptied, of being devoured, of being nothing." Vampires are destroyed.ĚýĚýDark rituals are performed--the rituals of ancient creatures prowling the modern world.ĚýĚýAnd, finally, we are brought to a moment in the twentieth century when, in an astonishing climax, the fate of the living dead--and perhaps of the living, all the living--will be decided.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 448 Anne Rice 0345419626 Aileen 0 to-read 3.93 1988
author: Anne Rice
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25489625 “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.�
Ěý
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,� a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Ěý
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.]]> 152 Ta-Nehisi Coates Aileen 0 to-read 4.40 2015
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 45882
Writing in a lyrical mixture of Spanish and English that is her unique heritage, she meditates on the condition of Chicanos in Anglo culture, women in Hispanic culture, and lesbians in the straight world. Her essays and poems range over broad territory, moving from the plight of undocumented migrant workers to memories of her grandmother, from Aztec religion to the agony of writing.

Anzaldua is a rebellious and willful talent who recognizes that life on the border, "life in the shadows," is vital territory for both literature and civilization. Venting her anger on all oppressors of people who are culturally or sexually different, the author has produced a powerful document that belongs in all collections with emphasis on Hispanic American or feminist issues.]]> 260 Gloria E. AnzaldĂşa 1879960575 Aileen 0 to-read 4.33 1987
author: Gloria E. AnzaldĂşa
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 43814 481 Anne Rice 0345476883 Aileen 4 4.10 1985
author: Anne Rice
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/24
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves:
review:
I really enjoyed this! It was really interesting. The dialogue and the way the main character thinks is so modern too it’s kinda strange. I’d say it’s more timeless than anything but it reads really nicely. Crazy to think it was written in the 80s (not THAT long ago but the language is just so not 80s writing to me lol). Interested to read through more of the series
]]> 137123459 320 Jeanette Winterson 0802161510 Aileen 0 to-read 3.70 2023
author: Jeanette Winterson
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55223004 Alternate cover edition of ASIN B08GJVLGGX.

A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green Aileen 0 to-read 4.31 2021
author: John Green
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25734172 All the beauty of modern physics in fewer than a hundred pages.

This is a book about the joy of discovery. A playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics, it's already a major bestseller in Italy and the United Kingdom. Carlo Rovelli offers surprising—and surprisingly easy to grasp—explanations of general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world. He takes us to the frontiers of our knowledge: to the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, back toĚýthe origins of the cosmos, and into the workings of our minds. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,â€� Rovelli writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”]]> 81 Carlo Rovelli 0399184414 Aileen 0 to-read 3.97 2014
author: Carlo Rovelli
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18693763
Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James Lee; a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue - in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James's case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the centre of every party. But Lydia is under pressures that have nothing to do with growing up in 1970s small town Ohio. Her father is an American born of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and his ethnicity, and hers, make them conspicuous in any setting.

When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, James is consumed by guilt and sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to make someone accountable, no matter what the cost. Lydia's older brother, Nathan, is convinced that local bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it's the youngest in the family - Hannah - who observes far more than anyone realises and who may be the only one who knows what really happened.

Everything I Never Told You is a gripping page-turner, about secrets, love, longing, lies and race.

Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.]]> 297 Celeste Ng 159420571X Aileen 0 to-read, curious-about 3.81 2014
author: Celeste Ng
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves: to-read, curious-about
review:

]]> 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats� from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge�: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as �1847� or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,� “Spotify,� and “the collapse of the British Empire.� But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Aileen 0 to-read 3.54 2024
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 847409 So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy is an anthology of original new stories by leading African, Asian, South Asian and Aboriginal authors, as well as North American and British writers of color.

Stories of imagined futures abound in Western writing. Writer and editor Nalo Hopkinson notes that the science fiction/fantasy genre “speaks so much about the experience of being alienated but contains so little writing by alienated people themselves.� It’s an oversight that Hopkinson and Mehan aim to correct with this anthology.

The book depicts imagined futures from the perspectives of writers associated with what might loosely be termed the “third world.� It includes stories that are bold, imaginative, edgy; stories that are centered in the worlds of the “developing� nations; stories that dare to dream what we might develop into.

The wealth of postcolonial literature has included many who have written insightfully about their pasts and presents. With So Long Been Dreaming they creatively address their futures.

Contributors include: Opal Palmer Adisa, Tobias Buckell, Wayde Compton, Hiromi Goto, Andrea Hairston, Tamai Kobayashi, Karin Lowachee, devorah major, Carole McDonnell, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Eden Robinson, Nisi Shawl, Vandana Singh, Sheree Renee Thomas and Greg Van Eekhout.

Nalo Hopkinson is the internationally-acclaimed author of Brown Girl in the Ring, Skin Folk, and Salt Roads. Her books have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Tiptree, and Philip K. Dick Awards; Skin Folk won a World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award. Born in Jamaica, Nalo moved to Canada when she was sixteen. She lives in Toronto.

Uppinder Mehan is a scholar of science fiction and postcolonial literature. A South Asian Canadian, he currently lives in Boston and teaches at Emerson College.]]> 270 Nalo Hopkinson 155152158X Aileen 0 to-read 4.00 2004
author: Nalo Hopkinson
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60521937
This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. . .

Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things.

Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband's dark secrets. With the lives of everyone she loves on the line, Constanta will have to choose between her own freedom and her love for her husband. But bonds forged by blood can only be broken by death.]]> 292 S.T. Gibson 0316501077 Aileen 0 to-read 3.91 2021
author: S.T. Gibson
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15811545
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.Ěý

Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.]]> 432 Ruth Ozeki 0670026638 Aileen 0 to-read 4.06 2013
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60041932 True love is at stake in this charming, debut romantic comedy.

Cassie Greenberg loves being an artist, but it’s a tough way to make a living. On the brink of eviction, she’s desperate when she finds a too-good-to-be-true apartment in a beautiful Chicago neighborhood. Cassie knows there has to be a catch—only someone with a secret to hide would rent out a room for that price.

Of course, her new roommate Frederick J. Fitzwilliam is far from normal. He sleeps all day, is out at night on business, and talks like he walked out of a regency romance novel. He also leaves Cassie heart-melting notes around the apartment, cares about her art, and asks about her day. And he doesn’t look half bad shirtless, on the rare occasions they’re both home and awake. But when Cassie finds bags of blood in the fridge that definitely weren’t there earlier, Frederick has to come clean...

Cassie’s sexy new roommate is a vampire. And he has a proposition for her.]]> 341 Jenna Levine 0593548914 Aileen 3 curious-about 3.46 2023
author: Jenna Levine
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/23
shelves: curious-about
review:
it was silly and goofy and ridiculous and fun! and cute. definitely worth reading. the information provided is quite surface level, we don’t get to know much about either character’s background or family, and the pace is pretty fast but overall I liked it. suspend your disbelief (not a bad thing) and enjoy
]]> 6101718
Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.

He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.

At once psychologically piercing and magnificently absorbing, The Magicians boldly moves into uncharted literary territory, imagining magic as practiced by real people, with their capricious desires and volatile emotions. Lev Grossman creates an utterly original world in which good and evil aren’t black and white, love and sex aren’t simple or innocent, and power comes at a terrible price.]]> 402 Lev Grossman 0670020559 Aileen 3 3.53 2009
author: Lev Grossman
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/19
date added: 2024/08/19
shelves:
review:
my actual rating is probably like 3.5, due to it being entertaining and the only time I’ve ever experienced myself sincerely and dutifully hoping that a character doesn’t die. for the amount of time we go through from start to finish, i thought the pacing was excellent and impressive. there were a few points that I was shocked either by the thing happening in the scene or a reveal. i’m pretty sure i’m quite easy to please though, for more experienced fantasy readers it might not be as crazy lol. anyways, I think it’s worth reading but I can see why not everybody would enjoy it! certainly fun. the magic system and the way it was described was cool. i could’ve definitely gone without the whole fox fucking thing though, personally LMAO
]]> 61685220 210 Sasha Velour 0358508088 Aileen 0 to-read 4.39 2023
author: Sasha Velour
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56249817 A modern-day fantasy novel about demons, dreams, and a young woman teaching English in Japan.

Cybelle teaches English in a small city in Japan. Her contract is up for renewal, her mother is begging her to come back to Canada, and she is not sure where she belongs anymore. She faces ostracism and fear daily, but she loves her job, despite its increasing difficulties. She vows to do her best � even when her sleep, appetite, and life in general start to get weird, and conforming to the rules that once helped her becomes a struggle.

Meanwhile, yokai feast and cavort around Osaka and Kyoto as the barrier between their world and the human world thins. Zaniel spends his nights walking the dream world and serving his demon “bodyguard,� Akki. But there is a new yokai on the scene, and it has gotten on Akki’s bad side. When Cybelle gets caught up in the supernatural clash, she has to figure out what is real and, more importantly, what she really wants � before her life spirals out of control altogether.]]> 536 Sifton Tracey Anipare 1459747372 Aileen 0 to-read 3.36 2021
author: Sifton Tracey Anipare
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 296662 Lies My Teacher Told Me won the American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship.

James W. Loewen, a sociology professor and distinguished critic of history education, puts 12 popular textbooks under the microscope-and what he discovers will surprise you. In his opinion, every one of these texts fails to make its subject interesting or memorable. Worse still is the proliferation of blind patriotism, mindless optimism and misinformation filling the pages.

From the truth about Christopher Columbus to the harsh reality of the Vietnam War, Loewen picks apart the lies we've been told. This audiobook, narrated by Brian Keeler (The Hurricane, "All My Children") will forever change your view of the past.]]> 383 James W. Loewen 0684818868 Aileen 0 to-read 3.96 1995
author: James W. Loewen
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62816044 Two villains, one girl, and a deadly battle for happily ever after.

Evangeline Fox ventured to the Magnificent North in search of her happy ending, and it seems as if she has it. She’s married to a handsome prince and lives in a legendary castle. But Evangeline has no idea of the devastating price she’s paid for this fairytale. She doesn’t know what she has lost, and her husband is determined to make sure she never finds out . . . but first he must kill Jacks, the Prince of Hearts.

Blood will be shed, hearts will be stolen, and true love will be put to the test in A Curse for True Love, the breathlessly anticipated conclusion to the Once Upon A Broken Heart trilogy.]]> 386 Stephanie Garber 1250851203 Aileen 3
I enjoyed the ride but it felt a little lackluster, I honestly kind of wish she had made it longer, and addressed the remaining storylines that were set up in TBONA. Overall I really enjoyed the series as a whole, plot holes be damned, but if I hadn’t read it consecutively I don’t think I would’ve been as happy as I was with this finale.]]> 4.14 2023
author: Stephanie Garber
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/02
date added: 2024/06/12
shelves:
review:
actual rating: 3.5 stars

I enjoyed the ride but it felt a little lackluster, I honestly kind of wish she had made it longer, and addressed the remaining storylines that were set up in TBONA. Overall I really enjoyed the series as a whole, plot holes be damned, but if I hadn’t read it consecutively I don’t think I would’ve been as happy as I was with this finale.
]]> 43352954 Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.]]> 209 Amal El-Mohtar Aileen 0 to-read 3.87 2019
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49624060 How proteins, machine learning and molecular chemistry can teach us about the complexities of human behaviour and the world around us.

How do we understand the people around us? How do we recognise people's motivations, their behaviour, or even their facial expressions? And, when do we learn the social cues that dictate human behaviour?

Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder at the age of eight, Camilla Pang struggled to understand the world around her and the way people worked. Desperate for a solution, Camilla asked her mother if there was an instruction manual for humans that she could consult. But, without the blueprint to life, she was hoping for, Camilla began to create her own. Now armed with a PhD in biochemistry, Camilla dismantles our obscure social customs and identifies what it really means to be human using her unique expertise and a language she knows best: science.

Through a set of scientific principles, this book examines life's everyday interactions including:

- Decisions and the route we take to make them;
- Conflict and how we can avoid it;
- Relationships and how we establish them;
- Etiquette and how we conform to it.

Explaining Humans is an original and incisive exploration of human nature and the strangeness of social norms, written from the outside looking in. Camilla's unique perspective of the world, in turn, tells us so much about ourselves - about who we are and why we do it - and is a fascinating guide on how to lead a more connected, happier life.]]> 239 Camilla Pang 0241409608 Aileen 0 to-read 3.46 2020
author: Camilla Pang
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 Aileen 5 4.17 2022
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/09
date added: 2024/05/09
shelves:
review:
Just absolutely stunning. Heartbreaking, beautiful, gorgeous. I have to give such great thanks to this book for the insight and knowledge it’s given me. Read it!!!!
]]> 23129811 On Palestine is the sequel to their acclaimed book Gaza in Crisis.]]> 220 Noam Chomsky 1608464709 Aileen 0 to-read 4.27 2015
author: Noam Chomsky
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36959638 From the author of Letters to a Young Poet, one of the greatest letter collections of all time, comes a new selection of the great poet's writings to bereaved friends and acquaintances, reflecting on death and dying, providing comfort in a time of grief.

Gleaned from Rainer Maria Rilke's voluminous, never-before-translated correspondence, this book collects the poet's best writings on grief and loss in one place for the first time. The result is a profound vision of the mourning process and a meditation on death's place in our lives, as well as a compilation of sensitive and moving expressions of consolation and condolence. Following the format of Rilke's classic, Letters to a Young Poet, this volume arranges a series of letters to Rilke's mourning friends, composed into a continuous, uninterrupted sequence, showcasing the full range of Rilke's thoughts on finding meaning and, perhaps, some form of comfort in the process of grieving.]]> 128 Rainer Maria Rilke 0525509844 Aileen 0 to-read 4.18 2018
author: Rainer Maria Rilke
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60717747 It's difficult to find a husband in Regency England when you're a young lady with only half a soul.

Ever since she was cursed by a faerie, Theodora Ettings has had no sense of fear or embarrassment - a condition which makes her prone to accidental scandal. Dora hopes to be a quiet, sensible wallflower during the London Season - but when the strange, handsome and utterly uncouth Lord Sorcier discovers her condition, she is instead drawn into dangerous and peculiar faerie affairs.

If Dora's reputation can survive both her curse and her sudden connection with the least-liked man in all of high society, then she may yet reclaim her normal place in the world. . . but the longer Dora spends with Elias Wilder, the more she begins to suspect that one may indeed fall in love, even with only half a soul.

Bridgerton meets Howl's Moving Castle in this enchanting historical fantasy, where the only thing more meddlesome than faeries is a marriage-minded mother.

Pick up HALF A SOUL, and be stolen away into Olivia Atwater's charming, magical version of Regency England!]]> 304 Olivia Atwater Aileen 0 to-read, curious-about 4.04 2020
author: Olivia Atwater
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/19
shelves: to-read, curious-about
review:

]]> 24885533
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary� (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware� (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves� (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species� (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), “All the Flavors� (Nebula award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King� (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie� (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor.]]> 450 Ken Liu 1481442546 Aileen 0 to-read 4.36 2016
author: Ken Liu
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 194740
The story is told through the eyes of Kazuko, the unmarried daughter of a widowed aristocrat. Her search for self meaning in a society devoid of use for her forms the crux of Dazai’s novel. It is a sad story, and structurally is a novel very much within the confines of the Japanese take on the novel in a way reminiscent of authors such as Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata � the social interactions are peripheral and understated, nuances must be drawn, and for readers more used to Western novelistic forms this comes across as being rather wishy-washy.

Kazuko’s mother falls ill, and due to their financial circumstances they are forced to take a cottage in the countryside. Her brother, who became addicted to opium during the war is missing. When he returns, Kazuko attempts to form a liaison with the novelist Uehara. This romantic displacement only furthers to deepen her alienation from society.]]> 175 Osamu Dazai 0811200329 Aileen 0 to-read 4.00 1947
author: Osamu Dazai
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/30
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]]> 953401 232 Osamu Dazai 0870117793 Aileen 0 to-read 4.23 1991
author: Osamu Dazai
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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]]> 43590055 Palestine + 100 poses a question to twelve Palestinian writers: what might your country look like in the year 2048 � a century after the tragedies and trauma of what has come to be called the Nakba? How might this event � which, in 1948, saw the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes � reach across a century of occupation, oppression, and political isolation, to shape the country and its people? Will a lasting peace finally have been reached, or will future technology only amplify the suffering and mistreatment of Palestinians?

Covering a range of approaches � from SF noir, to nightmarish dystopia, to high-tech farce � these stories use the blank canvas of the future to reimagine the Palestinian experience today. Along the way, we encounter drone swarms, digital uprisings, time-bending VR, peace treaties that span parallel universes, and even a Palestinian superhero, in probably the first anthology of science fiction from Palestine ever.

Translated from the Arabic by Raph Cormack, Mohamed Ghalaieny, Andrew Leber, Thoraya El-Rayyes, Yasmine Seale and Jonathan Wright.

WINNER of a PEN Translates Award 2018]]> 192 Basma Ghalayini 1910974447 Aileen 0 to-read 3.92 2019
author: Basma Ghalayini
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60149512
“This superbly written book offers insight into an extraordinary individual, the creative process, and the scope and limits of our current understanding of the cosmos.”—Lord Martin Rees

Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life.ĚýIn order to solve this mystery, Hawking studied the big bang origin of the universe, butĚýhis early work ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing a multiverse—countless different universes, most of which would be far too bizarre to ​harbor life.

HoledĚýupĚýin the theoretical physics department at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking and his friend and collaborator ThomasĚýHertogĚýworkedĚýon this problem for twenty years, developing a new theory of the cosmos that could account for the emergence of life. Peering into the extreme quantum physics of cosmic holograms and venturing far back in time to our deepest roots, they were startled to find a deeper level of evolution in which theĚýphysical laws themselvesĚýtransform and simplify until particles, forces, and even time itself fadesĚýaway.ĚýThis discovery led them to a revolutionary The laws of physics are not set in stone but areĚýborn and co-evolve as the universe they govern takes shape. As Hawking’s final days drew near, the two collaborators published their theory, which proposed aĚýradical new Darwinian perspective on the origins of our universe.

On the Origin of Time offersĚýa striking new vision of the universe’s birth that will profoundlyĚýtransform the way we think about our place in the order of the cosmos and may ultimately prove to be Hawking’s greatest legacy.]]> 352 Thomas Hertog 0593128443 Aileen 0 to-read 4.06 2023
author: Thomas Hertog
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 59808071 Not every love is meant to be.

After Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, betrays her, Evangeline Fox swears she'll never trust him again. Now that she’s discovered her own magic, Evangeline believes she can use it to restore the chance at happily ever after that Jacks stole away.

But when a new terrifying curse is revealed, Evangeline finds herself entering into a tenuous partnership with the Prince of Hearts again. Only this time, the rules have changed. Jacks isn’t the only force Evangeline needs to be wary of. In fact, he might be the only one she can trust, despite her desire to despise him.

Instead of a love spell wreaking havoc on Evangeline’s life, a murderous spell has been cast. To break it, Evangeline and Jacks will have to do battle with old friends, new foes, and a magic that plays with heads and hearts. Evangeline has always trusted her heart, but this time she’s not sure she can...]]> 416 Stephanie Garber 1250268427 Aileen 4 Ruined me. Will be re-reading 4.49 2022
author: Stephanie Garber
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/29
date added: 2024/03/29
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Ruined me. Will be re-reading
]]> 55987278 How far would you go for happily ever after?

For as long as she can remember, Evangeline Fox has believed in true love and happy endings... until she learns that the love of her life will marry another.

Desperate to stop the wedding and to heal her wounded heart, Evangeline strikes a deal with the charismatic but wicked Prince of Hearts. In exchange for his help, he asks for three kisses, to be given at the time and place of his choosing.

But after Evangeline’s first promised kiss, she learns that bargaining with an immortal is a dangerous game—and that the Prince of Hearts wants far more from her than she’d pledged. He has plans for Evangeline, plans that will either end in the greatest happily ever after or the most exquisite tragedy...]]> 408 Stephanie Garber 1250268397 Aileen 4 4.06 2021
author: Stephanie Garber
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2024/03/29
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]]> 17707648 A Korean Charlotte's Web

This is the story of a hen named Sprout. No longer content to lay eggs on command, only to have them carted off to the market, she glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild—and to hatch an egg of her own.

An anthem for freedom, individuality and motherhood featuring a plucky, spirited heroine who rebels against the tradition-bound world of the barnyard, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a novel of universal resonance that also opens a window on Korea, where it has captivated millions of readers. And with its array of animal characters—the hen, the duck, the rooster, the dog, the weasel—it calls to mind such classics in English as Animal Farm and Charlotte’s Web.

Featuring specially-commissioned illustrations, this first English-language edition of Sun-mi Hwang’s fable for our times beautifully captures the journey of an unforgettable character in world literature.]]> 134 Sun-mi Hwang 0143123203 Aileen 0 to-read 4.02 2000
author: Sun-mi Hwang
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/25
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]]> 56732449
That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding... six-pack abs.

Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.]]> 356 Ali Hazelwood 0593336828 Aileen 3 4.11 2021
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/20
date added: 2024/03/20
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]]> 33555224
Citra, now a junior scythe under Scythe Curie, sees the corruption and wants to help change it from the inside out, but is thwarted at every turn, and threatened by the “new order� scythes. Realizing she cannot do this alone—or even with the help of Scythe Curie and Faraday, she does the unthinkable, and risks being “deadish� so she can communicate with the Thunderhead—the only being on earth wise enough to solve the dire problems of a perfect world. But will it help solve those problems, or simply watch as perfection goes into decline?]]> 504 Neal Shusterman 1442472456 Aileen 5 4.38 2018
author: Neal Shusterman
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/28
date added: 2024/03/19
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]]> 59575970 Set in Jaffa in 1947-51, this fable-like novel is a heartbreaking tale of young love during the beginning of the destruction of Palestine and displacement of its people.

At times darkly humorous and ironic but also profoundly moving, this novel based on a true story, follows the lives of a gifted 15-year-old mechanic, Subhi, and 13-year-old Shams, a peasant girl he hopes to marry one day. At first we see the prosperous life of this cosmopolitan city on the Mediterranean--with its old cinemas, lively cafes and brothels, open air markets, a bustling port and Jaffa's world famous orange groves--through the lives of the families of Subhi and Shams, but particularly through Subhi. As the story evolves, the indiscriminate bombing of Jaffa and the displacements of Palestinian families begin, and we get a fascinating though dark close-up of how those who remained survived. This novel is a cinematic, though devastating, account of one of the most dramatic and least known chapters of Palestinian history.

It is a portrait of a city and a people irrevocably changed.]]> 304 Suad Amiry 059331655X Aileen 0 to-read 3.96 2022
author: Suad Amiry
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/08
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]]> 176443819 From Bram Stoker Award­–winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes a chilling novel about three childhood friends who miraculously survive the night everyone in their suburban neighborhood turned into ghosts—perfect for fans of Yellowjackets.

The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter—and only one has in the past twenty years, until now.

Talitha Velkwood has avoided anything to do with the tragedy that took her mother and eight-year-old sister, drifting from one job to another, never settling anywhere or with anyone, feeling as trapped by her past as if she was still there in the small town she so desperately wanted to escape from. When a new researcher tracks her down and offers to pay her to come back to enter the vicinity, Talitha claims she’s just doing it for the money. Of all the crackpot theories over the years, no one has discovered what happened the night Talitha, her estranged, former best friend Brett, and Grace, escaped their homes twenty years ago. Will she finally get the answers she’s been looking for all these years, or is this just another dead end?

Award-winning author Gwendolyn Kiste has created a suburban ghost story about a small town that trapped three young women who must confront the past if they’re going to have a future.]]> 246 Gwendolyn Kiste 1982172371 Aileen 0 to-read 3.60 2024
author: Gwendolyn Kiste
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/08
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]]> 213753
Told in journal entries, this is the heart-pounding story of Miranda’s struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all--hope--in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world.]]> 337 Susan Beth Pfeffer Aileen 0 to-read 3.89 2006
author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/08
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]]> 28954189 Thou shalt kill.

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.

Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art� of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.

An alternate cover edition of ISBN: 9781442472426]]> 435 Neal Shusterman Aileen 5 4.32 2016
author: Neal Shusterman
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/23
date added: 2024/02/23
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]]> 18423 The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants spend most of their time without a gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.]]> 304 Ursula K. Le Guin Aileen 0 to-read 4.11 1969
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/23
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]]> 61320857
“�The World Is On Fire’—your own and the real one out there. Bushfires rage in Australia and Ingken’s world is thrown off balance. The ecological threat interweaves with fears of change. On this fluid journey to oneself, everything falters and yet is connected. What can we hold on to when we don’t know yet how everything might feel right?
I like Nino Bulling’s way of illuminating complex situations and anchoring them in political dimensions. For me, it becomes great comic art through the fine nuances in the gestures and the vivid sceneries. Whether it’s a wild party night, a rural idyll or inner torment, the mood immediately jumps from each page into your own thoughts. That’s what I read for.� Gesine Claus, Strips & Stories, Bookshop for Graphic Novels, Hamburg

The comic is co-published with Colorama and part of Nino Bulling’s contribution to documenta fifteen.]]> 156 Nino Bulling 303731236X Aileen 0 to-read 3.91 2022
author: Nino Bulling
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/19
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]]> 62925087
But as the family settles into the mansion—Nick absent all week, commuting to the city for work—Orla finds herself unsettled. She hears voices when no one is around; doors open and close on their own; and her son Sam, who has not spoken in six months, seems to have made an imaginary friend whose motives Orla does not trust.

Four decades earlier, Lydia moves into the same house as a live-in nanny to a grieving family. Lydia, too, becomes aware of intangible presences in the large house, and she, like Orla four decades later, becomes increasingly fearful for the safety of the children in her care. But no one in either woman’s life believes the stories that seem fanciful, the stuff of magic and mayhem, sprung from the imaginations of hysterical women who spend too much time in the company of children.

Are both families careening towards tragedy? Are Orla and Lydia seeing things that aren’t there? What secrets is the house hiding?

A feminist gothic tale perfectly suited for the current moment, A Good House for Children combines an atmospheric mystery with resonant themes of motherhood, madness, and the value of a woman’s work.]]> 336 Kate Collins 0063291029 Aileen 3 heavy book. atmospheric and moody and rich with good imagery, proceed with a bit of caution. it was a good story that read in an entertaining way, save for the sad things that happen. although the author seemed to write about them in understanding, clear, non judgmental ways (at least to me). content warnings below that are kind of spoilers!











content warnings: suicidal ideation (mild/moderateish), suicide (moderate), child death (severe) by acute illness, spouse death (moderate) via implied terminal illness]]> 3.56 2023
author: Kate Collins
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/09
date added: 2024/02/15
shelves:
review:
actual rating: 3.75 stars!
heavy book. atmospheric and moody and rich with good imagery, proceed with a bit of caution. it was a good story that read in an entertaining way, save for the sad things that happen. although the author seemed to write about them in understanding, clear, non judgmental ways (at least to me). content warnings below that are kind of spoilers!











content warnings: suicidal ideation (mild/moderateish), suicide (moderate), child death (severe) by acute illness, spouse death (moderate) via implied terminal illness
]]> 41880609 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born � a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam � and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.]]> 246 Ocean Vuong 0525562028 Aileen 0 to-read 4.05 2019
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> 62334843 202 Nathan Truong 1513694723 Aileen 0 to-read 4.26
author: Nathan Truong
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/01
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]]> 241823
In "Women Who Run With the Wolves," Dr Estes unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairytales and stories, many from her own family, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine. Dr Estes has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.]]> 537 Clarissa Pinkola Estés 0345409876 Aileen 0 to-read 4.12 1992
author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/01
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]]> 386372
Death is the Grim Reaper of the Discworld, a black-robed skeleton with a scythe who ushers souls into the next world. He is also fond of cats and endlessly baffled by humanity. Soon Death is yearning to experience what humanity really has to offer, but to do that, he'll need to hire some help.

It's an offer Mort can't refuse. As Death's apprentice he'll have free board, use of the company horse—and being dead isn't compulsory. It's a dream job—until Mort falls in love with Death's daughter, Ysabell, and discovers that your boss can be a killer on your love life…]]> 243 Terry Pratchett 0061020680 Aileen 4 4.24 1987
author: Terry Pratchett
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1987
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/31
date added: 2024/01/31
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]]> 13214
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.

Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.� At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare�) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.]]> 289 Maya Angelou 0553279378 Aileen 0 4.30 1969
author: Maya Angelou
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at: 2019/04/30
date added: 2024/01/29
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]]> 48909025
Weston Winters isn’t an alchemist--yet. Fired from every apprenticeship he's landed, his last chance hinges on Master Welty taking him in. But when Wes arrives at Welty Manor, he finds only Margaret and her bloodhound Trouble. Margaret begrudgingly allows him to stay, but on one condition: he must join the hunt with her.

Although they make an unlikely team, Wes is in awe of the girl who has endured alone on the outskirts of a town that doesn’t want her, in this creaking house of ghosts and sorrow. And even though Wes disrupts every aspect of her life, Margaret is drawn to him. He, too, knows what it's like to be an outsider. As the hunt looms closer and tensions rise, Margaret and Wes uncover dark magic that could be the key to winning the hunt - if they survive that long.]]> 384 Allison Saft 1250623650 Aileen 0 to-read 3.84 2022
author: Allison Saft
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/20
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]]> 50520939
Enter the latest round of six: Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona, unwilling halves of an unfathomable whole, who exert uncanny control over every element of physicality. Reina Mori, a naturalist, who can intuit the language of life itself. Parisa Kamali, a telepath who can traverse the depths of the subconscious, navigating worlds inside the human mind. Callum Nova, an empath easily mistaken for a manipulative illusionist, who can influence the intimate workings of a person’s inner self. Finally, there is Tristan Caine, who can see through illusions to a new structure of reality—an ability so rare that neither he nor his peers can fully grasp its implications.

When the candidates are recruited by the mysterious Atlas Blakely, they are told they will have one year to qualify for initiation, during which time they will be permitted preliminary access to the Society’s archives and judged based on their contributions to various subjects of impossibility: time and space, luck and thought, life and death. Five, they are told, will be initiated. One will be eliminated. The six potential initiates will fight to survive the next year of their lives, and if they can prove themselves to be the best among their rivals, most of them will.

Most of them.]]> 376 Olivie Blake Aileen 0 to-read 3.56 2020
author: Olivie Blake
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 4900
A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, Heart of Darkness is considered one of the most influential works ever written.]]> 188 Joseph Conrad 1892295490 Aileen 0 to-read 3.43 1899
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1899
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/11
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]]> 162082107 0 The Moth Aileen 0 to-read 0.0
author: The Moth
name: Aileen
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/11
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]]> 179546754 Ěý
Carefully selected by the creative minds at The Moth and adapted to the page to preserve the raw energy of stories told live, onstage and without notes, readers of The Moth ĚýA Point of Beauty will encounter moments that cut and moments that heal. If we look closely enough, we can find real beauty in moments when our lives change forever—for better or for worse.]]> 400 The Moth 0593139038 Aileen 0 to-read 4.33
author: The Moth
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/11
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]]> 51086522 208 YĹ«ji Kaku 1974713202 Aileen 4 4.28 2018
author: YĹ«ji Kaku
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/14
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves:
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]]> 199370953 198 Hikaru Nakamura Aileen 0 to-read 4.07 2016
author: Hikaru Nakamura
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18813642 Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.

In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman of color while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years and commenting on the state of feminism today. The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.

Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better.

Feel me, see me, hear me, reach me --
Peculiar benefits --
Typical first year professor --
To scratch, claw or grope clumsily or frantically --
How to be friends with another woman --
Girls, girls, girls --
I once was Miss America --
Garish, glorious spectacles --
Not here to make friends --
How we all lose --
Reaching for catharsis : getting fat right (or wrong) and Diana Spechler's Skinny --
The smooth surfaces of idyll --
The careless language of sexual violence --
What we hunger for --
The illusion of safety/the safety of illusion --
The spectacle of broken men --
A tale of three coming out stories --
Beyond the measure of men --
Some jokes are funnier than others --
Dear young ladies who love Chris Brown --
So much they would let him beat them --
Blurred lines, indeed --
The trouble with Prince Charming, or, He who trespassed against us --
The solace of preparing fried foods and other quaint remembrances from 1960s Mississippi : thoughts on The help --
Surviving Django --
Beyond the struggle narrative --
The morality of Tyler Perry --
The last day of a young black man --
When less is more --
The politics of respectability --
When Twitter does what journalism cannot --
The alienable rights of women --
Holding out for a hero --
A tale of two profiles --
The racism we all carry --
Tragedy, call, compassion, response --
Bad feminist : take one --
Bad feminist : take two]]> 320 Roxane Gay 0062282719 Aileen 0 to-read 3.93 2014
author: Roxane Gay
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> 30962134 Ěý
Welcome compassion and fearlessness as your guide, and you’ll live wisely and effectively in good times and bad. But that’s easier said than done. In The Compassion Book , Pema Chödrön introduces a powerful, transformative method to nurture these qualities using a practice called lojong , which has been a primary focus of her teachings and personal practice for many years. For centuries, Tibetan Buddhists have relied on these teachings to awaken the deep goodness that lies within us.

The lojong teachings include fifty-nine pithy slogans for daily contemplation, such as “Always maintain only a joyful mind,� “Don’t be swayed by external circumstances,� “Don’t try to be the fastest,� and “Be grateful to everyone.� This book presents each of these slogans and includes Pema’s clear, succinct guidance on how to understand them—and how they can enrich our lives. It also features a forty-five-minute downloadable audio program entitled “Opening the Heart,� in which Pema offers in-depth instruction on tonglen meditation, a powerful practice that anyone can undertake to awaken compassion for oneself and others.]]> 144 Pema Chödrön 1611804205 Aileen 0 to-read 4.17
author: Pema Chödrön
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.17
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]]> 50887097 A wondrous debut from an extraordinary new voice in nonfiction, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a dark and astonishing tale of love, chaos, scientific obsession, and—possibly—even murder.

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.

Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.

When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool�a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.

Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don’t Exist reads like a fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.]]> 225 Lulu Miller Aileen 0 to-read 4.15 2020
author: Lulu Miller
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
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]]> 556302
Anthropologist Jeremy Narby has altered how we understand the Shamanic cultures and traditions that have undergone a worldwide revival in recent years. Now, in one of his most extraordinary journeys, Narby travels the globe-from the Amazon Basin to the Far East-to probe what traditional healers and pioneering researchers understand about the intelligence present in all forms of life.

Intelligence in Nature presents overwhelming illustrative evidence that independent intelligence is not unique to humanity alone. Indeed, bacteria, plants, animals, and other forms of nonhuman life display an uncanny penchant for self-deterministic decisions, patterns, and actions.

Narby presents the first in-depth anthropological study of this concept in the West. He not only uncovers a mysterious thread of intelligent behavior within the natural world but also probes the question of what humanity can learn from nature's economy and knowingness in its own search for a saner and more sustainable way of life.]]> 288 Jeremy Narby 1585424617 Aileen 0 to-read 3.83 2006
author: Jeremy Narby
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2006
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]]> 17934655 The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection; winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain—real and imagined, her own and others’—Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.]]> 230 Leslie Jamison 1555976719 Aileen 0 to-read 3.68 2014
author: Leslie Jamison
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2014
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]]> 61885024
Dave Torres, a night watchman in a placid coastal town, knows all about sleep troubles. Since childhood, he’s battled terrors and nightmares. Sometimes those battles leak into his waking life, with disastrous consequences for those he loves. Now Dave lives alone and self-medicates to neutralize his dreams. It’s not much of a life, he knows.

The morning after Independence Day, Santa Mira, California, is so quiet Dave can hear the ocean from miles away. Traffic signals blink from red to green over empty intersections. Storefronts remain locked up tight. Every radio station whispers static.

And all over town, there are bodies, lying right where their owners left them. Dead right where they slept.

Dave―along with his ex-girlfriend, Katie, his best friend, Matteo, and Linda, a nurse he’s just met―struggle to unravel the mystery before sleep overtakes them all.

Except the answer to the mystery might lie in the one place that frightens Dave His twisted, unnerving dreams. Now Dave and his friends must straddle the liminal boundary between life and death as they fight to save everyone they’ve ever loved―and to keep their eyes open.

Because if any of them falls asleep now, it will be the last thing they ever do.]]> 304 Jake Emanuel 1250284937 Aileen 0 to-read 3.42 2023
author: Jake Emanuel
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2023
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]]> 55405181
A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson’s award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.]]> 254 Brian Evenson 1566896150 Aileen 0 to-read 4.08 2021
author: Brian Evenson
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
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]]> 57485174 Startling stories that center the bodies, memories, myths, and relationships of Asian American women, from the National Book Award �5 Under 35� honoree and author of Bestiary

In “Auntland,� a steady stream of aunts adjust to American life by sneaking surreptitious kisses from women at temple, buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prepare for citizenship tests, and hatching plans to name their daughter “Dog.� In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,� ghost-cousins cross space, seas, and skies to haunt their live-cousin, wife to a storm-chaser. In “Xífù,� a mother-in-law tortures a wife in increasingly unsuccessful attempts to rid the house of her. In “Mariela,� two girls explore one another’s bodies for the first time in the belly of a plastic shark while in “Virginia Slims,� a woman from a cigarette ad comes to life. And in “Resident Aliens,� a former slaughterhouse serves as a residence to a series of widows, each harboring her own calamitous secrets.

With each tale, K-Ming Chang gives us her own take on a surrealism that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian. Stunningly told in her feminist fabulist style, these are uncanny stories peeling back greater questions of power and memory.]]> 224 K-Ming Chang 0593241584 Aileen 0 to-read 3.70 2022
author: K-Ming Chang
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2022
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]]> 91274427 For fans of The Midnight Library and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this charming Japanese novel shows how the perfect book recommendation can change a reader's life.

What are you looking for?

This is the famous question routinely asked by Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. Like most librarians, Komachi has read every book lining her shelves—but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of her library guests. For anyone who walks through her door, Komachi can sense exactly what they’re looking for in life and provide just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it.

Each visitor comes to her library from a different juncture in their careers and dreams, from the restless sales attendant who feels stuck at her job to the struggling working mother who longs to be a magazineĚýeditor. The conversation that they have with Sayuri Komachi—and the surprise book she lends each of them—will have life-altering consequences.

With heartwarming charm and wisdom, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a paean to the magic of libraries, friendship and community, perfect for anyone who has ever found themselves at an impasse in their life and in need of a little inspiration.]]> 304 Michiko Aoyama 1335005625 Aileen 0 to-read 4.07 2020
author: Michiko Aoyama
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
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]]> 17934530 Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

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

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.]]> 195 Jeff VanderMeer 0374104093 Aileen 0 to-read 3.79 2014
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2014
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]]> 58724863
On the way home from a party, seventeen-year-old Ivy and her soon-to-be ex nearly run over a nude young woman standing in the middle of a tree-lined road. It’s only the first in a string of increasingly eerie events and offerings: a dead rabbit in the driveway, a bizarre concoction buried by her mother in the backyard, a box of childhood keepsakes hidden in her parents� closet safe. Most unsettling of all, corroded recollections of Ivy and her enigmatic mother’s past resurface, with the help of the boy next door.

What if there’s more to Ivy’s mother than meets the eye? And what if the supernatural forces she messed with during her own teen years have come back to haunt them both? Ivy must grapple with these questions and more if she’s going to escape the darkness closing in.

Straddling Ivy’s contemporary suburban town and her mother’s magic-drenched 1990s Chicago, this bewitching and propulsive story rockets towards a conclusion guaranteed to keep readers up all night.]]> 341 Melissa Albert 1250826365 Aileen 0 to-read 3.72 2022
author: Melissa Albert
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.72
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]]> 42527596 When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods.

When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?

Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants…until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.

Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.

From Hugo Award–winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher.]]> 385 T. Kingfisher 1534429573 Aileen 0 to-read 3.60 2019
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2019
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]]> 359194
Renowned social psychologist and creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo explores the mechanisms that make good people do bad things, how moral people can be seduced into acting immorally, and what this says about the line separating good from evil.

The Lucifer Effect explains how—and the myriad reasons why—we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.� Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women.

Here, for the first time and in detail, Zimbardo tells the full story of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the landmark study in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly divided into “guards� and “inmates� and then placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as ordinary college students were transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners.

By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the “bad apple� with that of the “bad barrel”—the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around.

This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, though, Zimbardo also offers hope. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically. Like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, The Lucifer Effect is a shocking, engrossing study that will change the way we view human behavior.]]> 551 Philip G. Zimbardo 1400064112 Aileen 0 to-read 3.91 2007
author: Philip G. Zimbardo
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2007
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]]> 406235 178 James Baldwin Aileen 0 to-read 4.40 1956
author: James Baldwin
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1956
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]]> 23128387
Shoya is a bully. When Shoko, a girl who can’t hear, enters his elementary school class, she becomes their favorite target, and Shoya and his friends goad each other into devising new tortures for her. But the children’s cruelty goes too far. Shoko is forced to leave the school, and Shoya ends up shouldering all the blame. Six years later, the two meet again. Can Shoya make up for his past mistakes, or is it too late?]]> 190 Yoshitoki Oima 163236056X Aileen 0 to-read 4.47 2011
author: Yoshitoki Oima
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2011
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]]> 60020980 192 Seiko Erisawa 1638585210 Aileen 0 to-read 3.84 2020
author: Seiko Erisawa
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
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date added: 2023/11/19
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]]> 33624275 208 Kanata Yanagino Aileen 0 to-read 4.37 2016
author: Kanata Yanagino
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2016
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date added: 2023/11/19
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]]> 43306206
The Courage to Be Disliked shows you how to unlock the power within yourself to become your best and truest self, change your future and find lasting happiness. Using the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of 19th-century psychology alongside Freud and Jung, the authors explain how we are all free to determine our own future free of the shackles of past experiences, doubts and the expectations of others. It’s a philosophy that’s profoundly liberating, allowing us to develop the courage to change, and to ignore the limitations that we and those around us can place on ourselves.

The result is a book that is both highly accessible and profound in its importance. Millions have already read and benefited from its wisdom. Now that The Courage to Be Disliked has been published for the first time in English, so can you.]]> 288 Ichiro Kishimi Aileen 0 to-read 3.90 2013
author: Ichiro Kishimi
name: Aileen
average rating: 3.90
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]]> 44901216 Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body�---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.]]> 224 Achille Mbembe 1478005858 Aileen 0 to-read 4.24 2016
author: Achille Mbembe
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.24
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]]> 1613519 352 Denise Ferreira da Silva 0816649200 Aileen 0 to-read 4.12 2007
author: Denise Ferreira da Silva
name: Aileen
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]>