en-US Sat, 26 Apr 2025 15:30:28 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 168632462 A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good', from the award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident.

As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished? A meditative and deeply moving novel from one of Australia's most acclaimed and best loved writers.

"Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout." THE GUARDIAN UK]]> 320 Charlotte Wood C 0 3.73 2023
author: Charlotte Wood
name: C
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 938212 246 Charles Portis 0879519312 C 4 3.83 1979
author: Charles Portis
name: C
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 139135412 Will be shipped from US. 0 Jill Ker Conway C 0 3.80
author: Jill Ker Conway
name: C
average rating: 3.80
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 1997/01/29
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 214151387 A heartfelt and hilarious collection of essays from the comedian and entertainer known for voicing Olaf in Disney's Frozen and for his award-winning turn as Elder Cunningham in the Broadway smash hit The Book of Mormon

For the first and possibly last time Josh Gad dives into a wide array of personal topics: the lasting impact of his parents�� divorce; how he struggled with weight and self-image; his first big break; how everyone was sure his most successful ventures (both on the big screen and on the stage) would fail; his take on fatherhood; and much more. This trip down the rabbit hole of overly personal stories will distract readers from climate change, the downward descent of democracy in Western civilization, and the existential threat that AI poses to Drake’s music—with never-before-seen photos and few-to-no spelling errors.

Whether you know him from Disney or Broadway, YouTube, the silver screen, or not at all, one fact remains: Gad’s work never fails to bring people together (as long as they’re alive). His delightful debut, written in the tradition of Amy Poehler, Jim Gaffigan, and Mindy Kaling, reminds us to keep going, even when the chips and doubters are stacked against you.]]> 272 Josh Gad 1668050528 C 0 to-read 4.23 2025
author: Josh Gad
name: C
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215361984 Two people, one hotel room, and all the choices and complications that make up a life.

After six years of a stolen hour here, another there, tonight is going to be different—very different—for Nick Holloway and Jenny Parrish. They’ve booked a room in a new luxury hotel in Manhattan, where they’ll spend the entire night together for the first time. Expectations are running high for this brief reprieve from ordinary life: they both need a good bout of ravishing sex and witty conversation.

But that’s not what they get.

Because they’ve barely gotten started when a smoke alarm goes off. Nick is annoyed, but not worried about what must be only a minor glitch. Jenny is anxious, guilty—is karma coming for them at last?

This existential page-turner seamlessly shifts between Nick and Jenny’s perspectives as the reality of their situation becomes apparent, and all their secrets, evasions and regrets come spilling out. Stripped of their defenses, disagreeing about everything, these two flawed, funny, very different people are forced to be honest—with each other and themselves—about what they want, where they’ve screwed up, and whether their affair is really as casual as it seems.]]> 288 Eliza Kennedy 0593800834 C 0 3.55 2025
author: Eliza Kennedy
name: C
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 379087 Ce roman historique de l’Irlandais Sebastian Barry, paru en 2005, a été sélectionné pour le prestigieux Man Booker Prize.]]> 292 Sebastian Barry 0143035096 C 0 to-read 4.10 2005
author: Sebastian Barry
name: C
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215750214 Ten beautifully illustrated essays tell the stories of handcrafted objects and their makers, providing inspiration and insight into Black history and craftsmanship.

Black artisans have long been central to American art and design, creating innovative and highly desired work against immense odds. Atlanta-based chairmaker and scholar Robell Awake explores the stories behind ten cornerstones of Black craft,


The celebrated wooden chairs of Richard Poynor, an enslaved craftsman who began a dynasty of Tennessee chairmakers.


The elegant wrought-iron gates of Philip Simmons, seen to this day throughout Charleston, South Carolina, whose work features motifs from the Low Country.


The inventive assemblage art and yard shows of Joe Minter, James Hampton, Bessie Harvey, and others, who draw on African spiritual traditions to create large-scale improvisational art installations.




From the enslaved potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, to Ann Lowe, the couture dressmaker who made Jacqueline Kennedy's wedding dress, to Gullah Geechee sweetgrass basket makers, to the celebrated quilters of Gee's Bend, A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects illuminates the work of generations of Black craftspeople, foregrounding their enduring contributions to American craft.

BLACK CRAFT AND Delving into the history of Black skilled artisans, estimated to have outnumbered white artisans five to one in the southern United States in the late 1800s, this unique art history book celebrates handcrafted objects that reflect the dynamic nature of Black culture.



DYNAMIC ILLUSTRATED Luminous color illustrations by artist Johnalynn Holland highlight beloved craft objects and their makers, creating a fascinating volume to study and treasure.



ART HISTORY Author Robell Awake is a notable furniture maker, artisan, and educator whose work has been featured in the New York Times and in group shows at Verso Gallery in New York City and the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC. Dr. Tiffany Momon, who contributes an afterword, is the founder and co-director of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive and a leading scholar of Black history and African American placemaking throughout the southeast.



BEAUTIFUL GIFT The gorgeous design is ideal for art collectors and craft enthusiasts, as a keepsake reminder of Black heritage, for Black History Month and beyond.

Perfect


Anyone interested in the intersection of Black art, craft, and history


Designers and craftspeople


Educators and students


Collectors and museum curators


Lovers of fine and artisanal design objects

]]> 144 Robell Awake 1797228544 C 0 4.30
author: Robell Awake
name: C
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 212430491 Wesley Morris C 0 4.00 2024
author: Wesley Morris
name: C
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 45734862
Roza does all she can to take care of Shira and shield her from the horrors of the outside world. They play silent games and invent their own sign language. But then the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Roza must face an impossible choice: whether to keep her daughter close by her side, or give her the chance to survive by letting her go . . .

The Yellow Bird Sings is a powerfully gripping and deeply moving novel about the unbreakable bond between parent and child and the triumph of humanity and hope in even the darkest circumstances.]]> 294 Jennifer Rosner 1250179769 C 3 4.05 2020
author: Jennifer Rosner
name: C
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 212806569 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey to peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of��Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz �� just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy �� collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied ways those of other cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]> 224 Geraldine Brooks 059365398X C 0 4.34 2025
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: C
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves:
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]]> 201608156
Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father's shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love �� and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.

But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter's lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.

Set over the course of one December in the same village as Williams' beloved This Is Happiness, Time of the Child is a tender return to Faha for readers who know its charms, and a heartwarming welcome to new readers entering for the very first time.]]> 304 Niall Williams 1639734201 C 5 4.16 2024
author: Niall Williams
name: C
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves:
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]]> 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach C 4 4.11 2024
author: Alison Espach
name: C
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves:
review:
The audiobook is really well done, read by Helen Laser. Her voice shifts are so effective at indicating who is speaking in this character filled novel. If I'd read the book I'd give it 3 stars but the audio version boosts it.
]]> 156741696 The author of Cork Dork takes readers on another fascinating, hilarious, and revelatory journey—this time burrowing deep inside the impassioned, secretive world of art and artists.

An award-winning journalist obsessed with obsession, Bianca Bosker’s existence was upended when she wandered into the art world—and couldn’t look away. Intrigued by artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors and art fiends who max out credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world, Bosker grew fixated on understanding why art matters and how she—or any of us—could engage with it more deeply.

In Get the Picture, Bosker throws herself into the nerve center of art and the people who live for it: gallerists, collectors, curators, and, of course, artists themselves—the kind who work multiple jobs to afford their studios while scrabbling to get eyes on their art. As she stretches canvases until her fingers blister; talks her way into A-list parties full of billionaire collectors; has her face sat on by a nearly naked performance artist; and forces herself to stare at a single sculpture for hours on end while working as a museum security guard, she discovers not only the inner workings of the art-canonization machine but a more expansive way of living.

Probing everything from cave paintings to Instagram and from the science of sight to the importance of beauty as it examines art’s role in our culture, our economy, and our hearts, Get the Picture is a rollicking adventure that will forever change the way you see.]]> 370 Bianca Bosker 0525562206 C 4
The requirements of the business -- "While I (as a writer) spend hours tweaking sentences to make them clearer, artists painstakingly revise their pieces to make them more ambiguous." Contemporary art has sworn off beauty, and doesn't want to be decorative. (Maybe you've noticed.)

One horror of the business is how artists are required to present, always on, always self-conscious. Everything they do matters in the judgmental art world, which "isn't small, it's microscopic". Everyone is paranoid, hedging opinions. The Heads are museum curators, art advisers, gallerists, and their rich buyers. The rest of us are "Schmos" and often they won't sell to Schmos. One adviser claimed that the Heads "are quick to snap up quality artists" and "few good ones are languishing in obscurity". Ha! Then explain why 85% of "quality artists" in museums are white and 87% are male. Since art judgments are subjective, the Heads have to claim omniscient taste, but there actually is no "best".

Much is decided based on an artist's activity: going to shows, studio visits, online activity, becoming part of the community-- "you can't be a lazy artist in New York" says one. Or introverted. Or weird. Van Gogh would do no better today.

Being an artist is a business -- being starry eyed about the creative process, we barely consider the administrative crap -- Artists are not only head of production, they are finance chief, supply chain manager, PR team, shipping clerk...

Bosker observes artist studios "have a lived-in disheveledness I'd come to recognize as artists' way of marking their territory".

Historically successful artists always had assistants to delegate small parts and touch ups to. But count on Yoko Ono to take that privilege to the limit. She had an exhibition of 100 sculptures that she didn't even make! Yoko hired a fabricator, and asked her at the opening, "Did you enjoy making the pieces?" Isn't that Yoko to a T?

Bosker notes art bullies on Instagram espouse the view that art is a zero sum game, and opportunities are finite because attention is finite because the audience for art is finite. And they want it even smaller! They want to kick out the Schmos like me, who "are only dumbing down the culture".

But as a guard at the Guggenheim Museum, Bianca Bosker was staring at art for hours. The same piece. And learned to love fully taking in one piece. She realized that art that's incomprehensible is ungenerous. She realized that the art world may pitch the "artificial scarcity of great art" but beauty isn't expensive or a luxury or hard to find. It's attention that hard to find. She encourages everyone to attend not just museums but art shows, garage galleries and art school exhibitions. Museum art has gone through so many levels of vetting -- but we can all seek and enjoy artists overlooked by the Machine.]]> 4.09 2024
author: Bianca Bosker
name: C
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/26
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves:
review:
If you like art, Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker is an in depth exploration of the contemporary art scene by a smart writer willing to immerse herself for years! Bosker took low level work for gallery owners, an artist, and was a guard at the Guggenheim! Her observations are great -- The white cube setting, now the standard for showing art, "stands for a community with common ideas and assumptions," a mechanism for assuring art is considered art. It's now so powerful that junk left in that setting will be mistaken for artistic treasure (such as a janitor's mop!)

The requirements of the business -- "While I (as a writer) spend hours tweaking sentences to make them clearer, artists painstakingly revise their pieces to make them more ambiguous." Contemporary art has sworn off beauty, and doesn't want to be decorative. (Maybe you've noticed.)

One horror of the business is how artists are required to present, always on, always self-conscious. Everything they do matters in the judgmental art world, which "isn't small, it's microscopic". Everyone is paranoid, hedging opinions. The Heads are museum curators, art advisers, gallerists, and their rich buyers. The rest of us are "Schmos" and often they won't sell to Schmos. One adviser claimed that the Heads "are quick to snap up quality artists" and "few good ones are languishing in obscurity". Ha! Then explain why 85% of "quality artists" in museums are white and 87% are male. Since art judgments are subjective, the Heads have to claim omniscient taste, but there actually is no "best".

Much is decided based on an artist's activity: going to shows, studio visits, online activity, becoming part of the community-- "you can't be a lazy artist in New York" says one. Or introverted. Or weird. Van Gogh would do no better today.

Being an artist is a business -- being starry eyed about the creative process, we barely consider the administrative crap -- Artists are not only head of production, they are finance chief, supply chain manager, PR team, shipping clerk...

Bosker observes artist studios "have a lived-in disheveledness I'd come to recognize as artists' way of marking their territory".

Historically successful artists always had assistants to delegate small parts and touch ups to. But count on Yoko Ono to take that privilege to the limit. She had an exhibition of 100 sculptures that she didn't even make! Yoko hired a fabricator, and asked her at the opening, "Did you enjoy making the pieces?" Isn't that Yoko to a T?

Bosker notes art bullies on Instagram espouse the view that art is a zero sum game, and opportunities are finite because attention is finite because the audience for art is finite. And they want it even smaller! They want to kick out the Schmos like me, who "are only dumbing down the culture".

But as a guard at the Guggenheim Museum, Bianca Bosker was staring at art for hours. The same piece. And learned to love fully taking in one piece. She realized that art that's incomprehensible is ungenerous. She realized that the art world may pitch the "artificial scarcity of great art" but beauty isn't expensive or a luxury or hard to find. It's attention that hard to find. She encourages everyone to attend not just museums but art shows, garage galleries and art school exhibitions. Museum art has gone through so many levels of vetting -- but we can all seek and enjoy artists overlooked by the Machine.
]]> 17465512
Jessica Vye's 'violent experience' colours her schooldays and her reaction to the world around her- a confining world of Order Marks, wartime restrictions, viyella dresses, nicely-restrained essays and dusty tea shops. For Jessica she has been told that she is 'beyond all possible doubt', a born writer. With her inability to conform, her absolute compulsion to tell the truth and her dedication to accurately noting her experiences, she knows this anyway. But what she doesn't know is that the experiences that sustain and enrich her burgeoning talent will one day lead to a new- and entirely unexpected- reality.]]> 211 Jane Gardam 1609451414 C 4 3.84 1971
author: Jane Gardam
name: C
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 154472
Fussell's landmark study of World War I remains as original and gripping today as ever before: a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. 14 halftones.]]> 368 Paul Fussell 0195133323 C 5 4.13 1975
author: Paul Fussell
name: C
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1975
rating: 5
read at: 1982/11/11
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 1059856 The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking.

Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.

“I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).�� —Groucho Marx

“A cheerfully uninhibited...variation on the theme of the Innocents Abroad...Miss Dundy comes up with fresh and spirited comedy....Her novel is enormous fun—sparklingly written, genuinely youthful in spirit.�� ��The Atlantic]]> 260 Elaine Dundy 1590172329 C 0 3.66 1958
author: Elaine Dundy
name: C
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 145624825
“Jill McCorkle has had an extraordinary ear for the music of ordinary life since the beginning of her career, able to work with the voices we know so well to write these stories about what they will not tell us, what they would rather not tell us, what they hope to tell us, what too often goes unsaid. And this collection is a new wonder.�� —Alexander Chee, author of  How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Jill McCorkle, author of the  New York Times  bestselling  Life After Life and the widely acclaimed  Hieroglyphics (“One of our wryest, warmest, wisest storytellers�� —Rebecca Makkai), brings us a breathtaking collection of stories that offers an intimate look at the moments when a person’s life changes forever.

Old Crimes delves into the lives of characters who hold their secrets and misdeeds close, even as the past continues to reverberate over time and across generations. And despite the characters�� yearnings for connection, they can’t seem to tell the whole truth. In “Low Tones,�� a woman uses her hearing impairment as a way to guard herself from her husband’s commentary. In “Lineman,” a telephone lineman strains to connect to his family even as he feels pushed aside in a digital world. In “Confessional,�� a young couple buys a confessional booth for fun, only to discover the cost of honesty.

Profoundly moving and unforgettable, for fans of Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, and Lily King, the stories in Old Crimes reveal why McCorkle has long been considered a master of the form, probing lives full of great intensity, longing and affection, and deep regret.]]> 256 Jill McCorkle 1616209739 C 0 3.62 2024
author: Jill McCorkle
name: C
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 13547504 Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down's syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter.

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent should parents accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on ten years of research and interviews with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges.

Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far from the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other—a theme in every family’s life.]]> 962 Andrew Solomon C 5
Reading the chapter about schizophrenic children, who were usually normal until adolescence, I'm finding once again, as with Down's syndrome and autism, that the mother/family was often blamed:

"Self-help books such as the runaway best seller The Secret argue that mental health is simply a matter of positive thinking. William James called earlier versions of this philosophy, written into Christian Science and other American metaphysical movements of the nineteenth century, 'the religion of the healthy minded,' celebrating 'the conquering efficacy of courage, hope and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry.' This concept is popular for its suggestion that healthy people have earned their health through personal courage. For those who are unwell, however, the suggestion that flawed discipline and weak character are the source of their psychosis is torture...
"The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey...finds the blame absurd. 'Any parent who has raised a child knows that parents are not powerful enough to cause a disease like schizophrenia simply by favoring one child over another or giving the child inconsistent messages."]]> 4.25 2012
author: Andrew Solomon
name: C
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2013/01/27
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves:
review:
What an amazing book: Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon, about families coping with children who are different -- deaf, dwarfs, autistic, criminals, transgender, etc. The book is fascinating and heartbreaking; Solomon meets heroic, loving parents who do battle for their children and agonize over what can be improved versus what must be accepted.

Reading the chapter about schizophrenic children, who were usually normal until adolescence, I'm finding once again, as with Down's syndrome and autism, that the mother/family was often blamed:

"Self-help books such as the runaway best seller The Secret argue that mental health is simply a matter of positive thinking. William James called earlier versions of this philosophy, written into Christian Science and other American metaphysical movements of the nineteenth century, 'the religion of the healthy minded,' celebrating 'the conquering efficacy of courage, hope and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry.' This concept is popular for its suggestion that healthy people have earned their health through personal courage. For those who are unwell, however, the suggestion that flawed discipline and weak character are the source of their psychosis is torture...
"The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey...finds the blame absurd. 'Any parent who has raised a child knows that parents are not powerful enough to cause a disease like schizophrenia simply by favoring one child over another or giving the child inconsistent messages."
]]> 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,�� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics�� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,�� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 C 3 3.87 2024
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: C
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 58636923 A sharp and funny novel of a congregational search committee, told as a memoir with recipes

Dana Potowski is a restaurant critic and food writer and a longtime member of a progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California. Under pressure to find her next book idea, she’s asked to join the church search committee for a new minister and agrees, resolving to secretly pen a memoir, with recipes, about the experience. That memoir, Search, follows the travails of the committee and their candidates—and becomes its own media sensation.

Dana had good material to work the committee is a wide-ranging mix of Unitarian Universalist congregants, and their candidates range from a baker and microbrew master/pastor to a reverend who identifies as both a witch and an environmental warrior. Although she may have been ambivalent about joining the committee, Dana finds that she cares deeply about the fate of this institution and she will fight the entire committee, if necessary, to win the day for her side. This wry and wise tale will speak to anyone who has ever gone searching.]]> 393 Michelle Huneven 059330005X C 4 3.85 2022
author: Michelle Huneven
name: C
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 14276 135 William Maxwell 1860464181 C 0 3.91 1980
author: William Maxwell
name: C
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at: 2002/02/02
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 60784798
The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural, and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings and terrors. It's haunted by many gods - the sun among them, rising and falling on each day that Denny could be found, or lost forever.]]> 352 Fiona McFarlane 0374606234 C 0 3.62 2022
author: Fiona McFarlane
name: C
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> 195791148
At eight years old, Ricky Ian Gordon pulled The Victor Book of Opera off his piano teacher’s bookshelf, and his world shifted on its axis. Though scandal, sadness, and confusion would shake that world over the next few decades, its polestar remained constant. Music has been the guiding force of Gordon’s life; through it, he has been able not only to survive great sorrow but also to capture the depths of his emotion in song. It is this strength, this technical and visceral genius, that has made him one of our generation’s greatest composers.

In Seeing Through , Gordon writes with humor, insight, and incredible candor about his life and a tumultuous youth on Long Island, his artistic collaborations and obsessions, the creation of his compositions (including The Grapes of Wrath , 27 , Orpheus and Euridice , Intimate Apparel , Ellen West , and more), his addictions and the abuses he endured, and the loss of his partner to AIDS and the devastation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As Gordon writes of that “We were, thousands of us, Lazarus. We had to rise from the ashes. We didn’t have to rebuild our lives, we had to build new ones.��

Gordon has succeeded in building a remarkable life, as well as a body of work that bears witness to all he survived in the process―one that will endure as a pivotal chapter in America's songbook.]]> 480 Ricky Ian Gordon 0374605726 C 0 to-read 4.21 2024
author: Ricky Ian Gordon
name: C
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59411948
20 March. With Rupert now working from home my life is much easier, as I get regular cups of tea and a lovely hot lunch.

A year in and out of lockdown as experienced by Alan Bennett.

Alan Bennett's diary takes us from the filming of Talking Heads and memories of doomed childhood fishing expeditions, to thoughts on Boris Johnson, stair lifts, junk shops of old, having a haircut and encounters on the local park bench.]]> 49 Alan Bennett 1800811926 C 0 3.71
author: Alan Bennett
name: C
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 7570366 Book by Barrow, Andrew 192 Andrew Barrow 0715624164 C 0 to-read 3.33 1992
author: Andrew Barrow
name: C
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 672222
From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers have evoked such a multitude of worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiancé on his way to war, and 'Noon Wine', a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas. In all of the compelling stories collected here, harsh and tragic truths are expressed in prose both brilliant and precise.]]> 208 Katherine Anne Porter 0151707553 C 0 3.94 1939
author: Katherine Anne Porter
name: C
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 C 3 4.05 2024
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: C
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> 55777544 “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?��

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

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

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives�� tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.]]> 464 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0593133498 C 0 3.72 2024
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: C
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
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]]> 544038
Help is here! From how to eat an ice-cream cone to developing “principles�� when you have none, the author’s mission is to elevate, and ennoble, those fleeting instincts we all harbor to get our lives in order. “Hills is preoccupied primarily with the little things,�� Nora Ephron wrote in the New York Times “and he writes about them deliciously.��

This volume includes three titles previously published How To Do Things Right , How to Retire at 41 , and How to Be Good . They have been edited, revised and combined into one volume and the contents will have you laughing out loud, thinking hard, and at least temporarily rearranging your frazzled life. Hills is wise, witty, and very, very funny. But behind the humor, Hills remains a deeply sage and serious writer. This is his best advice, from years of experience, served up from the heart of one of the most charming humorists to grace the American scene.]]> 259 Lawrence Rust Hills 0879239697 C 0 to-read 3.90 1973
author: Lawrence Rust Hills
name: C
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 38885815 A Washington Post notable book of the year.

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune keep hitting beleaguered English professor Jason Fitger right between the eyes in this hilarious and eagerly awaited sequel to the cult classic of anhedonic academe, the Thurber Prize-winning Dear Committee Members.

Once more into the breach...

Now is the fall of his discontent, as Jason Fitger, newly appointed chair of the English Department of Payne University, takes arms against a sea of troubles, personal and institutional. His ex-wife is sleeping with the dean who must approve whatever modest initiatives he undertakes. The fearsome department secretary Fran clearly runs the show (when not taking in rescue parrots and dogs) and holds plenty of secrets she's not sharing. The lavishly funded Econ Department keeps siphoning off English's meager resources and has taken aim at its remaining office space. And Fitger's attempt to get a mossbacked and antediluvian Shakespeare scholar to retire backfires spectacularly when the press concludes that the Bard is being kicked to the curricular curb.

Lord, what fools these mortals be! Julie Schumacher proves the point and makes the most of it in this delicious romp of satire.

Don't miss Julie Schumacher's new novel, The English Experience, coming soon.]]> 312 Julie Schumacher 0385542356 C 0 to-read 3.74 2018
author: Julie Schumacher
name: C
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 25886636 Cockfosters is a funny, frank and forceful story collection dealing with ageing, ambition and the patterns of repetition and renewal found in long friendships and marriages. It opens irresistible new windows onto the world from Arizona to Dubai and from Moscow to Berlin. Turning both a panoramic and a zoom lens on the way we live now, these stories range through hitch-hiking in Bohemian forest-land to cresting the waves of the Aegean to the mending of hearts and the recovery of lost property at the end of the Piccadilly Line.

Helen Simpson writes with great warmth, wit and candour about the complexities of modern life, and this new collection shows why she is hailed as one of the best short story writers at work in the world today.]]> 0 Helen Simpson 1473523486 C 0 3.40 2015
author: Helen Simpson
name: C
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> 58724923 A wildly inventive spin on the supernatural thriller, about a woman working as a nanny for a young boy with strange and disturbing secrets.

Mallory Quinn is fresh out of rehab when she takes a job as a babysitter for Ted and Caroline Maxwell. She is to look after their five-year-old son, Teddy.

Mallory immediately loves it. She has her own living space, goes out for nightly runs, and has the stability she craves. And she sincerely bonds with Teddy, a sweet, shy boy who is never without his sketchbook and pencil. His drawings are the usual fare: trees, rabbits, balloons. But one day, he draws something different: a man in a forest, dragging a woman’s lifeless body.

Then, Teddy’s artwork becomes increasingly sinister, and his stick figures quickly evolve into lifelike sketches well beyond the ability of any five-year-old. Mallory begins to wonder if these are glimpses of a long-unsolved murder, perhaps relayed by a supernatural force.

Knowing just how crazy it all sounds, Mallory nevertheless sets out to decipher the images and save Teddy before it’s too late.]]> 372 Jason Rekulak 1250819342 C 0 4.12 2022
author: Jason Rekulak
name: C
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> 239819
Thousands of U.S. soldiers have suffered grievous wounds in Iraq, but only one of them is a Doonesbury character. The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time chronicles seven months of cutting-edge cartooning, during which B.D.-and readers of the strip-got an up-close schooling in a kind of personal transformation no one seeks.

Deprived not only of leg but also his ubiquitous trademark helmet, B.D. survives first-response Baghdad triage, evacuation to Landstuhl's surgeon-rich environment, and visits by innumerable morale-boosting celebs, both red and blue in hue. He's awed in turn by morphine, take-no-guff nurses, his fellow amps, and his family, including the daughter who hand-delivers succor, one aspirin at a time.

Transferred stateside to Walter Reed's Ward 57, B.D. is inspired by the wisdom of physiatrists, warmed by the dedicated ministrations of real-life fellow-amp heroes like Jim the Milkshake Man, and dazzled by high-tech prostheses that cost more than luxury cars. He's annoyed by his own bouts with self-pity, by the bedside awkwardness of friends more comfortable regarding his stump from e-mail distance, and by Zonk's unwavering commitment to supplementing his care with organic meds.

As their journey continues, B.D. and Boopsie are cared for by Fisher House, a home-next-door-to-the-hospital for families whose lives revolve around therapy. B.D. finds himself painfully engaged in building his future, one sadistically difficult physical therapy session at a time. "To Lash, Helga, and the Marquis!" toast the band of differently limbed brethren, raising their glasses to their PT masters as they prepare for reentry into the ambulatory world.

From rebuilding tissue to rebuilding social skills to rebuilding lives, B.D's inspiring, insightful, and darkly humorous story confirms that it can take a village, or at least a ward, to raise a soldier when he's gone down. "Thank you for getting blown up," offers one of B.D.'s visiting players. Replies the coach, "Just doing my job."]]> 93 G.B. Trudeau 0740753851 C 0 4.29 2005
author: G.B. Trudeau
name: C
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/26
date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> 34305
These stories, and a dozen more, powerfully evoke many lives--from step-families grappling with exes to children caught in grown-up tugs-of-war--during the one holiday when feelings cannot be easily hidden.����The time of year may be magical, imbued with meaning.����But the situations are timeless.����And Maeve Binchy makes us care about them all.]]> 259 Maeve Binchy 0440223571 C 0 First read in October 1996 3.57 1995
author: Maeve Binchy
name: C
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
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First read in October 1996
]]> 60051641 A rousing and original debut story collection that probes the erotic, emotional, and intellectual lives of elder women, CAT BRUSHING will be published in the author's 80th year. CAT BRUSHING, the provocative debut by Jane Campbell, vigorously explores the sensual worlds of thirteen older women, unearthing their passions, libidinal appetites, integrity, and sense of self as they fight against prevalent misconceptions and stereotypes of the aging.Written in spikey, incisive prose, this alluring cast of characters overcomes the notion that elder women's behavior must be in some way monitored and controlled. Susan falls in love with her beautiful young caregiver Miffy, and embarks on an intense emotional relationship within the confines of her nursing home. Linda seeks out her former lover, Malik, despite having left him years ago to return to her settled marriage to Bill. Daisy, who, by a curious stroke of fate, finds herself at the funeral of her former boyfriend, Tim, relives their early life together, his betrayal of her and the anguish of that time. Martha, mourning her small dog whom she believes has been killed by the home care staff, works out how to manage a robot designed to record her behavior, and get her revenge. And the narrator of the title story, "Cat Brushing," communes with her elegant, soft Siamese, reflecting on the sexual pleasures of her past.The timeless wisdom and dark wit of debut writer Jane Campbell inspires and challenges, shocks and comforts as she examines the inner lives of women who fight to lead the rest of their lives on their own terms.]]> 245 Jane Campbell 0802160026 C 0 3.56 2022
author: Jane Campbell
name: C
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/02
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]]> 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

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

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 C 0 3.92 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: C
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> 127305853 From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women—at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie�� McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.]]> 471 Kristin Hannah 1250178630 C 4 4.58 2024
author: Kristin Hannah
name: C
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/18
date added: 2024/11/18
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]]> 25901570 The Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller

A People Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year!

"Intelligent and captivating. Don't miss it." - People Magazine

"One of the best celebrity memoirs of the year." -The Hollywood Reporter


Rock Star. Composer and Lyricist. Feminist Icon. Survivor.

Simon's memoir reveals her remarkable life, beginning with her storied childhood as the third daughter of Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, her musical debut as half of The Simon Sisters performing folk songs with her sister Lucy in Greenwich Village, to a meteoric solo career that would result in 13 top 40 hits, including the #1 song "You're So Vain." She was the first artist in history to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, for her song "Let the River Run" from the movie Working Girl.

The memoir recalls a childhood enriched by music and culture, but also one shrouded in secrets that would eventually tear her family apart. Simon brilliantly captures moments of creative inspiration, the sparks of songs, and the stories behind writing "Anticipation" and "We Have No Secrets" among many others. Romantic entanglements with some of the most famous men of the day fueled her confessional lyrics, as well as the unraveling of her storybook marriage to James Taylor.]]> 384 Carly Simon 1250095891 C 0 3.61 2015
author: Carly Simon
name: C
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/09
date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> 63366031
Through a sea of troubles—personal, institutional, and international—the gimlet-eyed, acid-tongued Fitger strives to navigate safe passage for all concerned, revealing much about the essential need for human connection and the sometimes surprising places in which it is found.]]> 230 Julie Schumacher 038555012X C 5 3.82 2023
author: Julie Schumacher
name: C
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/08
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]]> 7969627 The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story traces this great tradition through decades of social change and shows the pleasure Irish writers continue to take in the short-story form.

Deft and often devastating, these short stories dodge the rolling mythologies of Irish life to produce truths that are delightful and real. Includes Roddy Doyle, Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin, Edna O’Brien, Colm Tóibín, Clarie Keegan and William Trevor.

The road to the shore / Michael McLaverty --
The pram / Roddy Doyle --
An attack of hunger / Maeve Brennan --
Summer voices / John Banville --
Summer night / Elizabeth Bowen --
Music at Annahullion / Eugene McCabe --
Naming the names / Anne Devlin --
Shame / Keith Ridgway --
Memory and desire / Val Mulkerns --
The mad Lomasneys / Frank O'Connor --
Walking Away / Philip Ó Ceallaigh --
Villa Marta / Clare Boylan --
Lilacs / Mary Lavin --
Meles Vulgaris / Patrick Boyle --
The trout / Seán Ó Faoláin --
Night in Tunisia / Neil Jordan --
Sister Imelda / Edna O'Brien --
The key / John McGahern --
A priest in the family / Colm Tóibín --
The supremacy of grief / Hugo Hamilton --
The swing of things / Jennifer C Cornell --
Train Tracks / Aidan Mathews --
See the tree, how big it's grown / Kevin Barry --
Visit / Gerard Donovan --
Everything in this country must / Colum McCann --
Curfew / Sean O'Reilly --
Language, truth and lockjaw / Bernard MacLaverty --
Midwife to the fairies / Éilís Ní Dhuibhne --
Men and women / Clare Keegan --
Mothers were all the same / Joseph O'Connor --
The dressmaker's child / William Trevor]]> 442 Anne Enright 1847080979 C 3 3.97 2011
author: Anne Enright
name: C
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/07
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]]> 42972008
For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now �� just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity �� the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.

As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community �� its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs �� and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.]]> 400 Niall Williams 163557420X C 5 4.18 2019
author: Niall Williams
name: C
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/04
date added: 2024/11/04
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]]> 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 C 5 4.11 2023
author: Daniel Mason
name: C
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
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]]> 203708995 400 Griffin Dunne 0593652827 C 0 4.01 2024
author: Griffin Dunne
name: C
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/21
date added: 2024/10/21
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]]> 2524702
A masterful portrait of a country wrestling with its past and of individuals eking out their futures, Walk the Blue Fields is a breathtaking collection from one of Ireland’s greatest talents, and a resounding articulation of all the yearnings of the human heart.]]> 168 Claire Keegan 0802170498 C 0 4.02 2007
author: Claire Keegan
name: C
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/19
date added: 2024/09/19
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]]> 150778999
From “The Maples��
Stand still. I thought to myself ever distracted, always in a hurry
learn to stand there―if only for one minute
―drinking light and breathing.]]> 192 Marie Howe 1324075031 C 0 4.47 2024
author: Marie Howe
name: C
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
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]]> 8143909
Winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize, Foster is now published in a revised and expanded version. Beautiful, sad and eerie, it is a story of astonishing emotional depth, showcasing Claire Keegan's great accomplishment and talent.]]> 89 Claire Keegan 0571255655 C 0 4.32 2010
author: Claire Keegan
name: C
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
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]]> 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

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

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 C 5
Barbara Kingsolver modeled the story on David Copperfield. Remembering that book from school days, I enjoyed spotting Dickens' distinctive characters relocated from 1840s London to today's corner of backwoods poverty: Steerforth is Fast Forward, Micawber is McCobb, Uriah Heep is U-Haul, as skeevy and unctuous as ever.

I read Empire of Pain last year, a history of the venal Sackler family and their stealthy pushing of "non-addictive" Oxycontin, specifically targeting areas like Appalachia, aiming to create addicts via a single prescription. This book brings to life the pain and helplessness of those addicts, bereft of resources to help. Another theme is poverty and class, with Demon hyperaware of his lack of standing.

The saving grace in this tough tale, the reason to continue reading, is Demon Copperhead's distinctive voice, a perceptive young man of wry observations:

"I was born IN the mobile home, that's like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash."

“A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing.��

"He was wearing one of those dweeb flat caps that would instantly get a guy poundcaked at school, if not for the badass leather jacket and Doc Martens. Those things cost, meaning there's backup somewhere, so watch who you're punching."

“This is what I would say if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes�� We can actually hear you.��

"Charles Dickens, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Jesus Christ did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat's ass. You'd think he was from around here."

On Demon's first trip to Richmond, driving through a poor neighborhood: "Black each and all, as entirely as we up home were white, and from the looks of that street just about as broke. All of us living where we got born. Maybe you have to pay extra to mingle."

Trying to understand city living: "Chartrain explained that city people don't look each other in the eye because they're saving their juice. A person only has so much juice, and it's ideally kept for your homeboys, not all pissed away on strangers before three in the day."

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.��

On the opioid tragedy that upends his life and breaks his heart: "The first to fall in any war are forgotten. Only after it's a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag, and they call the mistake by a different name because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice.
Mom was the unknown soldier."

Kingsolver acknowledges her gratitude to Charles Dickens, citing his outrage as her inspiration; she calls him her "genius friend". She reaches his high bar with this book, taking a poor invisible orphan and making us care. Now that I'm done I miss Demon's voice.

"Emmy had never seen a lightning bug. That is just tragic."]]> 4.46 2022
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: C
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/22
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:
It's only January and I've read my Book of the Year. Demon Copperhead is hardly overlooked -- it won the Pulitzer Prize and got a boost from Oprah. Yet it was a surprising read, a full immersion in the grim life of a brave Appalachian orphan who makes his way through foster homes, a work house, trash-picking jobs, the opioid crisis, yet manages to stay solid at his core.

Barbara Kingsolver modeled the story on David Copperfield. Remembering that book from school days, I enjoyed spotting Dickens' distinctive characters relocated from 1840s London to today's corner of backwoods poverty: Steerforth is Fast Forward, Micawber is McCobb, Uriah Heep is U-Haul, as skeevy and unctuous as ever.

I read Empire of Pain last year, a history of the venal Sackler family and their stealthy pushing of "non-addictive" Oxycontin, specifically targeting areas like Appalachia, aiming to create addicts via a single prescription. This book brings to life the pain and helplessness of those addicts, bereft of resources to help. Another theme is poverty and class, with Demon hyperaware of his lack of standing.

The saving grace in this tough tale, the reason to continue reading, is Demon Copperhead's distinctive voice, a perceptive young man of wry observations:

"I was born IN the mobile home, that's like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash."

“A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing.��

"He was wearing one of those dweeb flat caps that would instantly get a guy poundcaked at school, if not for the badass leather jacket and Doc Martens. Those things cost, meaning there's backup somewhere, so watch who you're punching."

“This is what I would say if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes�� We can actually hear you.��

"Charles Dickens, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Jesus Christ did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat's ass. You'd think he was from around here."

On Demon's first trip to Richmond, driving through a poor neighborhood: "Black each and all, as entirely as we up home were white, and from the looks of that street just about as broke. All of us living where we got born. Maybe you have to pay extra to mingle."

Trying to understand city living: "Chartrain explained that city people don't look each other in the eye because they're saving their juice. A person only has so much juice, and it's ideally kept for your homeboys, not all pissed away on strangers before three in the day."

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.��

On the opioid tragedy that upends his life and breaks his heart: "The first to fall in any war are forgotten. Only after it's a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag, and they call the mistake by a different name because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice.
Mom was the unknown soldier."

Kingsolver acknowledges her gratitude to Charles Dickens, citing his outrage as her inspiration; she calls him her "genius friend". She reaches his high bar with this book, taking a poor invisible orphan and making us care. Now that I'm done I miss Demon's voice.

"Emmy had never seen a lightning bug. That is just tragic."
]]> 7364419 Homecoming, the Brennans run Quentin's restaurant in Dublin for the owner, who lives abroad. But what will happen when he suddenly pays a visit? Telling Stories sees Irene's fiancÈ turning up the night before the wedding with a face as white as the dress that is to be worn the next day. Then trouble starts... In Needy, Heather is painfully aware that Valentine's Day declarations of love should be viewed with suspicion, even if the sender is the one she loves. And in The Interview, Bessie is deaf and needs a place in a special school. But will she pass the interview?
]]> 1 Maeve Binchy 1602837759 C 0 3.65 2001
author: Maeve Binchy
name: C
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/07
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 61102560 A witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five famous writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, fame, and power in these complex and fascinating relationships.

"With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page, but a helpless kitten in daily life--dependent on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp."

The history of wives is largely one of silence, resilience, and forbearance. Toss in celebrity, male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two, and it's easy to understand why the marriages of so many famous writers have been stormy, short-lived, and mutually destructive. "It's been my experience," as the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote, "that nobody holds a man's brutality to his wife against him." Literary wives are a unique breed, requiring a particular kind of fortitude.

Author Carmela Ciuraru shares the stories of five literary marriages, exposing the misery behind closed doors. In our #MeToo era, it is impossible not to challenge notions of power and silence in the context of writers' marriages.

The legendary British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan encouraged his American wife, Elaine Dundy, to write, then watched in a jealous rage as she became a bestselling author and critical success. In the early years of their marriage, Roald Dahl enjoyed basking in the glow of his glamorous movie star wife, Patricia Neal, until he detested her for being the breadwinner, and being more famous than he was. Elizabeth Jane Howard had to divorce Kingsley Amis to escape his suffocating needs and devote herself to her own writing. ("I really couldn't write very much when I was married to him," she once recalled, "because I had a very large household to keep up and Kingsley wasn't one to boil an egg, if you know what I mean.") Surprisingly, the most traditional partnership in LIVES OF THE WIVES is a lesbian couple, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall, both of whom were socially and politically conservative and unapologetic snobs.

As this erudite and entertaining book shows, each marriage is a unique story, filled with struggles and triumphs and the negotiation of power. The Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia were never sexually compatible, and it was Morante who often behaved abusively toward her cool, detached husband, even as he unwaveringly admired his wife's talents and championed her work. Theirs was an unhappy union, yet it fueled them creatively and enabled both to become two of Italy's most important postwar writers.

LIVES OF THE WIVES is an insightful, humorous, and poignant exploration of the intersection of life and art and creativity and love.]]> 336 Carmela Ciuraru 0062356917 C 0 3.47 2023
author: Carmela Ciuraru
name: C
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/07
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 57093755 321 Jenna Fischer 0063007606 C 0 4.21 2022
author: Jenna Fischer
name: C
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves:
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]]> 199797939 Quickly, While They Still Have Horses offer a fresh, irreverent look at life in post-conflict Northern Ireland. From first loves to strained relationships to the thrills and terrors of growing up to the dangers and challenges of parenthood, Carson infuses her stories with empathy, dark wit, and a surreal edge.

In “A Certain Degree of Ownership,�� a distracted couple on a beach fail to notice their baby crawl perilously toward the sea. In “Grand So,�� the ghost of a car’s previous owner haunts the backseat. In “Troubling the Water,�� a rumor of miraculous healing creates chaos at a public swimming pool.

Carson never fails to shock and delight as kids go missing in jungle gyms, a baby washes up on a riverbank in a biscuit tin, and a bloody hand appears (and reappears) in a refrigerator. Every so often, these stories travel into alternative versions of our world, where pillars of fire are a new treatment for mental illness and animals deemed nonessential are going extinct by legislative orders. While the legacy of the Troubles is never far from Carson’s mind, it is only a backdrop to the worlds she’s woven in these stories, driven by characters who feel real enough to touch.]]> 288 Jan Carson 1668056615 C 5 4.10 2024
author: Jan Carson
name: C
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves:
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]]> 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 C 0 4.35 2022
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: C
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/21
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves:
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]]> 5246
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's vivacious cousin enters their household as a hired girl, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read book.]]> 99 Edith Wharton C 5 3.42 1911
author: Edith Wharton
name: C
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1911
rating: 5
read at: 1982/01/06
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves:
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]]> 1289617 390 Amity Shlaes 022406312X C 0 to-read 3.88 2007
author: Amity Shlaes
name: C
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 106317
The Depression was both a disaster and an opportunity. As David Kennedy vividly demonstrates, the economic crisis of the 1930s was far more than a simple reaction to the alleged excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before 1929, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated through repeated boom and bust cycles, wastefully consuming capital and inflicting untold misery on city and countryside alike.

Freedom From Fear explores how the nation agonized over its role in World War II, how it fought the war, why the United States won, and why the consequences of victory were sometimes sweet, sometimes ironic. In a compelling narrative, Kennedy analyzes the determinants of American strategy, the painful choices faced by commanders and statesmen, and the agonies inflicted on the millions of ordinary Americans who were compelled to swallow their fears and face battle as best they could.

Both comprehensive and colorful, this account of the most convulsive period in American history, excepting only the Civil War, reveals a period that formed the crucible in which modern America was formed.]]> 936 David M. Kennedy 0195144031 C 0 to-read 4.19 1999
author: David M. Kennedy
name: C
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40961608 In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.   The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect�� (New York Times). In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet�� (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful reminder about the dangers of trifling with nature.]]> 352 Timothy Egan 0547347774 C 0 to-read 4.09 2005
author: Timothy Egan
name: C
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1092816 448 Robert S. McElvaine 0812923278 C 0 to-read 3.84 1984
author: Robert S. McElvaine
name: C
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199373354
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.

Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.]]> 320 Ben Shattuck 059349038X C 5 4.36 2024
author: Ben Shattuck
name: C
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/07
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
What beautiful New England stories! Spanning centuries, the stories are linked by found artifacts and histories. Ben Shattuck describing a cold Massachusetts winter will make you shiver.
]]> 199798868 New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis�� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 294 Colm Tóibín 1476785112 C 4 3.68 2024
author: Colm Tóibín
name: C
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/31
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves:
review:
Jessie Buckley reads the audiobook beautifully. My favorite character is Eilis's old Irish mother Mrs. Lacey -- Buckley is a hoot in her depiction of this pathologically difficult woman.
]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 C 0 4.14 2023
author: David Grann
name: C
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves:
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]]> 8725 302 Ruth Reichl 0375758739 C 0 4.04 2001
author: Ruth Reichl
name: C
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2002/06/28
date added: 2024/07/22
shelves:
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]]> 51152447 The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.��

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.]]> 544 Isabel Wilkerson 0593230256 C 4 4.52 2020
author: Isabel Wilkerson
name: C
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 968 The da Vinci Code, The da Vinci Code, The da Vinci Code, and The da Vinci Code

While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci -- clues visible for all to see -- yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.

Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion -- an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others.

In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's ancient secret -- and an explosive historical truth -- will be lost forever.

The Da Vinci Code heralds the arrival of a new breed of lightning-paced, intelligent thriller utterly unpredictable right up to its stunning conclusion.]]> 489 Dan Brown C 2 A good writer could make a good book of the plot, but this was painful.]]> 3.92 2003
author: Dan Brown
name: C
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at: 2004/02/13
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves:
review:
What a joke. How many lines about her "burgundy hair" can we read? How fast can they rush away from danger, then stop on the way to peruse a mystery, then high tail it again as fast as they can?
A good writer could make a good book of the plot, but this was painful.
]]> 916856 234 Winifred Watson 190315510X C 4
I do notice many reviews critiquing how the central character betrays prejudice. This is an odd observation, since fictional characters do have flaws. And this fiction is situated in late 1930s England, a time when antisemitism was common. Miss Pettigrew was a creature of her time and mores -- we watched her spend the entire book shucking off the judgmental moral strictures she was raised to live by.

AND in the end she fell for a man named Blomfield, who’s in the rag trade, a corset maker. She even admitted to herself he wasn't “a gentleman�� as she excitedly realized her feelings for him. It’s a shame people read too fast, skimming I guess, not too fast to be offended at 1930s snobbery, but too fast to pick up on the final big reveal, too busy being sanctimonious to discern this final transformation.
]]> 3.98 1938
author: Winifred Watson
name: C
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1938
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/11
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves:
review:
Light and funny, this is a fun quick read, about a middle aged spinster having life changing encounters all in a day.

I do notice many reviews critiquing how the central character betrays prejudice. This is an odd observation, since fictional characters do have flaws. And this fiction is situated in late 1930s England, a time when antisemitism was common. Miss Pettigrew was a creature of her time and mores -- we watched her spend the entire book shucking off the judgmental moral strictures she was raised to live by.

AND in the end she fell for a man named Blomfield, who’s in the rag trade, a corset maker. She even admitted to herself he wasn't “a gentleman�� as she excitedly realized her feelings for him. It’s a shame people read too fast, skimming I guess, not too fast to be offended at 1930s snobbery, but too fast to pick up on the final big reveal, too busy being sanctimonious to discern this final transformation.

]]> 34237826
Before the Civil War, Grant was flailing. His business ventures had been dismal, and despite distinguished service in the Mexican War, he ended up resigning from the army in disgrace amid recurring accusations of drunkenness. But in the Civil War, Grant began to realize his remarkable potential, soaring through the ranks of the Union army, prevailing at the Battle of Shiloh and in the Vicksburg campaign and ultimately defeating the legendary Confederate general Robert E. Lee after a series of unbelievably bloody battles in Virginia. Along the way Grant endeared himself to President Lincoln and became his most trusted general and the strategic genius of the war effort. His military fame translated into a two-term presidency, but one plagued by corruption scandals involving his closest staff. All the while Grant himself remained more or less above reproach. But, more importantly, he never failed to seek freedom and justice for black Americans, working to crush the Ku Klux Klan and earning the admiration of Frederick Douglass, who called him 'the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race." After his presidency, he was again brought low by a trusted colleague, this time a dashing young swindler on Wall Street, but he resuscitated his image by working with Mark Twain to publish his memoirs, which are recognized as a masterpiece of the genre.

With his famous lucidity, breadth, and meticulousness, Chernow finds the threads that bind these disparate stories together, shedding new light on the man whom Walt Whitman described as "nothing heroic... and yet the greatest hero." His probing portrait of Grant's lifelong struggle with alcoholism transforms our understanding of the man at the deepest level. This is America's greatest biographer, bringing movingly to life one of America's finest but most underappreciated presidents. The definitive biography, Grant is a grand synthesis of painstaking research and literary brilliance that makes sense of all sides of Grant's life, explaining how this simple Midwesterner could at once be so ordinary and so extraordinary.]]> 1074 Ron Chernow 159420487X C 0 currently-reading 4.46 2017
author: Ron Chernow
name: C
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 101145361
From the beloved award-winning author Paul Yoon comes a spectacular collection of unique stories, each confronting themes of identity, belonging, and the collision of cultures across countries and centuries.

A boy searches for his father, a prison guard on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family.

The Hive and the Honey is a bold and indelible collection by celebrated author Paul Yoon, one that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in Far East Russia?

Lauded as a “quotidian - surreal craft - master�� ( New York magazine), Yoon’s stunning stories are laced with beauty and cruelty, and The Hive and the Honey is the work of an author writing at the very height of his powers.]]> 160 Paul Yoon 1668020793 C 0 3.73 2023
author: Paul Yoon
name: C
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves:
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]]> 58877223 379 Jenny Erpenbeck 332860085X C 3
�����ձ�> 3.35 2021
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: C
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves:
review:
This Booker Prize winner by Germany's brightest literary light wasn't a pleasant book to read, the story of a older man's affair with a 19 year old, as he grows more jealous, controlling, and abusive, even tricking and surveilling her. But the metaphor becomes apparent, of East German corruption and evil growing out of  hopeful beginning. I'd only recommend to hardy readers who can persevere through many many scenes of male manipulation and abuse of a young woman

����
]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

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

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X C 3 My first disappointment by Ann Patchett.]]> 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: C
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/27
date added: 2024/07/05
shelves:
review:
I read that Ann Patchett wrote this book at a standing desk while walking on a treadmill. It reads like it. The slow stately pace of the book never varies, and in a book with no big events or melodramatic scenes, it's just too slow.
My first disappointment by Ann Patchett.
]]> 527632 These works represent the recurrent themes which most characterize the work of Käthe Kollwitz: social consciousness and a sense of the suffering of mankind, an urge to voice the basic maternal attitude, and a preoccupation with death. She has been called a propagandist, a crusader, yet her art is essentially apolitical. Her concern was not with partisan causes, but rather with universal rights.
Fundamentally a dramatic artist, Käthe Kollwitz (1867��1945) brought to each of her works an uncanny ability to evoke human emotions through subtle gestures and facial expressions. The reactions of her characters were psychologically true primarily because she tested them on herself.
The present collection contains 83 of Mrs. Kollwitz's finest works, including the last great print cycles: "The Weavers" of 1898; "The Peasant War" of 1908; "War" of 1925; and "Death" of 1935. These selections provide a full panorama of Mrs. Kollwitz's development as a master of the graphic techniques of etching, woodcutting and lithography. Over 69 of the illustrations have been rephotographed from the original works specially for this edition, and new techniques in photolithography and a larger format have resulted in reproductions that are as close as possible to the prints and drawings themselves.]]> 83 Käthe Kollwitz 0486221776 C 0 4.54 1969
author: Käthe Kollwitz
name: C
average rating: 4.54
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/03
date added: 2024/07/03
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]]> 52649136
Violette’s routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of a man—Julien Sole, local police chief—who insists on depositing the ashes of his recently departed mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. It soon becomes clear that the grave Julien is looking for belongs to his mother’s one-time lover, and that his mother’s story of clandestine love is intertwined with Violette’s own secret past.

With Fresh Water for Flowers, Valérie Perrin has given readers a funny, moving, intimately told story of a woman who believes obstinately in happiness. Perrin has the rare talent of illuminating what is exceptional and poetic in what seems ordinary. A #1 best-seller in France, Fresh Water for Flowers is a delightful, atmospheric, absorbing fairy tale full of poetry, generosity, and warmth.]]> 476 Valérie Perrin 1609455959 C 0 4.25 2018
author: Valérie Perrin
name: C
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/23
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves:
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]]> 8155668 110 G.B. Trudeau C 5 4.64 2006
author: G.B. Trudeau
name: C
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/06/20
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]]> 161187070 Vintage children's book 216 C 0 0.0 1947
author: Ursula Koering (Illustrator) Eleanor Clymer (Author)
name: C
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1947
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/06/20
shelves:
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]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 C 0 3.83 2023
author: James McBride
name: C
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/28
date added: 2024/05/28
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]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett C 0 4.46 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: C
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/08
date added: 2024/05/08
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]]> 127975811
We read to escape, to learn, to find love, to feel seen. We read to encounter new worlds, to discover new recipes, to find connection across difference, or simply to pass a rainy afternoon. No matter the reason, books have the power to keep us safe, to challenge us, and perhaps most importantly, to make us more fully human.

Shannon Reed, a longtime teacher, lifelong reader, and New Yorker contributor, gets it. With one simple goal in mind, she makes the case that we should read for pleasure above all else. In this whip-smart, laugh-out-loud-funny collection, Reed shares surprising stories from her life as a reader and the poignant ways in which books have impacted her students. From the varied novels she cherishes ( Gone Girl , Their Eyes Were Watching God ) to the ones she didn’t ( Tess of the d’Urbervilles ), Reed takes us on a rollicking tour through the comforting world of literature, celebrating the books we love, the readers who love them, and the surprising ways in which literature can transform us for the better.]]> 336 Shannon Reed 1335007962 C 0 3.66 2024
author: Shannon Reed
name: C
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/10
date added: 2024/04/11
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]]> 57225105 220 Ishmael Reed 1771862564 C 0 3.06
author: Ishmael Reed
name: C
average rating: 3.06
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/03
date added: 2024/04/03
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]]> 165177 256 Roxana Robinson 0812967356 C 5 3.82 2005
author: Roxana Robinson
name: C
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/29
date added: 2024/03/29
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]]> 180357146 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 715 Abraham Verghese 0802162177 C 0 4.34 2023
author: Abraham Verghese
name: C
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/27
date added: 2024/03/28
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]]> 61242456 'Tremendously enjoyable ... thoughtful, honest, open, self-deprecating' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
'Readers could hardly wish for a wiser guide ... panoramic ... defiantly hopeful' Financial Times

Drawing from the people who lived it, Homelands explores how Europe slowly recovered and rebuilt from World War Two. And then faltered.

Timothy Garton Ash, our greatest writer about Europe, has spent a lifetime studying Europe and this deeply felt book is full of vivid experiences: from his father's memories of D-Day and his own surveillance at the hands of the Stasi to interviewing Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents.

Homelands is at once a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress, a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong and an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

'The right book for Europe, at the right time' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
'A moving love letter to Europe' Lea Ypi, author of Free]]> 365 Timothy Garton Ash 147358566X C 0 to-read 4.18 2023
author: Timothy Garton Ash
name: C
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60784605 Shortlisted for the TikTok Book Awards in the Book of the Year, 2023 and the ŷ������ Debut and Fiction Book of the Year, 2023.

It’s fair to say that Maddie’s life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson’s. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting.

When her mum returns from her latest trip to Ghana, Maddie leaps at the chance to get out of the family home and finally start living. A self-acknowledged late bloomer, she’s ready to experience some important “firsts��: She finds a flat share, says yes to after-work drinks, pushes for more recognition in her career, and throws herself into the bewildering world of internet dating. But it's not long before tragedy strikes, forcing Maddie to face the true nature of her unconventional family, and the perils—and rewards—of putting her life on the line.

Smart, funny, and deeply affecting, Jessica George's Maame deals with the themes of our time with humor and poignancy: from familial duty and racism, to female pleasure, the complexity of love, and the life-saving power of friendship. Most important, it explores what it feels like to be torn between two homes and cultures―and it celebrates finally being able to find where you belong.]]> 320 Jessica George C 0 4.03 2023
author: Jessica George
name: C
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/01
date added: 2024/03/01
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]]> 802625 256 Rose Macaulay 1853818275 C 0 3.57 1926
author: Rose Macaulay
name: C
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1926
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/23
date added: 2024/02/26
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]]> 453084
The New York Stories of Edith Wharton gathers twenty stories of the city, written over the course of Wharton’s career. From her first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,�� to one of her last and most celebrated, “Roman Fever,�� this new collection charts the growth of an American master and enriches our understanding of the central themes of her work, among them the meaning of marriage, the struggle for artistic integrity, the bonds between parent and child, and the plight of the aged.

Illuminated by Roxana Robinson’s Introduction, these stories showcase Wharton’s astonishing insight into the turbulent inner lives of the men and women caught up in a rapidly changing society.]]> 488 Edith Wharton 1590172485 C 0 4.20 1934
author: Edith Wharton
name: C
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at: 2010/09/08
date added: 2024/02/24
shelves:
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]]> 63933637 An extraordinary and unforgettable short story collection about community, home, betrayal, and forgiveness--from a writer whose "spellbinding, buoyant"* storytelling will break your heart as it tends to the wounds.
*Texas Monthly

In Holler, Child's eleven brilliant stories, LaToya Watkins presses at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance. Each story introduces us to a character irrevocably shaped by place and reaching toward something--hope, reconciliation, freedom.

In "Cutting Horse," the appearance of a horse in a man's suburban backyard places a former horse breeder in trouble with the police. In "Holler, Child," a mother is forced into an impossible position when her son gets in a kind of trouble she knows too well from the other side. And "Time After" shows us the unshakable bonds of family as a sister journeys to find her estranged brother--the one who saved her many times over.

Throughout Holler, Child, we see love lost and gained, and grief turned to hope. Much like LaToya Watkins's acclaimed debut novel, Perish, this collection peers deeply into lives of women and men experiencing intimate and magnificent reckonings--exploring how race, power, and inequality map on the individual, and demonstrating the mythic proportions of everyday life.]]> 224 LaToya Watkins 0593185943 C 5 4.12 2023
author: LaToya Watkins
name: C
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/15
date added: 2024/02/15
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Wonderful short stories, beautifully told and original.
]]> 60657583
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we're apart--the pain of a beloved daughter's suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.]]> 291 Elizabeth Strout 0593446062 C 0 3.80 2022
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: C
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/12
date added: 2024/02/12
shelves:
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]]> 75494577
“An often enthralling chronicle [that] delivers the gossipy goods . . . Like Robert Caro’s biographies, [ The Times ] should appeal to anyone interested in power.”�� Los Angeles Times

For over a century, The New York Times has been an iconic institution in American journalism, one whose history is intertwined with the events that it chronicles—a newspaper read by millions of people every day to stay informed about events that have taken place across the globe.

In The Times, Adam Nagourney, who’s worked at The New York Times since 1996, examines four decades of the newspaper’s history, from the final years of Arthur “Punch�� Sulzberger’s reign as publisher to the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. Nagourney recounts the paper’s triumphs—the coverage of September 11, the explosion of the U.S. Challenger , the scandal of a New York governor snared in a prostitution case—as well as failures that threatened the paper’s standing and reputation, including the discredited coverage of the war in Iraq, the resignation of Judith Miller, the plagiarism scandal of Jayson Blair, and the high-profile ouster of two of its executive editors.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents and letters contained in the newspaper’s archives and the private papers of editors and reporters, The Times is an inside look at the essential years that shaped the newspaper. Nagourney paints a vivid picture of a divided newsroom, fraught with tension as it struggled to move into the digital age, while confronting its scandals, shortcomings, and swelling criticism from conservatives and many of its own readers alike. Along the way we meet the memorable personalities—including Abe Rosenthal, Max Frankel, Howell Raines, Joe Lelyveld, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson, Dean Baquet, Punch Sulzberger and Arthur Sulzberger Jr.—who shaped the paper as we know it today. We see the battles between the newsroom and the business operations side, the fight between old and new media, the tension between journalists who tried to hold on to the traditional model of a print newspaper and a new generation of reporters who are eager to embrace the new digital world.

Immersive, meticulously researched, and filled with powerful stories of the rise and fall of the men and women who ran the most important newspaper in the nation, The Times is a definitive account of the most pivotal years in New York Times history.]]> 592 Adam Nagourney 0451499360 C 0 4.13
author: Adam Nagourney
name: C
average rating: 4.13
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/05
date added: 2024/02/05
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]]> 65215464 A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family


Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960’s to the 2000’s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.

Each piece in Company includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone’s home. In “The Good, Good Men,�� two brothers reunite to oust a “deadbeat�� boyfriend from their mother’s house. In “The Everest Society,�� the brothers�� sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In “Birds of Paradise,�� their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost’s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister’s daughter comes calling.
These are stories about intimacy, societial and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.]]> 246 Shannon Sanders 1644452510 C 4 3.94 2023
author: Shannon Sanders
name: C
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/03
date added: 2024/02/03
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]]> 59948520 A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during a time of war.

It's 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.

Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.

An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.]]> 382 Alice Winn 0593534565 C 5 4.51 2023
author: Alice Winn
name: C
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/01
date added: 2024/02/01
shelves:
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]]> 251740
Have you ever held down a����job for money rather than love? Put up with an����impossible boss? Been told when and how often to����visit the restroom, get a drink, use the phone?����Struggled to remember that who you are doesn't depend����on what you do?

Meet Claudia����Shear, a misfit from Brooklyn who grew up dreaming of����adventure. Shear rode a wild wave of employment����(sixty-four jobs in all) on her way to realizing����her dream of becoming an actress. Before landing����the starring role in the upcoming film, Body����Language, and scoring a deal with Steven Spielberg and����Jeffrey Katzenberg for her own sitcom, she worked����as (among other things) a pastry chef, a nude����model, a waitress (a lot), a receptionist in a����whorehouse, a brunch chef on Fire Island, a����proofreader on Wall Street (a lot), and an Italian����translator. On the surface her life makes for a hilarious����tour de resume. But underneath is a universal����lesson learned about life in the����workplace.]]> 128 Claudia Shear 0385313152 C 0 3.82 1995
author: Claudia Shear
name: C
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/26
date added: 2024/01/26
shelves:
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]]> 51047371 240 Bob Avian 1496826981 C 4 4.44
author: Bob Avian
name: C
average rating: 4.44
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/25
date added: 2024/01/25
shelves:
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]]> 1069576 76 Claire Huchet Bishop 0140310762 C 0 4.17 1952
author: Claire Huchet Bishop
name: C
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/16
shelves:
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]]> 36638
With the help of Simon the gooseboy and his flock, they escape. But how will they ever get Willoughby Chase free from the clutches of the evil Miss Slighcarp?]]> 181 Joan Aiken 0385327900 C 0 4.06 1962
author: Joan Aiken
name: C
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/16
shelves:
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]]> 229847
Then there's the roster of regular guests: an artist from Greenwich Village, a magician from The World, and a carpenter form Nobody Knows.

It's the perfect combination for adventure - from mysterious messages to alligator hunting, dognapping, and Great-Granduncle Hiram's rumored secret treasure. The action at the Pink Motel never stops!]]> 214 Carol Ryrie Brink 068971677X C 0 4.23 1959
author: Carol Ryrie Brink
name: C
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/14
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]]> 648958
After Jimmy is blinded in an accident with a firecracker, he has to relearn all the things he used to know - how to get dressed, how to find his way around the house, even how to eat. With the help of a determined therapist, he learns to read Braille and use a cane. Then he's given the chance to have a guide dog. Learning to work with Leader is not easy, but Jimmy tries harder than he ever has before. Can Leader really give him the ability and the confidence he needs?]]> 192 James B. Garfield 0140364854 C 0 4.21 1957
author: James B. Garfield
name: C
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
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]]> 1112570 152 Margery Sharp 0316783102 C 0 3.95 1962
author: Margery Sharp
name: C
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
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]]> 67270
Unfortunately, when his seven pounds goes missing on the train, Emil is determined to get it back - and when he teams up with the detectives he meets in Berlin, it's just the start of a marvellous money-retrieving adventure . . .

A classic and influential story, Emil and the Detectives remains an enthralling read.]]> 224 Erich Kästner 0099413124 C 0 4.02 1929
author: Erich Kästner
name: C
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1929
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
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]]> 36637 240 Joan Aiken 0395971284 C 0 4.14 1964
author: Joan Aiken
name: C
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
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]]> 494304 160 Margery Sharp 0316783552 C 0 4.11 1959
author: Margery Sharp
name: C
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
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]]> 61549
A classic of American humor, this story of a gentle housepainter and his high stepping penguins has delighted children for generations.
]]> 139 Richard Atwater C 0 3.97 1938
author: Richard Atwater
name: C
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
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]]> 42486 224 Maud Hart Lovelace 0064400980 C 0 4.23 1943
author: Maud Hart Lovelace
name: C
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
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]]> 816870 322 Esther Forbes C 0 3.68 1943
author: Esther Forbes
name: C
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at: 1969/01/01
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
review:

]]>