Rahul 's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 01 Apr 2025 10:50:40 -0700 60 Rahul 's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg No One Is Talking About This 53733106
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats—from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness—begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?"

Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.]]> 210 Patricia Lockwood 0593189582 Rahul 4 3.57 2021 No One Is Talking About This
author: Patricia Lockwood
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes]]> 56890617 96 Hannah Moscovitch Rahul 3 4.17 Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes
author: Hannah Moscovitch
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lucky Loser: Adventures in Tennis and Comedy]]> 216269048 From a host of The Daily Show and stand-up comic, Michael Kosta, comes a wildly funny and insightful memoir about his unlikely journey from professional tennis player (#864 in the world) to professional comedian (there’s no ranking system in comedy but he’s probably . . . top 50?) .

Before Michael Kosta was performing stand-up comedy specials and hosting The Daily Show, he was a professional tennis “star,� reaching the lofty heights of the #864 ranked men’s singles player in the world. Stop laughing. That’s better than your world ranking. As a tennis pro, Kosta traveled across the globe, competing in such exotic locales as the Netherlands, Tokyo, and even rural Illinois before deciding to put down his racket and pursue a more stable and predictable career: comedy.

In a completely unexpected and wild journey through the backwaters of professional tennis, Kosta shows the unlikely ways life on the court prepared him for life in front of a microphone. Like comedy, tennis is brutally competitive, and most people lose at it. Unlike comedy, no one in tennis puts a gun on the table as they count out your earnings in twenty-dollar bills at the end of the night.

And then there are the things that have more to do with what happens to you—and what you end up learning—as part of growing up. Topics include: how to properly discard an unwanted European hard-boiled egg, giving CPR to your dead grandpa, cringe-worthy “sex� in the Red Light District, crying so hard in a car that strangers call the cops, and also happy things like what it feels like when your dreams come true.

From misadventures in tennis to the humbling setbacks of comedy, Lucky Loser is a heart-filled story of making your own luck, the universal experience of failure, and the many ways in which we all inevitably lose on the way to success.

Lucky Loser includes a 16-page photo insert.]]> 304 Michael Kosta 0063418061 Rahul 0 to-read 3.85 Lucky Loser: Adventures in Tennis and Comedy
author: Michael Kosta
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

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

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]> 400 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Rahul 0 to-read 4.35 2025 Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Intimacies 55918474 A novel from the author of A Separation, a taut and electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.

She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into explosive political fires: her work interpreting for a former president accused of war crimes becomes precarious as their relationship is unbound by shifting language and meaning.

This woman is the voice in the ear of many, but what command does that give her, and how vulnerable does that leave her? Her coolly impassioned views on power, love, and violence, are tested, both in her personal intimacies and in her role at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her; it is her drive towards truth, and love, that throws into stark relief what she wants from her life.]]> 225 Katie Kitamura 0399576169 Rahul 3 europe
Solid and unspectacular. A normal woman doing a normal job in a country not her own. The court is dreary, the three person scenes are interesting, and there are many of them.

Recommended by a friend of the author's. ]]> 3.62 2021 Intimacies
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: europe
review:
Teases ambiguity at the end. Would have liked more of it.

Solid and unspectacular. A normal woman doing a normal job in a country not her own. The court is dreary, the three person scenes are interesting, and there are many of them.

Recommended by a friend of the author's.
]]> <![CDATA[Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)]]> 256008 Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.]]> 960 Larry McMurtry 067168390X Rahul 5 merica, road-trip
I didn't feel like such a non-entity when the two ladies were seeing off Gus. The happenings at Clara's are easy to find fault with. ]]> 4.53 1985 Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: merica, road-trip
review:
Some very minor gripes about some minor non-Hat creek company characters but who am I but a mote of dust up against such achievements.

I didn't feel like such a non-entity when the two ladies were seeing off Gus. The happenings at Clara's are easy to find fault with.
]]> <![CDATA[The Golden Pot and Other Tales]]> 551457 contact and conflict. This new translation includes The Golden Pot, The Sandman, Princess Brambilla, Master Flea, and My Cousin's Corner Window.]]> 401 E.T.A. Hoffmann 0192837230 Rahul 0 to-read 3.88 1814 The Golden Pot and Other Tales
author: E.T.A. Hoffmann
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1814
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Copenhagen Trilogy (The Copenhagen Trilogy, #1-3)]]> 53317528 Called a masterpiece by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing

Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969-71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child's single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.

Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today's discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up--in this sense, it's Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.

Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class, female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors, with Tove fever gripping readers.]]> 371 Tove Ditlevsen 0374602395 Rahul 0 to-read 4.36 1967 The Copenhagen Trilogy (The Copenhagen Trilogy, #1-3)
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Great War and Modern Memory]]> 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 Rahul 0 to-read 4.13 1975 The Great War and Modern Memory
author: Paul Fussell
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[âԱܲ: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London]]> 23984074 'âԱܲ [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities.

That is an imaginary definition.'

If the word flâneur conjures up visions of Baudelaire, boulevards and bohemia � then what exactly is a flâneuse?

In this gloriously provocative and celebratory book, Lauren Elkin defines her as ‘a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk�. Part cultural meander, part memoir, âԱܲ traces the relationship between the city and creativity through a journey that begins in New York and moves us to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo and London, exploring along the way the paths taken by the flâneuses who have lived and walked in those cities.

From nineteenth-century novelist George Sand to artist Sophie Calle, from war correspondent Martha Gellhorn to film-maker Agnes Varda, âԱܲ considers what is at stake when a certain kind of light-footed woman encounters the city and changes her life, one step at a time.]]> 336 Lauren Elkin Rahul 3 habitats, europe, drift 3.56 2017 âԱܲ: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London
author: Lauren Elkin
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: habitats, europe, drift
review:
I do like reading about artists. And I love Elkin's recent work of fiction.
]]> Letters to Milena 88340 Letters to Milena, which begin essentially as a business correspondence but soon develop into a passionate "letter love." Milena Jesenská was a gifted and charismatic woman of twenty-three. Kafka's Czech translator, she was uniquely able to recognize his complex genius and his even more complex character. For the thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was "a living fire, such as I have never seen." It was to her that he revealed his most intimate self. It was to her that, after the end of the affair, he entrusted the safekeeping of his diaries.

Newly translated, revised, and expanded, this edition contains material previously omitted because of its extreme sensitivity. Also included for the first time are letters and essays by Milena Jesenská, herself a talented writer as well as the recipient of these documents of Kafka's love, anxiety, and despair.]]> 298 Franz Kafka 0805208852 Rahul 2 discarded 4.10 1952 Letters to Milena
author: Franz Kafka
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1952
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: discarded
review:
Abandoned 20% in. I may not have much agency in life but I do have enough to set aside books I am not enjoying.
]]> Madonna in a Fur Coat 27793819 The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.



'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.'

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul.



'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian]]> 168 Sabahattin Ali 014198127X Rahul 1 4.19 1943 Madonna in a Fur Coat
author: Sabahattin Ali
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1943
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves:
review:
Abandoned it after reading a few pages but was convinced of its rating from those. How can I mark a book as abandoned and not include it in the read shelf?
]]> The Aeneid 12912 From the award-winning translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey comes a brilliant new translation of Virgil's great epic

With his translations of Homer's classic poems, Robert Fagles gave new life to seminal works of the Western canon and became one of the preeminent translators of our time. His latest achievement completes the magnificent triptych of Western epics. A sweeping story of arms and heroism, The Aeneid follows the adventures of Aeneas, who flees the ashes of Troy to embark upon a tortuous course that brings him to Italy and fulfills his destiny as founder of the Roman people. Retaining all of the gravitas and humanity of the original, this powerful blend of poetry and myth remains as relevant today as when it was first written.

]]> 486 Virgil 0670038032 Rahul 3 culture, europe
Many of the later chapters (books) read like screenplays. More suitable for the visual format.

The Trojans following the defeat at Troy travel to Italy and give birth to the Roman Empire, as decreed by the gods.

Unlike Hollywood, Virgil doesn't shy away from humanizing the enemy.

“as Aeneas drives his tempered sword through the youth, plunging it home hilt-deep. The point impaled his shield, a flimsy defense for the youngster’s brash threats, and the shirt his mother wove him of soft gold mesh and his lap filled up with blood, and then his life slipped through the air, sorrowing down to the shades and left his corpse behind.�

Remember, Aeneas is the hero.]]> 3.98 -19 The Aeneid
author: Virgil
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.98
book published: -19
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: culture, europe
review:
Enjoyed books 1-4, i.e until Dido's exit.

Many of the later chapters (books) read like screenplays. More suitable for the visual format.

The Trojans following the defeat at Troy travel to Italy and give birth to the Roman Empire, as decreed by the gods.

Unlike Hollywood, Virgil doesn't shy away from humanizing the enemy.

“as Aeneas drives his tempered sword through the youth, plunging it home hilt-deep. The point impaled his shield, a flimsy defense for the youngster’s brash threats, and the shirt his mother wove him of soft gold mesh and his lap filled up with blood, and then his life slipped through the air, sorrowing down to the shades and left his corpse behind.�

Remember, Aeneas is the hero.
]]> Far From the Madding Crowd 31463 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780141439655

Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community. The first of his works set in the fictional county of Wessex, Hardy's novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships.]]> 433 Thomas Hardy Rahul 0 british, fiction
Easy to see why this book remains a draw. 3.5. ]]> 3.96 1874 Far From the Madding Crowd
author: Thomas Hardy
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1874
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: british, fiction
review:
The writing has plenty in its favor but the plot makes you feel a few things. At least it ends on a good note after all that misery. Everything regarding Troy, and the lady he jilts, feels half-fleshed out.

Easy to see why this book remains a draw. 3.5.
]]> Metamorphoses 1715
In Metamophoses, Ovid brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation—often as a result of love or lust—where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy. Erudite but light-hearted, dramatic and yet playful, Metamorphoses has influenced writers and artists throughout the centuries from Shakespeare and Titian to Picasso and Ted Hughes.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 723 Ovid 014044789X Rahul 0 to-read 4.08 8 Metamorphoses
author: Ovid
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.08
book published: 8
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2]]> 65350 178 Mary Oliver 080706887X Rahul 4 poems, favorites 4.57 1992 New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2
author: Mary Oliver
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/24
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: poems, favorites
review:
Filled to the brim with nature and yet, irresistible. Just glad to be alive, the poems all go.
]]> <![CDATA[Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue]]> 203956642 From the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE, a re-examination of one of the 20th century’s greatest unsung power players When Pamela Churchill Harriman died in 1997, obituaries that followed were predictably sexist. Written off as a party girl, courtesan and social climber, her real legacy was overshadowed by a glamorous social life spent in glittering, elite circles of power. That is, until with a wealth of new research, interviews and newly discovered sources, Sonia Purnell is reclaiming her larger-than-life story of influence and power in full, spectacular depth for the first time. At age 20 Churchill’s beloved daughter-in-law became a “secret weapon� during World War II, wining, dining, and seducing diplomats and envoys to help win over American sentiment (and secrets) for the cause. She transformed Gianni Agnelli into a savvy businessman and heir to the Fiat empire, and after moving to the US brought a struggling Democratic party back to life, hand-picking Bill Clinton from obscurity and vaulting him to the presidency. Picked as Ambassador to France, she deployed her legendary quiet, subtle power to charm world leaders and broker an end to the conflict in Bosnia, in effect rehabilitating the reputation of the US on the world stage. There are few people in history with a greater scope of impact over as many decades and across continents, and there is no one in 20th Century politics, culture, and fashion whom she did not know, including Aly Khan, Kay Graham, Jackie Onassis, Truman Capote, Gloria Steinem, Ed Murrow, and Frank Sinatra among her friends and lovers.Written with the novelistic richness and investigative rigor that only Sonia Purnell could bring to this story full of sex, politics, yachts, and fabulous clothes, KINGMAKER re-asserts Harriman’s rightful place in history.]]> 528 Sonia Purnell 0593297806 Rahul 3 biographies, british 4.10 Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue
author: Sonia Purnell
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: biographies, british
review:
I liked the satisfying ending to her professional arc but it's still more page 3 than geopolitics.
]]> <![CDATA[American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer]]> 80571
J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.

When he proposed international controls over atomic materials, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and criticized plans for a nuclear war, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup during the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s. They declared that Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America’s nuclear secrets.

In this magisterial biography twenty-five years in the making, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for biography, the authors capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War.]]> 721 Kai Bird Rahul 3
A fan would've been thrilled going to those places. I went as someone who was lukewarm to both this award-winning book and the award-winning movie.

If I hear the phrase 'Chevalier affair' one more time, I am going to blow up and release more energy than the Trinity bomb. The author belabors. ]]> 4.27 2005 American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
author: Kai Bird
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: biographies, history, upcoming-hollywood
review:
From the time I started reading this book - the movie came out and I visited Princeton, Berkeley, and Los Alamos.

A fan would've been thrilled going to those places. I went as someone who was lukewarm to both this award-winning book and the award-winning movie.

If I hear the phrase 'Chevalier affair' one more time, I am going to blow up and release more energy than the Trinity bomb. The author belabors.
]]> The End of Eddy 31574750
“Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy. � Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different―“girlish,� intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.

Already translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result―a critical and popular triumph―has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.]]> 208 Édouard Louis 0374266654 Rahul 0
Remember The Shed.]]> 3.96 2014 The End of Eddy
author: Édouard Louis
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves:
review:
How much of this is he making up? A lot of it fits too neatly. That snug fit could explain its popularity.

Remember The Shed.
]]> <![CDATA[Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America]]> 62874267
Private equity surrounds us. Firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR are among the largest employers in America and hold assets that rival those of small countries. Yet few understand what these firms are or how they work.

In Plunder , Brendan Ballou explains how private equity has reshaped American business by raising prices, reducing quality, cutting jobs, and shifting resources from productive to unproductive parts of the economy. Ballou vividly illustrates how many private equity firms buy up retailers, medical practices, prison services, nursing-home chains, and mobile-home parks, among other businesses, using little of their own money to do it and avoiding debt and liability for their actions. Forced to take on huge debts and pay extractive fees, companies purchased by private equity firms are often left bankrupt, or shells of their former selves, with consequences to communities that long depended on them.

Perhaps most startling is Ballou’s insight into how this is happening with the active support of various arms of the government. But, as Ballou reveals in an agenda for reining in the industry, private equity can be stopped from wreaking further havoc.
ձ> 368 Brendan Ballou 1541702107 Rahul 0 critical, dystopia, merica
Trump and his cronies are going to turbo-charge this evil extractive empire. Capitalism should get a rap as bad as colonialism. ]]> 4.08 2023 Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America
author: Brendan Ballou
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: critical, dystopia, merica
review:
Could've been a paper. But papers don't get you attention. 3.5.

Trump and his cronies are going to turbo-charge this evil extractive empire. Capitalism should get a rap as bad as colonialism.
]]> Don Juan 78249 Probably few subjects fitted Byron's particular talents better than Don Juan.

In this rambling, exuberant, conversational poem, the travels of Don Juan are used as a vehicle for some of the most lively and acute commentaries on human societies and behaviour in the language. The manner is what Goethe called 'a cultured comic language'-a genre which he regarded as not possible in Geman and which he felt Byron managed superbly.]]> 584 Lord Byron 0140424520 Rahul 4 europe, poems
It's one long digression. Need to be familiar with the classic studies. Meaningless 4. ]]> 3.78 1819 Don Juan
author: Lord Byron
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1819
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: europe, poems
review:
Read every word and understood a third. The book's titled Don Juan and there's a guy in it by the name of Don Juan but he doesn't do any seducing and the book isn't about a seducer.

It's one long digression. Need to be familiar with the classic studies. Meaningless 4.
]]> Nightwood 53101
The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions.

Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it."

Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.]]> 182 Djuna Barnes 0811216713 Rahul 0 to-read 3.66 1936 Nightwood
author: Djuna Barnes
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1936
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Scaffolding 201826095 The story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart.

In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London. Hence, she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood…Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, unaware that they once inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.]]> 388 Lauren Elkin 1529926459 Rahul 5 europe, fiction
Pair this with Miranda July's 'All Fours'. I'm all for desire having its moment.]]> 3.71 2024 Scaffolding
author: Lauren Elkin
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: europe, fiction
review:
The Jonathan bit is silly but I still couldn't help myself.

Pair this with Miranda July's 'All Fours'. I'm all for desire having its moment.
]]> Confessions 12649 the world of modern civilization. In trying to explain who he was and how he came to be the object of others' admiration and abuse, Rousseau analyses with unique insight the relationship between an elusive but essential inner self and the variety of social identities he was led to adopt. The book
vividly illustrates the mixture of moods and motives that underlie the writing of defiance and vulnerability, self-exploration and denial, passion, puzzlement, and detachment. Above all, Confessions is Rousseau's search, through every resource of language, to convey what he despairs
of putting into the personal quality of one's own existence.]]> 676 Jean-Jacques Rousseau 0192822756 Rahul 0 to-read 3.61 1773 Confessions
author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1773
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Woman in Me 63133205 The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 288 Britney Spears 1668009048 Rahul 3 biographies, memoir 3.83 2023 The Woman in Me
author: Britney Spears
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: biographies, memoir
review:
She's spilling her guts out and you're judging it on literary merit?
]]> Parade 195790675
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.]]> 198 Rachel Cusk 0374610045 Rahul 0 to-read 3.55 2024 Parade
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops]]> 214918704 Box Office Poison tells an alternative history of Hollywood, through a century of its most notable flops.

Freaks, Land of the Pharaohs, Dune, Speed 2, Catwoman, what can these films tell us about the Hollywood system, the public's appetite -- or lack of it -- and the circumstances that saw such box office disasters actually made? Away from the canon, here is the definitive take on these ill-fated, but essential celluloid failures.]]> 387 Tim Robey 0571381227 Rahul 0 to-read 3.64 2024 Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops
author: Tim Robey
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Idlewild 98653925 James Frankie Thomas’s Idlewild is a darkly funny story of two adults looking back on their intense teenage friendship, in a queer, trans, and early-Internet twist on the Manhattan prep school novel.

Idlewild is a tiny, artsy Quaker high school in lower Manhattan. Students call their teachers by their first names, there are no grades, and every day begins with 20 minutes of contemplative silence in the Meetinghouse. It is during one of those meetings that an airplane hits the Twin Towers.

For two Idlewild outcasts, 9/11 serves as the first day of an intense, 18-month friendship. Fay is prickly, aloof, and obsessed with gay men; Nell is shy, sensitive, and obsessed with Fay. The two of them bond fiercely and spend all their waking hours giddily parsing their environment for homoerotic subtext. Then, during rehearsals for the fall play, they notice two sexually ambiguous boys who are potential candidates for their exclusive Invert Society. The pairs become mirrors of one another and drive each other to make choices that they’ll regret for the rest of their lives.

Looking back on these events as adults, the estranged Fay and Nell trace that fateful school year, recalling backstage theater department intrigue, antiwar demonstrations, smutty fanfic written over AIM, a shared dial-up connection—and the spectacular cascade of mistakes, miscommunications, and betrayals that would ultimately tear the two of them apart.]]> 389 James Frankie Thomas 1419769146 Rahul 3 fiction, new-york 4.06 2023 Idlewild
author: James Frankie Thomas
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: fiction, new-york
review:
Zero issues with the writing. But when it comes to the characters- one is enough, two is a crowd, 4 is falling into the territory of that Donna Tartt book I didn't like.
]]> The Empty Space 2955838 The Empty Space is an exploration of four aspects of theatre, 'Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate', published in Penguin Modern Classics.

'I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage'

In The Empty Space, groundbreaking director Peter Brook draws on a life in love with the stage to explore the issues facing any theatrical performance. Here he describes important developments in theatre from the last century, as well as smaller scale events, from productions by Stanislavsky to the rise of Method Acting, from Brecht's revolutionary alienation technique to the free form Happenings of the 1960s, and from the different styles of such great Shakespearean actors as John Gielgud and Paul Scofield to a joyous impromptu performance in the burnt-out shell of the Hamburg Opera just after the war. Passionate, unconventional and fascinating, his book shows how theatre defies rules, builds and shatters illusions and creates lasting memories for its audiences.

Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH CBE (b. 1925) is a highly influential British theatrical producer and director. During the 1950s he worked on many productions in Britain, Europe, and the USA, and in 1962 returned to Stratford-upon-Avon to join the newly established Royal Shakespeare Company. Throughout the next the 1960's he directed many ground breaking productions for the RSC before in 1970 forming The International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris.

If you enjoyed The Empty Space, you might like John Berger's Ways of Seeing, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'A brilliant book ... should be read by the many besides the passionate few to whom it will be required reading'
Daily Telegraph]]> 160 Peter Brook 0141189223 Rahul 0 to-read 4.00 1968 The Empty Space
author: Peter Brook
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Herscht 07769 56337680
Krasznahorkai's newest work is a several hundred pages long-story will be published in Hungarian by Magvető publishing house in February, 2021. At its heart are Johann Sebastian Bach, a foggy question of quantum physics and the Thuringian neo-Nazi movement. The German version of the book translated by Heike Flemming will be published by S.Fischer Verlag next autumn :: S.K.]]> 424 László Krasznahorkai 9631438953 Rahul 0 to-read 4.19 2021 Herscht 07769
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Repeat Room 205673381 Franz Kafka meets Yorgos Lanthimos in this provocative new novel from one of America’s most brilliant and distinctive writers

In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant’s lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.

The case to which Abel is assigned is revealed in the novel’s shocking second act. We receive a record of a boy’s broken and constrained life, a tale that reveals an illicit and passionate psycho-sexual relationship, its end as tragic as the circumstances of its conception.

Artful in its suspense, and sharp in its evocation of a byzantine and cruel bureaucracy, The Repeat Room is an exciting and pointed critique of the nature of knowledge and judgment, and a vivid framing of Ball’s absurd and nihilistic philosophy of love.]]> 256 Jesse Ball 1646221400 Rahul 0 to-read 3.14 2024 The Repeat Room
author: Jesse Ball
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Long Island Compromise 55777544 “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?�

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

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

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives� tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.]]> 464 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0593133498 Rahul 3 culture, fiction 3.72 2024 Long Island Compromise
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: culture, fiction
review:
Please tell me the praise for this book is a conspiracy.
]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Rahul 4 fiction, culture 3.54 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: fiction, culture
review:
A lot happens! The end is nothing but a fizzle. This is how a certain borough in NYC operates.
]]> The Storm We Made 60211228 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781668015148.

A novel about a Malayan mother who becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during WWII—and the shocking consequences that rain upon her community and family.

Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara’s family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day.

Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth.

A decade prior, Cecily had been desperate to be more than a housewife to a low-level bureaucrat in British-colonized Malaya. A chance meeting with the charismatic General Fuijwara lured her into a life of espionage, pursuing dreams of an “Asia for Asians.� Instead, Cecily helped usher in an even more brutal occupation by the Japanese. Ten years later as the war reaches its apex, her actions have caught up with her. Now her family is on the brink of destruction—and she will do anything to save them.]]> 339 Vanessa Chan Rahul 4 fiction 3.80 2024 The Storm We Made
author: Vanessa Chan
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/26
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Colored Television 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Rahul 0 to-read 3.54 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Death in Venice and Other Tales]]> 53064 384 Thomas Mann 0141181737 Rahul 0 to-read 3.92 1911 Death in Venice and Other Tales
author: Thomas Mann
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1911
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Call of Cthulhu 15730101 The Call of Cthulhu is a harrowing tale of the weakness of the human mind when confronted by powers and intelligences from beyond our world.]]> 43 H.P. Lovecraft Rahul 0 fiction, shorts, adventure
The writing in this short story is exceedingly formal and the story is maybe deliberately set in the blandest of places, like at an archaeology conference in St. Louis and in would you believe it- Paterson, New Jersey. Picture Paterson reading out his poetry to Cthulhu and the two sharing a nice cordial laugh.

How's this for an opening para “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.�

]]> 3.97 1928 The Call of Cthulhu
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1928
rating: 0
read at: 2019/03/22
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: fiction, shorts, adventure
review:
The face of Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships, the prose of Lovecraft launched a thousand B-movie scripts.

The writing in this short story is exceedingly formal and the story is maybe deliberately set in the blandest of places, like at an archaeology conference in St. Louis and in would you believe it- Paterson, New Jersey. Picture Paterson reading out his poetry to Cthulhu and the two sharing a nice cordial laugh.

How's this for an opening para “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.�


]]> War and Peace 656
War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men.

As Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature.


Tolstoy gave his personal approval to this translation, published here in a new single volume edition, which includes an introduction by Henry Gifford, and Tolstoy's important essay `Some Words about War and Peace'.]]> 1392 Leo Tolstoy 0192833987 Rahul 3
Was definitely moved by the part where Prince Andrew is moved by the sight of a tree, and some of the scenes with young courters put Jane Austen to shame but overall, I got very little from this book. It's no Moby Dick!

Works as an inverse of Plot against America. That book has great politics, so-so domestic; this one has great family, so-so war. ]]> 4.14 1869 War and Peace
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1869
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: culture, fiction, translations
review:
Was Tolstoy's main motivation in writing this book the rehabilitation of Kutuzov? Or was it having a rant against historians?

Was definitely moved by the part where Prince Andrew is moved by the sight of a tree, and some of the scenes with young courters put Jane Austen to shame but overall, I got very little from this book. It's no Moby Dick!

Works as an inverse of Plot against America. That book has great politics, so-so domestic; this one has great family, so-so war.
]]> The Plot Against America 703
For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh's election is the first in a series of ruptures that threatens to destroy his small, safe corner of America - and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.]]> 391 Philip Roth 1400079497 Rahul 0 fiction
The politics are on point. The family plot meanders. 3.5. ]]> 3.79 2004 The Plot Against America
author: Philip Roth
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/05
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves: fiction
review:
Feels longer than 391 pages. Definitely a novel- the one with the extended family and a hot aunt. There are very many of these.

The politics are on point. The family plot meanders. 3.5.
]]> Conversations on Love 57028269 320 Natasha Lunn 0241448735 Rahul 4 humankind
A book of interviews overlaid by the author's own story about miscarriage and her struggles. ]]> 4.23 2021 Conversations on Love
author: Natasha Lunn
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves: humankind
review:
A pleasant read. Don't get hung up when one interviewee says love is supposed to be easy and another says love is supposed to be hard. They don't know the truth, they're just telling their sides.

A book of interviews overlaid by the author's own story about miscarriage and her struggles.
]]> <![CDATA[Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Rahul 0 culture, critical 4.21 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
author: Naomi Klein
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: culture, critical
review:
Says worthy things but is also a slog?
]]> <![CDATA[The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6)]]> 18801 In Search of Lost Time contains both The Captive (1923) and The Fugitive (1925). In The Captive, Proust’s narrator describes living in his mother’s Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her. In The Fugitive, the narrator loses Albertine forever. Rich with irony, The Captive and The Fugitive inspire meditations on desire, sexual love, music, and the art of introspection.

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).]]> 957 Marcel Proust 0375753117 Rahul 5
Here's a scene where Lauren Bacall talks to Humphrey Bogart about Proust's working habits

Here's a tiny glimpse of the work itself

“If only I’m not killed,� he says to himself, “how I shall settle down to work the very minute, and how I shall enjoy myself too!� Life has in fact suddenly acquired a higher value in his eyes, because he puts into life everything that it seems to him capable of giving instead of the little that he normally demands of it. He sees it in the light of his desire, not as his experience has taught him that he was apt to make it, that is to say so tawdry. It has, at that moment, become filled with work, travel, mountain-climbing, all the splendid things which, he tells himself, the fatal outcome of the duel may render impossible, without thinking that they were already impossible before there was any question of a duel, owing to the bad habits which, even had there been no duel, would have persisted. He returns home without even a scratch, but he continues to find the same obstacles to pleasures, excursions, travel, to everything which for a moment he had feared that death would deprive him of; life is sufficient for that.�

I would've liked this book to be the longest I've read this year but ŷ has Gone With the Wind beating this by 2 pages, 959 to 957. Can you believe that! Take that Isner- Mahut.]]> 4.38 1923 The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6)
author: Marcel Proust
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1923
rating: 5
read at: 2018/12/27
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: fiction, translations, viva-la-france
review:
A 5 star rating would imply ability to savour a majority of what was being said. I don't want the rating to fool you into thinking I possess that ability.

Here's a scene where Lauren Bacall talks to Humphrey Bogart about Proust's working habits

Here's a tiny glimpse of the work itself

“If only I’m not killed,� he says to himself, “how I shall settle down to work the very minute, and how I shall enjoy myself too!� Life has in fact suddenly acquired a higher value in his eyes, because he puts into life everything that it seems to him capable of giving instead of the little that he normally demands of it. He sees it in the light of his desire, not as his experience has taught him that he was apt to make it, that is to say so tawdry. It has, at that moment, become filled with work, travel, mountain-climbing, all the splendid things which, he tells himself, the fatal outcome of the duel may render impossible, without thinking that they were already impossible before there was any question of a duel, owing to the bad habits which, even had there been no duel, would have persisted. He returns home without even a scratch, but he continues to find the same obstacles to pleasures, excursions, travel, to everything which for a moment he had feared that death would deprive him of; life is sufficient for that.�

I would've liked this book to be the longest I've read this year but ŷ has Gone With the Wind beating this by 2 pages, 959 to 957. Can you believe that! Take that Isner- Mahut.
]]> Mania 181109972 What if calling someone stupid was illegal? In a reality not too distant from our own, where the so-called Mental Parity Movement has taken hold, the worst thing you can call someone is 'stupid'.

Everyone is equally clever, and discrimination based on intelligence is 'the last great civil rights fight'.

Exams and grades are all discarded, and smart phones are rebranded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word and encouraged to report parents for using it. You don't need a qualification to be a doctor.

Best friends since adolescence, Pearson and Emory find themselves on opposing sides of this new culture war. Radio personality Emory � who has built her career riding the tide of popular thought � makes increasingly hard-line statements while, for her part, Pearson believes the whole thing is ludicrous.

As their friendship fractures, Pearson's determination to cling onto the 'old, bigoted way of thinking' begins to endanger her job, her safety and even her family.

Lionel Shriver turns her piercing gaze on the policing of opinion and intellect, and imagines a world in which intellectual meritocracy is heresy. Hilarious, deadpan, scathing and at times frighteningly plausible, MANIA will delight the many fans of her fiction and journalism alike.]]> 288 Lionel Shriver 0063345390 Rahul 2 fiction, culture
Takes shots at both sides of the aisle, I guess. At the liberals for their promotion of DEI, at Trump for picking cronies instead of people who may know their job. Not enough material to base a whole book on.]]> 3.58 2024 Mania
author: Lionel Shriver
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: fiction, culture
review:
Has the potential to be a lightning rod ala Ayn Rand and Fountainhead.

Takes shots at both sides of the aisle, I guess. At the liberals for their promotion of DEI, at Trump for picking cronies instead of people who may know their job. Not enough material to base a whole book on.
]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Rahul 0 fiction, british
Irish, religious, based on a religious scandal. Recommended by NY Times. ]]> 4.14 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/12
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: fiction, british
review:
If doing the right thing means risking the well-being of you and your family, would you still do it? Is it selfish of you to put your family in a worse off position just to get the glow of doing the right thing? Those are the dilemmas of the protagonist in this.

Irish, religious, based on a religious scandal. Recommended by NY Times.
]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Rahul 4 adventure, humankind, merica
I was tempted to give this book 5 stars. Has humor, doesn't hold back its punches, will make a very entertaining film, ala Django. Book takes one unnecessary turn but that subversion must be very dear. ]]> 4.47 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2024/07/05
shelves: adventure, humankind, merica
review:
Been a good year for Percival Everett. American Fiction won an Oscar for Adapted Screenplay and this book has been a big success.

I was tempted to give this book 5 stars. Has humor, doesn't hold back its punches, will make a very entertaining film, ala Django. Book takes one unnecessary turn but that subversion must be very dear.
]]> Bad Animals 150778707
A shrewd, page-turning caper that explores one woman’s search for agency and ultimate reckoning with the kind of animal she is.]]> 304 Sarah Braunstein 1324051043 Rahul 3 fiction
I bought a kindle, this was the first book I read on it. ]]> 3.43 Bad Animals
author: Sarah Braunstein
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.43
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/03
date added: 2024/07/03
shelves: fiction
review:
The bathroom spying incident featured in the blurb is as integral to the book as the subplot with the plant that will heal the world. Both of them are kind of marginal. Maeve could've been let go for any reason, that wouldn't have changed the book by a lot. And therein likes the weakness of the book. It's just a few strands briefly interacting. Pleasant enough; has a few nice nice things to say about words and books.

I bought a kindle, this was the first book I read on it.
]]> <![CDATA[Japan and the Shackles of the Past (What Everyone Needs to Know (Hardcover))]]> 18635378
In Japan and the Shackles of the Past, R. Taggart Murphy places the current troubles of Japan in a sweeping historical context, moving deftly from early feudal times to the modern age that began with the Meiji Restoration. Combining fascinating analyses of Japanese culture and society over the centuries with hard-headed accounts of Japan's numerous political regimes, Murphy not only reshapes our understanding of Japanese history, but of Japan's place in the contemporary world. He concedes that Japan has indeed been out of sight and out of mind in recent decades, but contends that this is already changing. Political and economic developments in Japan today risk upheaval in the pivotal arena of Northeast Asia, inviting comparisons with Europe on the eve of the First World War. America's half-completed effort to remake Japan in the late 1940s is unraveling, and the American foreign policy and defense establishment is directly culpable for what has happened. The one apparent exception to Japan's malaise is the vitality of its pop culture, but it's actually no exception at all; rather, it provides critical clues to what is going on now.

With insights into everything from Japan's politics and economics to the texture of daily life, gender relations, the changing business landscape, and popular and high culture, Japan and the Shackles of the Past is the indispensable guide to understanding Japan in all its complexity.
]]> 443 R. Taggart Murphy 0199845980 Rahul 0 history, geopolitics 4.26 2014 Japan and the Shackles of the Past (What Everyone Needs to Know (Hardcover))
author: R. Taggart Murphy
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/22
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves: history, geopolitics
review:
Not the history book I had in mind. More multi-disciplinarian than just historical.
]]> Margo's Got Money Troubles 199534613
Margo braucht Geld. Seit sie ungewollt von ihrem Collegeprofessor, der sie jetzt mit dem Kind alleinlässt, schwanger wurde, mehr denn je. Wie Margo es auch dreht und wendet, kein Job scheint passend zu sein, oder könnte auch nur ansatzweise ihr Leben mit einem Baby finanzieren. Durch einen Zufall wird sie auf die Plattform OnlyFans aufmerksam, und Margo ist fasziniert von dieser Welt, in der Frauen mit sich und ihrem Körper experimentieren, und offenbar gut dabei verdienen. Also beginnt auch sie, Inhalte zu produzieren. Dabei erhält sie Unterstützung von ihrer Mitbewohnerin Suzie, einem großen Cosplay-Fan, und auch von ihrem Vater Jinx, einem Ex-Wrestlingprofi. Ehe sie sich versieht, ist Margo ein Online-Phänomen. Könnte dies die Antwort auf all ihre Probleme sein, oder hat der Internet-Ruhm einen zu hohen Preis?]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Rahul 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Margo's Got Money Troubles
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism]]> 63354049 A myth-dispelling, comprehensive guide to the Chinese economy and its path to ascendancy

China's economy has been booming for decades now. A formidable and emerging power on the world stage, the China that most Americans picture is only a rough sketch, based on American news coverage, policy, and ways of understanding.

Enter Keyu Jin: a world-renowned economist who was born in China, educated in the U.S., and is now a tenured professor at the London School of Economics. A person fluent in both Eastern and Western cultures, and a voice of the new generation of Chinese who represent a radical break from the past, Jin is uniquely poised to explain how China became the most successful economic story of our time, as it has shifted from primarily state-owned enterprise to an economy that is thriving in entrepreneurship, and participation in the global economy.

China’s economic realm is colorful and lively, filled with paradoxes and conundrums, and Jin believes that by understanding the Chinese model, the people, the culture and history in its true perspective, one can reconcile what may appear to be contradictions to the Western eye.

What follows is an illuminating account of a burgeoning world power, its past, and its potential future.]]> 320 Keyu Jin 198487828X Rahul 4 china 3.77 2023 The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism
author: Keyu Jin
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/06
date added: 2024/06/06
shelves: china
review:

]]> The Rabbit Hutch 61322794 The Rabbit Hutch is a stunning debut novel about four teenagers—recently aged out of the state foster-care system—living together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest, exploring the quest for transcendence and the desire for love. “Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies—the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations.”—Raven Leilani, best-selling, award-winning author of LusterThe automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors an extraordinary fear. But C4 is of particular interest. Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster-care three boys and one girl, Blandine, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her. Now all Blandine wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads. Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents—especially Blandine—go to achieve it? Does one person’s gain always come at another’s expense? Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.]]> 352 Tess Gunty 0861543653 Rahul 4 fiction, drift, merica
Decent lines, decent plot, isn’t particularly strong or weak in either. 3.5.]]> 3.55 2022 The Rabbit Hutch
author: Tess Gunty
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/05
date added: 2024/05/24
shelves: fiction, drift, merica
review:
The author did her MFA in creative writing from NYU and lives in LA. I don’t think she needed her debut book to win awards, on top of all that.

Decent lines, decent plot, isn’t particularly strong or weak in either. 3.5.
]]> Choice 150778991
Together, these connected narratives raise the How free are we really to make our own choices? In a scathing, compassionate quarrel with the world, Neel Mukherjee confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life.]]> 304 Neel Mukherjee 1324075015 Rahul 0 to-read 3.33 Choice
author: Neel Mukherjee
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Room 50274 288 Hubert Selby Jr. 0714530387 Rahul 0 to-read 3.72 1971 The Room
author: Hubert Selby Jr.
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Last Exit to Brooklyn 50275 Last Exit to Brooklyn, and this Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting.

Described by various reviewers as hellish and obscene, Last Exit to Brooklyn tells the stories of New Yorkers who at every turn confront the worst excesses in human nature. Yet there are moments of exquisite tenderness in these troubled lives. Georgette, the transvestite who falls in love with a callous hoodlum; Tralala, the conniving prostitute who plumbs the depths of sexual degradation; and Harry, the strike leader who hides his true desires behind a boorish masculinity, are unforgettable creations. Last Exit to Brooklyn was banned by British courts in 1967, a decision that was reversed the following year with the help of a number of writers and critics including Anthony Burgess and Frank Kermode.

Hubert Selby, Jr. (1928-2004) was born in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of 15, he dropped out of school and went to sea with the merchant marines. While at sea he was diagnosed with lung disease. With no other way to make a living, he decided to try writing: 'I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer.' In 1964 he completed his first book, Last Exit to Brooklyn, which has since become a cult classic. In 1966, it was the subject of an obscenity trial in the UK. His other books include The Room, The Demon, Requiem for a Dream, The Willow Tree and Waiting Period. In 2000, Requiem for a Dream was adapted into a film starring Jared Leto and Ellen Burstyn, and directed by Darren Aronofsky.

'Last Exit to Brooklyn will explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America, and still be eagerly read in 100 years'
Allen Ginsberg

'An urgent tickertape from hell'
Spectator]]> 290 Hubert Selby Jr. 0747549923 Rahul 0 currently-reading 3.94 1964 Last Exit to Brooklyn
author: Hubert Selby Jr.
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Chronology of Water 9214995 The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the reader through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman's developing sexuality that some define as untraditional because of her attraction to both men and women. Her emergence as a writer evolves at the same time and takes the narrator on a journey of addiction, self-destruction, and ultimately survival that finally comes in the shape of love and motherhood.]]> 310 Lidia Yuknavitch 0979018838 Rahul 4
The poet Billy Collins pops up once. "We also lunched with Billy Collins and Alfred Corn. The latter I adored. The former talked to my tits."

The writer belongs to the Oregon group of writers and one of her champions include Chuck Palahniuk.

What's with all the raging, dads. ]]> 4.24 2011 The Chronology of Water
author: Lidia Yuknavitch
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: memoir, merica, culture, upcoming-hollywood, favorites
review:
Explicit and also, very good. Brought to my attention by Kristen Stewart turning it into a movie, which there's absolutely no need of.

The poet Billy Collins pops up once. "We also lunched with Billy Collins and Alfred Corn. The latter I adored. The former talked to my tits."

The writer belongs to the Oregon group of writers and one of her champions include Chuck Palahniuk.

What's with all the raging, dads.
]]> The Outsiders 231804 The Outsiders is about two weeks in the life of a 14-year-old boy. The novel tells the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his struggles with right and wrong in a society in which he believes that he is an outsider. According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, even willing to rumble against a gang of socs for the sake of his fellow greasers--until one terrible night when his friend Johnny kills a soc. The murder gets under Ponyboy's skin, causing his bifurcated world to crumble and teaching him that pain feels the same whether a soc or a greaser.

Librarian note: This record is for one of the three editions published with different covers and with ISBN 0-140-38572-X / 978-0-14-038572-4. The records are for the 1988 cover (this record), the 1995 cover, and the 2008 cover which is also the current in-print cover.]]> 208 S.E. Hinton 0670532576 Rahul 3 culture, fiction, merica 4.13 1967 The Outsiders
author: S.E. Hinton
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1967
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/17
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: culture, fiction, merica
review:

]]> The Zone of Interest 20447658 Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were.

The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.

The Zone of Interest is a love story with a violently unromantic setting. Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other’s eye, after we have seen who we really are?

Powered by both wit and compassion, and in characteristically vivid prose, Martin Amis’s unforgettable new novel excavates the depths and contradictions of the human soul.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 306 Martin Amis 0385353499 Rahul 3 europe, fiction
]]> 3.62 2014 The Zone of Interest
author: Martin Amis
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/12
date added: 2024/03/12
shelves: europe, fiction
review:
At times delicious but also full of itself. Did it need so much German?


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

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

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

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

]]> Praiseworthy 123263848 736 Alexis Wright 1922725323 Rahul 0 to-read 3.77 2023 Praiseworthy
author: Alexis Wright
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Blood and Guts in High School 321950
In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny--her "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father"--until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise.

Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.]]> 165 Kathy Acker 080213193X Rahul 0 to-read 3.50 1984 Blood and Guts in High School
author: Kathy Acker
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens]]> 152034931 A rollicking historyof England's earliest kings and queens, a story ofnarcissists, excessive beheadings, middle-management insurrection, uncivil wars,and more, fromaward-winning British actor and comedian David Mitchell

Think you know the kings and queens of England? Think again.

In Unruly , David Mitchell explores how early England’s monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects� destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky bastards who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear to us today in their portraits.

Taking us right back to King Arthur ( he didn’t exist), Mitchell tells the founding story of post-Roman England right up to the reign of Elizabeth I ( she dies), as the monarchy began to lose its power. It’s a tale of bizarre and curious ascensions, inadequate self-control, and at least one total Cnut, as the English evolved from having their crops stolen by the thug with the largest armed gang to bowing and paying taxes to a divinely anointed King.

How this happened, who it happened to, and why the hell it matters are all questions Mitchell answers with brilliance, wit, and the full erudition of a man who once studied history—and is damned if he’ll let it off the hook for the mess it’s made of everything.

A funny book that takes history seriously, Unruly is for anyone who has ever wondered how the monarchy came to be—and who is to blame.]]> 433 David Mitchell 0593728491 Rahul 4 british, history 4.13 2023 Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens
author: David Mitchell
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/01
date added: 2024/03/01
shelves: british, history
review:

]]> Lulu in Hollywood 847367
Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1982.]]> 184 Louise Brooks 0816637318 Rahul 0 to-read 3.98 1982 Lulu in Hollywood
author: Louise Brooks
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> How to Butter Toast 122882829 It seems like nothing, really, could be clearer or more straight.
But though, in terms of things required, the number is just two,
there is a lot of wiggle room for what there is to do. Cook and author Tara Wigley had been to cookery school, read hundreds of cookbooks and developed recipes for over a decade. Yet she found the fewer the ingredients in a recipe, the more confusion there was about how best to make it. The result is How to Butter Toast , a collection of rhymes that will enlighten and entertain, reassure and ultimately liberate the culinarily confused. The rhymes provide reassuring � and memorable � answers to the culinary conundrums we often How long should I boil an egg? What’s the best way to crush garlic? How do I make mayonnaise, a martini or indeed the perfect cup of tea? Tara’s playful take on these food quandaries seems effortless but belies her knowledgeable and carefully researched approach to cooking. Beautifully packaged with bold and witty illustrations throughout, How to Butter Toast is the perfect gift for cooks of all levels. This is the first book in a series Tara is publishing with Pavilion. ‘I can't think of many food authorities who can string together words which are as poignant and profound as they are entertaining and ear-pleasing.� Yotam Ottolenghi ‘A total joy. Part Dr Seuss, part Ogden Nash, part Julia Child, 100% inspired and inspiring� Samin Nosrat ‘Fun and wise, Tara manages to capture the kinds of the things we cogitate about � sometimes without even knowing! � and provides reassuring answers to those confusing everyday conundrums. A collection for when you are weary of recipes and cooking, but not of life itself!� Helen Goh ‘Those who have followed her ditties on Insta since Lockdown will be delighted, but the detail, the skill, the Ballymaloe cookery school training, the years as co-writer with Yotam at Ottolenghi will save serious cooks a fortune in cookery school fees. How she manages to explain chemistry in rhyme is little short of genius .� Gilly Smith]]> 160 Tara Wigley 0008554722 Rahul 0 to-read 4.10 How to Butter Toast
author: Tara Wigley
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Shards 60880820 A sensational new novel from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.

Bret Easton Ellis's masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them--and Bret in particular--with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends--or his own mind--to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero LA, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17-sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
]]> 595 Bret Easton Ellis 059353560X Rahul 3 fiction 3.98 2023 The Shards
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/02
date added: 2024/02/03
shelves: fiction
review:
The ending is quite the mess and BEE doesn't have much to say in general apart from reciting names of streets and songs. Liked the modus operandi of the Trawler and some images, like that of bats fighting the wind to get to the horse. B-movie Hollywood Thriller is the vibe.
]]> <![CDATA[Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life]]> 150778642 An astonishing debut from the beloved NPR science correspondent: intimate essays about the intersection of science and everyday life.

Inspired by Walt Whitman’s invocation to the “transient and strange,� longtime NPR science reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce brings what best-selling essayist Tim Kreider calls her “bright inquiring mind and lively, drily funny voice� to the largest matters of life―birth and death, constancy and impermanence, love and aging. In personal essays both curious and wise, she describes the wildest workings of the natural world, from the echoing truth of a fetal heartbeat and the incredible leap of the humble flea to the eerie power of tornadoes and the otherworldly glint of micrometeorites. Beautifully blending explanatory science, original reporting, and personal experience, she captures the ache of ordinary comforting a frightened child, wrestling with potential genetic defects, confronting mortality through a parent’s illness. Transient and Strange delves into the places where science touches our lives most intimately, offering resonant insights into both the world around us and the worlds within us.]]> 224 Nell Greenfieldboyce 0393882349 Rahul 0 to-read 3.83 Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life
author: Nell Greenfieldboyce
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Indelicacy 45892263 her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?

Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.

"Indelicacy isn't merely a book, it's a world; a world I wanted to live in, forever . . . Arch, yet warm; aspiring and impervious; confiding and enigmatic; reposing and intrepid; Cain has conjured a protagonist who purged my mind and filled my heart." �Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

A ghostly feminist fable, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams.]]> 176 Amina Cain 0374148376 Rahul 0 to-read 3.58 2020 Indelicacy
author: Amina Cain
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials]]> 176443387
Witchcraft is a dramatic journey through thirteen witch trials across history, some famous—like the Salem witch trials—and some on Vardø island, Norway, in the 1620s, where an indigenous Sami woman was accused of murder; in France in 1731, during the country’s last witch trial, where a young woman was pitted against her confessor and cult leader; in Pennsylvania in 1929 where a magical healer was labelled a “witch�; in Lesotho in 1948, where British colonial authorities executed local leaders. Exploring how witchcraft became feared, decriminalized, reimagined, and eventually reframed as gendered persecution, Witchcraft takes on the intersections between gender and power, indigenous spirituality and colonial rule, and political conspiracy and individual resistance.

Offering a vivid, compelling, and dramatic story, unspooling through centuries, about the men and women who were accused—some of whom survived their trials, and some who did not� Witchcraft empowers the people who were and are victimized and marginalized, giving a voice to those who were silenced by history.]]> 320 Marion Gibson 1668002426 Rahul 0 to-read 3.64 2023 Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials
author: Marion Gibson
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Good in Bed (Cannie Shapiro, #1)]]> 14748
For twenty-eight years, things have been tripping along nicely for Cannie Shapiro. Sure, her mother has come charging out of the closet, and her father has long since dropped out of her world. But she loves her friends, her rat terrier, Nifkin, and her job as pop culture reporter for The Philadelphia Examiner. She's even made a tenuous peace with her plus-size body.

But the day she opens up a national women's magazine and sees the words "Loving a Larger Woman" above her ex-boyfriend's byline, Cannie is plunged into misery...and the most amazing year of her life. From Philadelphia to Hollywood and back home again, she charts a new course for herself: mourning her losses, facing her past, and figuring out who she is and who she can become.]]> 376 Jennifer Weiner 0743418174 Rahul 3 fiction
The third act is a mess, the second act is overblown, but the writing is solid throughout. I can never imagine anyone loving a guy with a ponytail. And to pine for one? Come on!

The guy's column is better than Cannie's.]]> 3.76 2002 Good in Bed (Cannie Shapiro, #1)
author: Jennifer Weiner
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves: fiction
review:
Don't be fooled by the title or the cover, this isn't a book about sex. It's a normal book of fiction.

The third act is a mess, the second act is overblown, but the writing is solid throughout. I can never imagine anyone loving a guy with a ponytail. And to pine for one? Come on!

The guy's column is better than Cannie's.
]]> The Counting House 125429061 He helms the engine room of the modern the six-billion-dollar endowment he presides over allows the school to compete for students, faculty, prestige, moral purpose―and solvency. The CIO is a winner in bourgeois America's highest "doing well by doing good."
And then all that he thinks he understands―about investing, about his own talents, about every choice and non-choice that brought his life to where it is―begins to fall apart. At first, slowly, amid endless fascinating conversations with his staff, his wildly talented (and sometimes hilarious) trustees, and the motley money managers that march through his office. And then quickly, in an epic showdown with a reclusive, legendary hedge fund manager, his university's richest and most stingy billionaire alumnus.
With its wry appreciation for the absurd, The Counting House lays claim to the title of funniest novel about American business. Underneath the humor, however, is an unprecedented, necessary story of the inner life of a story that reveals how the workings of our daily lives rest upon the market's unforgiving truths.]]> 288 Gary Sernovitz 1608012530 Rahul 0 to-read 3.68 The Counting House
author: Gary Sernovitz
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.68
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Black Friend: Essays 56969544
Ziwe made a name for herself by asking guests like Alyssa Milano, Fran Lebowitz, and Chet Hanks direct questions. In Black Friend, she turns her incisive perspective on both herself and the culture at large. Throughout the book, Ziwe combines pop-culture commentary and personal stories, which grapple with her own (mis)understanding of identity. From a hilarious case of mistaken identity via a jumbotron to a terrifying fight-or-flight encounter in the woods, Ziwe raises difficult questions for comedic relief.

From Black Friend’s Introduction:

“Today, I learned that my book is ranked as the #1 new release in ‘Discrimination and Racism� on Amazon. Wow. This is a huge honor, especially considering my stiff competition in the selfpublished manifestos space. Unfortunately, this victory is bittersweet. I worry that people may get the wrong idea and think that I am pro-racism when in actuality, I am indifferent. Still, I’d love to thank everyone who made this possible. I solemnly swear to write the most discriminatory book in American history. I hope I can make you proud.

“Just kidding . . . I will not marginalize you . . . unless that’s your kink. This book of essays offers moments of extreme discomfort (and the subsequent growth) in my life around the role of ‘black friend.� Black friends come in all shapes and sizes. Yet the archetype is often a two-dimensional character meant to support the non-black protagonists� more complex humanity. Some black friends exist as the comic relief, like Donkey in any of the Shrek movies. Some are the sassy friend, like Louise from St. Louis in Sex and the City. Still others are the inexplicably sagacious companion, like Morpheus in The Matrix. It’s impossible for these individual portraits to reflect my complicated reality. To start, they are fictional. One of them is a talking ass. I do not exist just to move plot. While I am a supportive friend, I am not a supporting character. I am the protagonist of my perfectly imperfect story.”]]> 192 Ziwe 1419756346 Rahul 4 essays, humor 4.27 2023 Black Friend: Essays
author: Ziwe
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/23
date added: 2023/12/23
shelves: essays, humor
review:
Fun, but not very intellectual :P There's a brief moment when Fran Lebowitz pops up and you wonder if you shouldn't be reading her work. The race talk keeps the book going, didn't know what the chapters on peloton and reality tv were doing in there. Not funny nor insightful, those couple of chapters. Has a tendency to present some well-known facts as something esoteric. Like who among us doesn't know PTA is married to Maya Rudolph? There are also way too many conversations she swears she THINKS ABOUT EVERY SINGLE DAY. Could've also cut down on some [REDACTED].
]]> <![CDATA[The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder]]> 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 Rahul 3
Worthy story, ok book, should make a better movie. No Moby Dick! But then, what is!

]]> 4.14 2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
author: David Grann
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/16
date added: 2023/12/16
shelves: british, culture, history, upcoming-hollywood
review:
Now taking wagers on which of the characters Leonardo will be playing in the movie adaptation.

Worthy story, ok book, should make a better movie. No Moby Dick! But then, what is!


]]> Bream Gives Me Hiccups 24886634
Taking its title from a group of stories that begin the book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups moves from contemporary L.A. to the dorm rooms of an American college to ancient Pompeii, throwing the reader into a universe of social misfits, reimagined scenes from history, and ridiculous overreactions. In one piece, a tense email exchange between a young man and his girlfriend is taken over by his sister, who is obsessed with the Bosnian genocide (The situation reminds me of a little historical blip called the Karadordevo agreement); in another, a college freshman forced to live with a roommate is stunned when one of her ramen packets goes missing (she didn't have "one" of my ramens. She had a chicken ramen); in another piece, Alexander Graham Bell has teething problems with his invention (I've been calling Mabel all day, she doesn't pick up! Yes, of course I dialed the right number - 2!).

United by Eisenberg's gift for humor and character, and grouped into chapters that open with illustrations by award-winning cartoonist Jean Jullien, the witty pieces collected in Bream Gives Me Hiccups explore the various insanities of the modern world, and mark the arrival of a fantastically funny, self-ironic, and original voice.]]> 273 Jesse Eisenberg 0802124046 Rahul 3 humor
The book is divided into 9 sections and I really enjoyed a couple of them.

If Jesse Eisenberg writes a book, you read the acknowledgements too- just to see if he's mentioned any of his acting pals. Sure enough, there's Mia Wasikowska.
]]> 3.49 Bream Gives Me Hiccups
author: Jesse Eisenberg
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.49
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2016/08/13
date added: 2023/12/01
shelves: humor
review:
Plenty of wit. Plenty of wisdom that pops up from unexpected places as well, but that's par with humorous writings. Coming across as deep when trying to be funny is an occupational hazard. A distinctive mean streak too, especially when in character as a freshman. Most of the choices he makes are the choices that help make writing easier. Not complaining, that's something worth copying for a beginner.

The book is divided into 9 sections and I really enjoyed a couple of them.

If Jesse Eisenberg writes a book, you read the acknowledgements too- just to see if he's mentioned any of his acting pals. Sure enough, there's Mia Wasikowska.

]]> This Is Salvaged 123410680
A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This Is Salvaged , unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.]]> 208 Vauhini Vara 0393541738 Rahul 0 to-read 3.66 2023 This Is Salvaged
author: Vauhini Vara
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Why the New Deal Matters (Why X Matters Series)]]> 54849820
“A must-read for those who’ve read nothing about the New Deal before, those who’ve read everything about it, and anyone in between. With timeless prose and timely arguments, Why the New Deal Matters powerfully connects that era to our own.”—Kevin M. Kruse, Princeton University

The greatest peaceable expression of common purpose in U.S. history, the New Deal altered Americans' relationship with politics, economics, and one another in ways that continue to resonate today. No matter where you look in America, there is likely a building or bridge built through New Deal initiatives. If you have taken out a small business loan backed by the federal government or drawn unemployment insurance, you can thank the New Deal. While certainly flawed in many aspects—the New Deal was implemented by a Democratic Party still beholden to the segregationist South for its majorities in Congress and the Electoral College—the New Deal functioned as a bulwark of American democracy in hard times. This book looks at how this legacy, both for good and ill, informs the current debates around governmental responses to crises.]]> 232 Eric Rauchway 0300252005 Rahul 0 to-read 3.99 Why the New Deal Matters (Why X Matters Series)
author: Eric Rauchway
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.99
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference (Check Info and Delete This Occurrence: ºC the Rodolfo De Benedetti Lecture Series)]]> 7788971 economic explanations for the difference, including different levels of pre-tax income, openness, and social mobility; they survey politico-historical differences such as the varying physical size of nations, their electoral and legal systems, and the character of their political parties, as well as
their experiences of war; and they examine sociological explanations which include different attitudes to the poor and notions of social responsibility, as well as, most importantly, attitudes to race.]]> 264 Alberto Alesina 0199267669 Rahul 0 to-read 3.33 2004 Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference (Check Info and Delete This Occurrence: ºC the Rodolfo De Benedetti Lecture Series)
author: Alberto Alesina
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> According to Mark 19450168 A respected literary biographer, Mark is working on the life of Gilbert Strong - a writer about whom he thinks he knows everything. Happily married, and apparently dedicated to a life of letters, he nevertheless falls in love with Strong's granddaughter Carrie, a vague and unsophisticated young woman more interested in bedding plants than books or passion. As Mark's obsessions develop over a hot, complicated summer, he begins to understand that nothing is ever what it seems; not Gilbert Strong, and certainly not himself.



According to Mark is a witty and moving look at love, literature and the dangers of middle-aged folly.

]]> 224 Penelope Lively 0141968842 Rahul 3 culture, lit, fiction
Another book I picked up from the column, Read like the wind.]]> 3.91 1984 According to Mark
author: Penelope Lively
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1984
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/22
date added: 2023/09/22
shelves: culture, lit, fiction
review:
It spoils Thomas Hardy’s Tess of� so beware. The pleasures of the book are subtle, more in the to be admired than the to be enjoyed camp. The book is very chaste, the people react in very mature ways - which was refreshing. Rolling my eyes at the two ‘very’s I dumped in the last line.

Another book I picked up from the column, Read like the wind.
]]> <![CDATA[The Journals of Andre Gide: Volume I 1889-1913]]> 492519 Original French]]> 396 André Gide 1199582131 Rahul 0 to-read 4.23 1947 The Journals of Andre Gide: Volume I 1889-1913
author: André Gide
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1947
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water]]> 56140 Cadillac Desert Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West.

Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning expose and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of an Eden—an Eden that may be only a mirage.]]> 582 Marc Reisner 0140178244 Rahul 0 to-read 4.27 1986 Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
author: Marc Reisner
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Ex-Wife 62919597
It's 1924, and Peter and Patricia have what looks to be a very modern marriage. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work, Patricia as a head copywriter at a major department store. When it comes to sex with other people, both believe in “the honesty policy.� Until they don‘t. Or, at least, until Peter doesn‘t—and a shell-shocked, lovesick Patricia finds herself starting out all over again, but this time around as a different kind of single the ex-wife.

An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife captures the speakeasies, night clubs, and parties that defined Jazz Age New York—alongside the morning-after aspirin and calisthenics, the lunch-hour visits to the gym, the girl-talk, and the freedoms and anguish of solitude. It also casts a cool eye on the bedrooms and the doctor’s offices where, despite rising hemlines, the men still call the shots. The result is a unique view of what its author Ursula Parrott called “the era of the one-night stand�: an era very much like our own.]]> 232 Ursula Parrott 194602256X Rahul 4 fiction, merica 4.29 1929 Ex-Wife
author: Ursula Parrott
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/09
date added: 2023/09/13
shelves: fiction, merica
review:

]]> Two Serious Ladies 215262
Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, they go in search of salvation: Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels; while Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each changed by her experience.

Mysterious, profound, anarchic and very funny, 'Two Serious Ladies' is a daring, original work that defies analysis.]]> 234 Jane Bowles 0720611792 Rahul 4 fiction, lit
More Poor Things than the novel Poor Things, the one Lanthimos is turning into a movie.

"He reminded her of certain comedians who are at last given a secondary tragic role and execute it rather well." ]]> 3.66 1943 Two Serious Ladies
author: Jane Bowles
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/29
date added: 2023/08/29
shelves: fiction, lit
review:
Masterpiece in strangeness. The characters in this book exhibit the strangest of behaviors. Everything is a bit off. Nothing makes sense. Recommended by a delightful weekly column about books in the NY Times. Tremendously inspiring.

More Poor Things than the novel Poor Things, the one Lanthimos is turning into a movie.

"He reminded her of certain comedians who are at last given a secondary tragic role and execute it rather well."
]]> <![CDATA[The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet]]> 63251778
The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing.It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90° F to 110°F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event� one that culls out the most vulnerable people. But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.

As an award-winning journalist who has been at the forefront of environmental journalism for decades, Goodell’s new book may be his most provocative yet, explaining how extreme heat will dramatically change the world as we know it. Masterfully reported, mixing the latest scientific insight with on-the-ground storytelling, Jeff Goodell tackles the big questions and uncovers how extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.
ձ> 400 Jeff Goodell 0316497576 Rahul 4
A thing I learnt from the book: William Faulkner might have lived longer had he not had such an (completely justified) aversion to the air conditioner. His wife had one installed the day after his passing.
]]> 4.26 2023 The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
author: Jeff Goodell
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/26
date added: 2023/08/26
shelves: climate, critical, culture, habitats
review:
Soft 4. Not all chapters are equally good. Some of the human interest stories are not so interesting.

A thing I learnt from the book: William Faulkner might have lived longer had he not had such an (completely justified) aversion to the air conditioner. His wife had one installed the day after his passing.

]]> The Memory Police 37004370
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.]]> 274 Yōko Ogawa 1101870605 Rahul 0 to-read 3.72 1994 The Memory Police
author: Yōko Ogawa
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa]]> 58532181 Crackling with energy and intelligence, this debut is the story of Andrew Aziza, a one-of-a-kind teenager who goes on a journey of self-discovery in the shadow of colonialism and communal violence in Nigeria.

Andrew Aziza is a fifteen-year-old boy living in Kontagora in Northern Nigeria. He lives with his secretive mother, Gloria, and spends his days about town with his droogs, Slim and Morocca. He's contemplating the larger questions with his teacher Zahrah and his equally brilliant friend Fatima, a Hausa-Fulani girl who clearly has feelings for him. Together they discuss mathematical theorems, Black power, and what Andy has deemed the curse of Africa.

Inevitably, Andy falls hopelessly in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on: Eileen, Father McMahon's niece. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. The first is that an unfamiliar man there claims to be Andy's father. The second is that an anti-Christian mob has gathered, headed for the church. In the ensuing havoc and its aftermath, Andy is forced to reckon with his identity and desires and determine how to live on the so-called Cursed Continent.

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces a dazzling, distinctive, new literary voice. Crackling with energy, this tragicomic novel provides a stunning lens into contemporary African life, the complicity of the West, and the impossible challenges of coming of age in a turbulent world.]]> 336 Stephen Buoro 1635577772 Rahul 4 to-read
Elevated by tales of Africa and Africans, lessened by the white woman.]]> 3.65 2023 The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa
author: Stephen Buoro
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/23
date added: 2023/08/23
shelves: to-read
review:
'Eiqueen' is the fly in the ointment. Would've felt far more comfortable giving the book 4 stars without her in it. An ironic development since Eiqueen was what drew me to the book.

Elevated by tales of Africa and Africans, lessened by the white woman.
]]> Flowers for Algernon 54872718 Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.

Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence-a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?]]> 311 Daniel Keyes Rahul 4 fiction, psych, sci-fi 4.27 1966 Flowers for Algernon
author: Daniel Keyes
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2015/02/10
date added: 2023/08/18
shelves: fiction, psych, sci-fi
review:

]]> The Pine Barrens 821355
The term refers to the predominant trees in the vast forests that cover the area and to the quality of the soils below, which are too sandy and acid to be good for farming. On all sides, however, developments of one kind or another have gradually moved in, so that now the central and integral forest is reduced to about a thousand square miles. Although New Jersey has the heaviest population density of any state, huge segments of the Pine Barrens remain uninhabited. The few people who dwell in the region, the "Pineys," are little known and often misunderstood. Here McPhee uses his uncanny skills as a journalist to explore the history of the region and describe the people "and their distinctive folklore" who call it home.]]> 157 John McPhee 0374514429 Rahul 0 to-read 4.20 1967 The Pine Barrens
author: John McPhee
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder]]> 63366030
Malcolm Macarthurwas a well-known Dublin socialite and heir.Suave and urbane, he passed his days mingling with artists and aristocrats, reading philosophy, living a life of the mind. But by 1982, his inheritance had dwindled to almost nothing, a desperate threat to his lifestyle.Macarthurhastily conceived a He would commit bank robbery, of the kind that had become frightfully common in Dublin at the time. But his plan spun swiftly out of control, and he needlessly killed two innocent people. The ensuing manhunt, arrest, and conviction amounted to one of the most infamous political scandals in modern Irish history, contributing to the eventual collapse of a government.

Author Mark O'Connell spentcountless hours in conversation with Macarthur—interviews that veered from confession to evasion. Through their tense exchanges and O’Connell’s independent reporting, a pair of narratives a riveting account of Macarthur's crimes and a study of the hazy line between truth and invention. We come to see not only the enormity of the murders but the damage that’s inflicted when a life is rendered into story.

At once propulsive and searching, A Thread of Violence is a hard look at a brutal act, its subterranean origins, and the long shadow it casts. It offers a haunting and insightful examination of the lies we tell ourselves—and the lengths we'll go to preserve them.]]> 283 Mark O'Connell 0385547625 Rahul 0 to-read 3.72 2023 A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder
author: Mark O'Connell
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> If Beale Street Could Talk 38463 197 James Baldwin 0307275930 Rahul 3 fiction, new-york 4.28 1974 If Beale Street Could Talk
author: James Baldwin
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1974
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/09
date added: 2023/08/13
shelves: fiction, new-york
review:
Uneven. Has a rough draft feel? Baldwin obviously has put out better works.
]]> <![CDATA[An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell]]> 1889090 75 Deborah Levy 009935831X Rahul 0 3.89 1990 An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell
author: Deborah Levy
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/11
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Others: New and Selected Stories]]> 10796178 —David Rollow, Boston Sunday Globe

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning the essential stories across three decades that showcase his indomitable imagination.
Steven Millhauser’s fiction has consistently, and to dazzling effect, dissolved the boundaries between reality and fantasy, waking life and dreams, the past and the future, darkness and light, love and lust. The stories gathered here unfurl in settings as disparate as nineteenth-century Vienna, a contemporary Connecticut town, the corridors of a monstrous museum, and Thomas Edison’s laboratory, and they are inhabited by a wide-ranging cast of characters, including a knife thrower and teenage boys, ghosts and a cartoon cat and mouse. But all of the stories are united in their unfailing power to surprise and enchant. From the earliest to the stunning, previously unpublished novella-length title story—in which a man who is dead, but not quite gone, reaches out to two lonely women—Millhauser in this magnificent collection carves out ever more deeply his wondrous place in the American literary canon.]]> 387 Steven Millhauser 0307595900 Rahul 0 currently-reading 3.92 2011 We Others: New and Selected Stories
author: Steven Millhauser
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Studies in Classic American Literature]]> 591705 192 D.H. Lawrence 0140183779 Rahul 0 to-read 4.06 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1923
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life]]> 18775383
Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics and computer science, students are losing the ability to think in innovative ways. Deresiewicz explains how college should be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success, so they can forge their own path. He addresses parents, students, educators, and anyone who's interested in the direction of American society, featuring quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and clearly presenting solutions.]]> 245 William Deresiewicz 1476702713 Rahul 0 to-read 3.85 2014 Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
author: William Deresiewicz
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Oblomov 254308 586 Ivan Goncharov 1933480092 Rahul 0 to-read 4.09 1859 Oblomov
author: Ivan Goncharov
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1859
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?]]> 6452731
Affirmative action, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, national service, the moral limits of markets―Sandel relates the big questions of political philosophy to the most vexing issues of the day, and shows how a surer grasp of philosophy can help us make sense of politics, morality, and our own convictions as well.

Justice is lively, thought-provoking, and wise―an essential new addition to the small shelf of books that speak convincingly to the hard questions of our civic life.]]> 308 Michael J. Sandel 0374180652 Rahul 0 to-read 4.30 2007 Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
author: Michael J. Sandel
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.]]> 62963 178 Eve Babitz Rahul 4 4.12 1977 Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.
author: Eve Babitz
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/24
date added: 2023/07/26
shelves:
review:
Lots of California to be explored.
]]> <![CDATA[The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession]]> 62873378 One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first the story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser.

In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser’s strange world—unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.

In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.

This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.]]> 224 Michael Finkel 0525657320 Rahul 0 to-read 3.92 2023 The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
author: Michael Finkel
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Watch Us Dance (In the Country of Others, #2)]]> 62802765 The rebellions within an interracial family play out against the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s in this sexy, stylish, sophisticated new novel by the award-winning, internationally bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny and In the Country of Others.

Morocco, 1968: Two siblings, unusual for their biracial parentage--their father is Moroccan, their mother French--search for their place in a world not made to fit them. Aicha, strong-willed and studious, dreams of leaving Morocco to study medicine in her mother's homeland. Her younger brother, Selim, the family's errant misfit, will forge a path of rebellion among the European hippies descending en masse to practice drugs and free love. Children of the revolution, now coming of age in the violent, nihilistic "years of lead," they seem destined to echo their homeland's fate: teetering between liberation and corruption, idealism and compromise. Enduring racism and abandonment, and experiencing the thrills and terrors of freedom and the iron thralls of desire, they navigate a path toward themselves: who they are, and who they dream of becoming. In Watch Us Dance, Leila Slimani draws on her family's inspiring story to craft a bold, powerful chronicle of the relentless human quest for freedom and self-knowledge.]]> 336 Leïla Slimani 0593493303 Rahul 0 to-read 3.84 2022 Watch Us Dance (In the Country of Others, #2)
author: Leïla Slimani
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Lock-Up (Quirke, #9 and St. John Strafford, #4)]]> 62325806 Booker Prize winner and “Irish master�(The New Yorker)John Banville’s most ambitious crime novel yet brings two detectives together to solve a globe-spanning mystery

In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young history scholar, is found dead in her car. Renowned pathologist Dr. Quirke and DI St. John Strafford begin to investigate the death as a murder, but it’s the victim’s older sister Molly, an established journalist, who discovers a lead that could crack open the case.

One of Rosa’s friends, it turns out, is from a powerful German family that arrived in Ireland under mysterious circumstances shortly after World War II. But as Quirke and Strafford close in, their personal lives may put the case, and the lives of everyone involved, in peril, including Quirke’s own daughter.

Spanning the mountaintops of Italy, the front lines of World War II Bavaria, the gritty streets of Dublin and other unexpected locales,The Lock-Upis an ambitious and arresting mystery by one of the world’s most celebrated authors.]]> 320 John Banville 1335449639 Rahul 0 to-read 3.50 2023 The Lock-Up (Quirke, #9 and St. John Strafford, #4)
author: John Banville
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream]]> 6004724
Keefe reveals the inner workings of Sister Ping’s complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way, he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of illegal immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them. Grand in scope yet propulsive in narrative force, The Snakehead is both a kaleidoscopic crime story and a brilliant exploration of the ironies of immigration in America.]]> 432 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521308 Rahul 0 to-read 4.13 2009 The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Rahul
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Rahul 2 fiction
Nothing special about the story, Bollywood could come up with it. The cultural commentary has more going for it. Relies on plot and suspense more than the books I usually read and I may have punished it for that. Oops.

Will credit the delusional note it ends on. ]]> 3.84 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/06/08
date added: 2023/06/08
shelves: fiction
review:
Before the Joker stairs, there were the Exorcist stairs. Visiting them the next time I'm in DC.

Nothing special about the story, Bollywood could come up with it. The cultural commentary has more going for it. Relies on plot and suspense more than the books I usually read and I may have punished it for that. Oops.

Will credit the delusional note it ends on.
]]> The Guest 61986136 A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.]]> 304 Emma Cline 0812998626 Rahul 3 drift, fiction 3.29 2023 The Guest
author: Emma Cline
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/04
date added: 2023/06/04
shelves: drift, fiction
review:
Love a story about a person whose delusions run deep. Also love the quandary she finds herself in, having to find a way to spend 5 days in a place where she knows no one and has no place to stay. So while the plot and the themes are appealing, the writing doesn't have the charm.
]]> The Devil's Playground 62793677 A riveting 1920s Hollywood thriller about the making of the most terrifying silent film evermade, and a deadly search for the single copy rumored still to exist, from the internationally acclaimed author of The Devil Aspect.

1927: Mary Rourke—a Hollywood studio fixer—is called urgently to the palatial home of Norma Carlton, one of the most recognizable stars in American silent film. Norma has been working on the secret film everyone is openly talking about... a terrifying horror picture called The Devil’s Playground that is rumored to have unleashed a curse on everyone involved in the production. Mary finds Norma’s cold, dead body, and she wonders for just a moment if these dark rumors could be true.

1967: Paul Conway, a journalist and self-professed film aficionado, is on the trail of a tantalizing rumor. He has heard that a single copy of The Devil’s Playground —a Holy Grail for film buffs—may exist. He knows his Hollywood history and he knows the film endured myriad tragedies and ended up lost to time.

The Devil's Playground is Craig Russell’s tour de force, a richly researched and constructed thriller that weaves through the Golden Age of Hollywood and reveals a blossoming industry built on secrets, invented identities, and a desperate pursuit of image. As Mary Rourke charges headlong through the egos, distractions, and traps that threaten to take her down with the doomed production, she discovers a truth far more sinister than she—or we—could have imagined.]]> 368 Craig Russell 0385549016 Rahul 0 to-read 3.79 2023 The Devil's Playground
author: Craig Russell
name: Rahul
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>