en-US Wed, 27 Nov 2024 16:00:51 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 45032 488 Jane Austen Alex 4 classics 3.86 1814
author: Jane Austen
name: Alex
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 4
read at: 2019/05/07
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: classics
review:

]]> 1058564
But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.]]> 140 Elena Ferrante 1933372427 Alex 4 3.70 2006
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Alex
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/19
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 49794584 A new Penguin English Library edition of Jane Austen's tantalizing final work - set to be a major Andrew Davies ITV adaptation this autumn

Written in the last months of Austen's life, Sanditon features a glorious cast of hypochondriacs and speculators in a newly established seaside resort, and shows the author contemplating a changing society with scepticism and amusement. It tells the story of Charlotte Heywood, who is transported by a chance accident from her rural hometown to Sanditon, where she is exposed to the intrigues and dalliances of a small town determined to reinvent itself - and encounters the intriguingly handsome Sidney Parker.

This edition also includes the early epistolary novel Lady Susan and the delightful fragment The Watsons.]]> 196 Jane Austen 0241433711 Alex 3 3.58 1817
author: Jane Austen
name: Alex
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1817
rating: 3
read at: 2019/11/24
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 25242224 The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance.

The Story of the Lost Child is the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women � the brilliant, bookish Elena, and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults, with husbands, lovers, aging parents, and children. Their friendship has been the gravitational center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up � a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final novel she has returned to Naples, drawn back as if responding to the city's obscure magnetism. Lila, on the other hand, could never free herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect the neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.]]> 473 Elena Ferrante 1609452860 Alex 5 favs
I kept wondering why I felt this series stands in a league of its own as a work of fiction, and I think it’s because I never expected any type of reward as a reader. I find that when I read fiction I start to feel a bit of relief towards the end or maybe after a plot line develops that implies a resolution. While out of all four of this series I found this one the most meandering and scattered, it was also the one that left a lot of wonder about characters that were more present in previous novels, but in a good way. Because real life works the same way�-there are these brief lapses that Elena reinserts her being into Lila, I’m guessing as a form of control over life, despite the many opportunities that could cause her to leave Naples and become someone else. This last novel reiterates the endless alternative possibilities a lot of times, and with each one I could see coming true, which made me forget this was fiction in the first place.]]> 4.47 2014
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Alex
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2018/09/15
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: favs
review:
“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.�

I kept wondering why I felt this series stands in a league of its own as a work of fiction, and I think it’s because I never expected any type of reward as a reader. I find that when I read fiction I start to feel a bit of relief towards the end or maybe after a plot line develops that implies a resolution. While out of all four of this series I found this one the most meandering and scattered, it was also the one that left a lot of wonder about characters that were more present in previous novels, but in a good way. Because real life works the same way�-there are these brief lapses that Elena reinserts her being into Lila, I’m guessing as a form of control over life, despite the many opportunities that could cause her to leave Naples and become someone else. This last novel reiterates the endless alternative possibilities a lot of times, and with each one I could see coming true, which made me forget this was fiction in the first place.
]]> 23156040 418 Elena Ferrante Alex 5 favs 4.38 2013
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Alex
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2018/08/18
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: favs
review:
Initially, I had given this 4 stars. Yet as I’ve been thinking about it more, that’s the exact reason why I can’t help but give this 5: I’ve been thinking about this since finishing it. While the beginning half seems to take some time to find its footing with how Elena positions herself in this third installment in the series, the second half put me in a trance, tearful at times as I realize how much Elena has grown as a character. There are callbacks to events of books 1 & 2, but presented with a faint grip on nostalgia, as Elena finds herself both rational and a romantic at the same time. I’m sad to only have one book left in this series.
]]> 2156 249 Jane Austen 0192802631 Alex 4 classics, favs
Enjoyed this way more my second go-around, no doubt having read much more Austen other than P&P helped me think about Austen’s writing strengths more, and Persuasion is definitely one of her best, and maybe, somehow now, I read as her most vulnerable? Apart from my initial thoughts on it during my first read displaying heavy optimism, which is still does. Where was I?]]> 4.15 1817
author: Jane Austen
name: Alex
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1817
rating: 4
read at: 2019/11/24
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: classics, favs
review:
First read: March 2019 / 3 stars

Enjoyed this way more my second go-around, no doubt having read much more Austen other than P&P helped me think about Austen’s writing strengths more, and Persuasion is definitely one of her best, and maybe, somehow now, I read as her most vulnerable? Apart from my initial thoughts on it during my first read displaying heavy optimism, which is still does. Where was I?
]]> 31117613
Ellis and Michael are twelve when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of an overbearing father. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.

But then we fast forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?

This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that.]]> 213 Sarah Winman 0755390962 Alex 5 favs 3.94 2017
author: Sarah Winman
name: Alex
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2018/05/22
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: favs
review:

]]> 58757675 SELIN IS THE LUCKIEST PERSON IN HER The only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's her second year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with her? On the plus side, her life feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy, abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel-a life worthy of becoming a novel-without becoming a crazy, abandoned woman oneself?Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice - no matter the cost. Next on the international travel.Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either / Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.]]> 432 Elif Batuman 1787333868 Alex 5 favs 4.11 2022
author: Elif Batuman
name: Alex
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/02
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: favs
review:

]]> 45732027 A woman in a post-election tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this provocative and subversive debut novel that examines social media, sex, feminism, and fiction, the connection they've all promised, and the lies they help us tell.

On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend's phone and makes a startling discovery: he's an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she's not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she's relieved—he was always a little distant—and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women's March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.

Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can't trust anyone--shouldn't the feeling be mutual?

Narrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age.]]> 272 Lauren Oyler 1948226928 Alex 5 favs 2.83 2021
author: Lauren Oyler
name: Alex
average rating: 2.83
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/22
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: favs
review:

]]> 59575964 A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma.

When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope.

All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender portrayal of what it's like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one's suffering. By turns devastating and soaring, it is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a work of rare and transcendent beauty.]]> 240 Seán Hewitt 0593300084 Alex 5 favs 4.16 2022
author: Seán Hewitt
name: Alex
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/08/02
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: favs
review:

]]> 399257 80 Annie Ernaux 1583225749 Alex 5 favs 3.92 1991
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Alex
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/10
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: favs
review:

]]> 53443227 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize–shortlisted author of The Years.

In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season fifty years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another’s will and desire. In the summer of 1958, eighteen-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man’s, and then he moves on, leaving her without a “master,� bereft. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life.]]> 160 Annie Ernaux Alex 5 favs 4.01 2016
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Alex
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/30
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: favs
review:

]]> 527513 480 Norman Rush 067973709X Alex 5 favs 3.85 1991
author: Norman Rush
name: Alex
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: favs
review:

]]> 75663718 288 Lauren Oyler 0063235358 Alex 4 3.29 2024
author: Lauren Oyler
name: Alex
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/28
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 61340200 A searing collection of true stories from “one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices� (The Guardian)

Set in and around the Mexican city of Veracruz, This Is Not Miami delivers a series of devastating stories—spiraling from real events—that bleed together reportage and the author’s rich and rigorous imagination.

These narrative nonfiction pieces probe deeply into the motivations of murderers and misfits, into their desires and circumstances, forcing us to understand them—and even empathize—despite our wish to simply label them monsters. As in her hugely acclaimed novels Hurricane Season and Paradais, Fernanda Melchor’s masterful stories show how the violent and shocking aberrations that make the headlines are only the surface ruptures of a society on the brink of chaos.]]> 160 Fernanda Melchor 0811228053 Alex 4 4.04 2013
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: Alex
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/28
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 127282947 An autobiographical novel from Édouard Louis, hailed as one of the most important voices of his generation―about social class, transformation, and the perils of leaving the past behind.

One question took center stage in my life, it focused all of my thoughts and occupied every moment when I was alone with how could I get this revenge, by what means? I tried everything.

Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination, and violence in his working-class hometown―so he sets out for school in Amiens, and, later, university in Paris. He sheds the provincial “Eddy� for an elegant new name, determined to eradicate every aspect of his past. He reads incessantly; he dines with aristocrats; he spends nights with millionaires and drug-dealers alike. Everything he does is motivated by a single to become someone else. At once harrowing and profound, Change is not just a personal odyssey, a story of dreams and of “the beautiful violence of being torn away,� but a profound portrait of a society divided by class, power, and inequality.]]> 256 Édouard Louis 0374606803 Alex 4 4.21 2021
author: Édouard Louis
name: Alex
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/28
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 59552167 A young gay man upends the lives of a powerful art-world couple in this steamy novel of self-discovery.

It’s 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon―handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction―takes a bus from Minnesota to New York City because it’s the only place for a young gay man to go. As he begins to settle into the city’s punishing rhythm, he gets a job walking rich Manhattanites� dogs. But it isn’t until he stumbles into the West Village brownstone of two of his clients, the powerful gallery owners Phillip and Nicola, that Gordon learns how much the world has hidden from him―and what he’s capable of doing in order to get it for himself.

A lush, heart-quickening novel about family and art, sex and class, and the terror of self-discovery, Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues chronicles Gordon’s perilous pursuit of belonging from the Midwest to New York and, later, to Europe and Mexico City. As he floats further into Phillip and Nicola’s exclusive universe, and as lines blur between employee, muse, lover, and mentor, Gordon’s charm, manipulation, and growing ambition begin to escape his own control, in turn threatening to unravel the lives, and lies, of those around him.

Anchored by winsome lyricism, glinting intellect, and a main character whose yearnings and mistakes come to feel like our own, In Tongues crackles with fierce longing and pointed emotion, further confirming Grattan as a rare chronicler of young adulthood’s joys and devastations.]]> Thomas Grattan Alex 3 3.5 4.00 2024
author: Thomas Grattan
name: Alex
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/10
date added: 2023/11/10
shelves:
review:
3.5
]]> 123414019 From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss.

Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?

When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.]]> 320 Bryan Washington 0593421094 Alex 2 3.51 2023
author: Bryan Washington
name: Alex
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/10/29
date added: 2023/10/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 125078616 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Annie Ernaux's most recent book, dazzling and breathtaking, published in France in 2022, is about her affair with a man 30 years her junior.

“A sublime book.� —Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle

“Once again the work of the writer Annie Ernaux appears as both a rigorous study of life and an experiment. These fragments of living, however evanescent, are precious, irreplaceable, like a skin that never fades.� —Caroline Montpetit in Le Devoir

The Young Man is Annie Ernaux’s account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the
same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time� together with a sense that she is living her life backwards.

Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the “scandalous girl� she once was, but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing. It was first
published in France in 2022.]]> 64 Annie Ernaux 1644213206 Alex 4 3.59 2022
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Alex
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/17
date added: 2023/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 123026409 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

“The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city—the whole world—with a person you may never have met.�

These first words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman’s need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved’s life. Ernaux’s writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection.”]]> 64 Annie Ernaux 1644213559 Alex 5 3.90 2002
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Alex
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/17
date added: 2023/10/17
shelves:
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]]> 37514017
"You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine" is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel.

Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez," and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages--and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life.

Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.]]> 224 Joshua Whitehead Alex 4
Merged review:

3.5]]> 3.94 2018
author: Joshua Whitehead
name: Alex
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/10
date added: 2023/10/13
shelves:
review:
3.5

Merged review:

3.5
]]> 84476
Tiny, smiling daddy --
Because they wanted to --
Orchid --
The blanket --
Comfort --
The girl on the plane --
The dentist --
Kiss and tell --
The wrong thing Turgor --
Respect --
Processing --
Stuff]]> 256 Mary Gaitskill 0684841444 Alex 4 3.94 1997
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Alex
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/12
date added: 2023/10/12
shelves:
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]]> 145625425 NATIONAL BESTELLER � An “exquisite� (The Boston Globe) exploration of love and loss, the struggles and limitations of family life—and how we all must learn to live together and apart—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

“The only problem with Michael Cunningham’s prose is that it ruins you for mere mortals� work. He is the most elegant writer in America.”�The Washington Post

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS� CHOICE � A BEST BOOK OF THE NPR, Harper’s Bazaar, Chicago Public Library, Lit Hub, Paste, Kirkus Reviews

April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, husband and wife, are slowly drifting apart—and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, is living vicariously through a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. And then there is Nathan, age ten, taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while his sister, Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.

April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the cozy brownstone is starting to feel more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled sleights and frustrated sighs. And dear Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.

April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—and with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.

“[Cunningham] is one of love’s greatest witnesses.� —Los Angeles Times

“An absolutely stunning portrait of humanity . . . a masterpiece.� —Literary Hub ]]> 275 Michael Cunningham Alex 4 3.83 2023
author: Michael Cunningham
name: Alex
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/23
date added: 2023/09/23
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]]> 78292448
In “The Boundary,� one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,� a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering—until the husband crosses a line. And in “The Steps,� on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.

These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.]]> 235 Jhumpa Lahiri 0593536320 Alex 3 4.02 2023
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Alex
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/06
date added: 2023/09/06
shelves:
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]]> 57693584
A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?]]> 186 Noor Naga 164445081X Alex 4 3.95 2022
author: Noor Naga
name: Alex
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/30
date added: 2023/08/30
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]]> 46041168 A New York Times Notable Book (2020)
A Guardian Best Book of 2020
A Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.

Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666Ěýor Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.]]> 224 Fernanda Melchor 0811228037 Alex 4 4.5 3.93 2017
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: Alex
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/30
date added: 2023/08/30
shelves:
review:
4.5
]]> 58350424 A Taiwanese American woman’s coming-of-consciousness ignites eye-opening revelations and chaos on a college campus in this outrageously hilarious and startlingly tender debut novel.

Twenty-nine-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperate to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou and never read about “Chinese-y� things again. But after years of grueling research, all she has to show for her efforts are junk food addiction and stomach pain. When she accidentally stumbles upon a curious note in the Chou archives one afternoon, she convinces herself it’s her ticket out of academic hell.

But Ingrid’s in much deeper than she thinks. Her clumsy exploits to unravel the note’s message lead to an explosive discovery, upending not only her sheltered life within academia but her entire world beyond it. With her trusty friend Eunice Kim by her side and her rival Vivian Vo hot on her tail, together they set off a roller coaster of mishaps and misadventures, from book burnings and OTC drug hallucinations, to hot-button protests and Yellow Peril 2.0 propaganda.

In the aftermath, nothing looks the same to Ingrid—including her gentle and doting fiancé, Stephen Greene. When he embarks on a book tour with the super kawaii Japanese author he’s translated, doubts and insecurities creep in for the first time� As the events Ingrid instigated keep spiraling, she’ll have to confront her sticky relationship to white men and white institutions—and, most of all, herself.

For readers of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, this uproarious and bighearted satire is a blistering send-up of privilege and power in America, and a profound reckoning of individual complicity and unspoken rage. In this electrifying debut novel from a provocative new voice, Elaine Hsieh Chou asks who gets to tell our stories—and how the story changes when we finally tell it ourselves.]]> 403 Elaine Hsieh Chou 0593298357 Alex 5 3.84 2022
author: Elaine Hsieh Chou
name: Alex
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/30
date added: 2023/08/30
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]]> 51587 The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.]]> 263 Dennis Cooper 0786716746 Alex 4 3.79 2004
author: Dennis Cooper
name: Alex
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/30
date added: 2023/08/30
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]]> 60151826 I'm A Fan, a single speaker uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another. With a clear and unforgiving eye, the narrator unpicks the behaviour of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world, in turn offering a devastating critique of access, social media, patriarchal hetero-normative relationships, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.

In this incredible debut, Sheena Patel announces herself as a vital new voice in literature, capable of rendering a range of emotions and visceral experiences on the page. Sex, violence, politics, tenderness, humour—Patel handles them all with both originality and dexterity of voice.]]> 207 Sheena Patel Alex 3 3.5 3.28 2022
author: Sheena Patel
name: Alex
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/25
date added: 2023/08/25
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3.5
]]> 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.�

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

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Alex 4 4.10 1969
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Alex
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/08
date added: 2023/08/08
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]]> 61126612
Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings.

For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision.

To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse.

For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability—until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?

From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, comes an intimate and contemporary study of time, space, and the nature of love. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken.]]> 288 Olivie Blake 1250888166 Alex 3 3.5 3.69 2020
author: Olivie Blake
name: Alex
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/08
date added: 2023/08/08
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3.5
]]> 65215321 From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collective.

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay--playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized--has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories--moments of joy and oblivion--and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Páramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres's Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made--a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.]]> 306 Justin Torres 0374293570 Alex 3 3.76 2023
author: Justin Torres
name: Alex
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/20
date added: 2023/07/20
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]]> 57845088
I carry each book I’ve ever read with me, just as I carry my dead―those things that aren’t really there, those things that shape everything I am.

A genre-bending work of nonfiction, Samantha Hunt’s The Unwritten Book explores ghosts, ghost stories, and haunting, in the broadest sense of each. What is it to be haunted, to be a ghost, to die, to live, to read? Books are ghosts; reading is communion with the dead. Alcohol is a way of communing, too, as well as a way of dying.

Each chapter gathers subjects that dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we’ll never have time to read or write. Hunt, like a mad crossword puzzler, looks for patterns and clues. Through literary criticism, history, family history, and memoir, inspired by W. G. Sebald, James Joyce, Ali Smith, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and many others, Hunt explores motherhood, hoarding, legacies of addiction, grief, how we insulate ourselves from the past, how we misinterpret the world. Nestled within her inquiry is a very special ghost book, an incomplete manuscript about people who can fly without wings, written by her father and found in his desk just days after he died. What secret messages might his work reveal? What wisdom might she distill from its unfinished pages?

Hunt conveys a vivid and grateful life, one that comes from living closer to the dead and shedding fear for wonder. The Unwritten Book revels in the randomness, connectivity, and magic of everyday existence. And at its heart is the immense weight of love.]]> 384 Samantha Hunt 0374604916 Alex 4 4.20 2022
author: Samantha Hunt
name: Alex
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/16
date added: 2023/07/16
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]]> 902010 256 Dorothy Baker 1590171128 Alex 4 3.96 1962
author: Dorothy Baker
name: Alex
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/16
date added: 2023/07/16
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]]> 16057602
Book Two is at heart a love story—the story of Karl Ove falling in love with his wife. But the novel also tells other stories: of becoming a father, of the turbulence of family life, of outrageously unsuccessful attempts at a family vacation, of the emotional strain of birthday parties for children, and of the daily frustrations, rhythms, and distractions of Stockholm keeping him from (and filling) his novel.]]> 571 Karl Ove Knausgård 1935744828 Alex 5 4.38 2009
author: Karl Ove KnausgĂĄrd
name: Alex
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/09
date added: 2023/05/09
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]]> 49236083
La protagonista d'aquesta novel·la és una dona atreta per la solitud com per un imant. Es guanya la vida en un buc, la situació perfecta: una cabina, l'oceà, moltes hores per encara el buit i algún port per conèixer dones. Fins que una la reté, se l'emporta entre les quatre parets d'una casa i l'embarca en la gestació assistida d'una criatura. ¿Què en farà, la maternitat, de l'amant coneguda en un bar?

Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname “Boulder.� When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already 40 and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn’t know how to say no―and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien.

With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.

Once again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her preeminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world―and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.]]> 128 Eva Baltasar 8439736967 Alex 4 3.89 2020
author: Eva Baltasar
name: Alex
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/08
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]]> 11700333 Swimming Home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-adjusted people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera comes loose at the seams. Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize.]]> 165 Deborah Levy 1908276029 Alex 4 4.5 3.44 2011
author: Deborah Levy
name: Alex
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/07
date added: 2023/05/07
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4.5
]]> 61154622
Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events.

Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party is a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.]]> 454 Laurent Mauvignier 1945492651 Alex 5 3.74 2020
author: Laurent Mauvignier
name: Alex
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/06
date added: 2023/05/06
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]]> 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Alex 3 3.5 4.01 2022
author: Hua Hsu
name: Alex
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/03
date added: 2023/05/03
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3.5
]]> 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 Alex 2 3.29 2023
author: Emma Cline
name: Alex
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/05/01
date added: 2023/05/01
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]]> 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Alex 3 3.79 2023
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Alex
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/26
date added: 2023/04/26
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]]> 42200387
Repleto de imágenes poéticas, contundentes y muy físicas, este carácter tan palpable del texto no es gratuito en una novela que nos habla del cuerpo, del sexo, del yo; una obra aguda y directa que reivindica la libertad femenina en el placer y en la soledad.

Eva Baltasar inicia con "Permafrost" un trĂ­ptico de protagonistas femeninas que quiere explorar distintas etapas en la vida de las mujeres.]]> 144 Eva Baltasar 8439735146 Alex 4 3.81 2018
author: Eva Baltasar
name: Alex
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/18
date added: 2023/04/18
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]]> 60409041 A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting the welfare of a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,� our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.�

When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.� As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief, while scrambling to avoid earthquakes, floods, and the noise of their own conflicted psyche. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?

In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion. Both feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings mythmaking to real life.]]> 176 Henry Hoke 0374609888 Alex 4 4.06 2023
author: Henry Hoke
name: Alex
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/16
date added: 2023/04/16
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]]> 42972048
The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries-feminine and masculine,]]> 199 Deborah Levy 1632869845 Alex 4 3.66 2014
author: Deborah Levy
name: Alex
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/16
date added: 2023/04/16
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]]> 61718053
They broke up six months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends.

Which is how they find themselves sharing the largest bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blue week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.

Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends� hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week� in front of those who know you best?

A couple who broke up months ago make a pact to pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.]]> 400 Emily Henry 0593441273 Alex 4 3.95 2023
author: Emily Henry
name: Alex
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/15
date added: 2023/04/15
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Not as banter-y as Book Lovers but has a more complex and satisfying two-for-one deal of a romance in a way. Would have been 5 stars if everyone had the hots for Parth!!!
]]> 62909823
Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.]]> 205 Melissa Broder 1668024896 Alex 3 3.52 2023
author: Melissa Broder
name: Alex
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/13
date added: 2023/04/13
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]]> 62628727 A comedy writer thinks she’s sworn off love, until a dreamily handsome pop star flips the script on all her assumptions. Romantic Comedy is a hilarious, observant and deeply tender novel from New York Times–bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld.

Sally Milz is a sketch writer for "The Night Owls," the late-night live comedy show that airs each Saturday. With a couple of heartbreaks under her belt, she’s long abandoned the search for love, settling instead for the occasional hook-up, career success, and a close relationship with her stepfather to round out a satisfying life.

But when Sally’s friend and fellow writer Danny Horst begins dating Annabel, a glamorous actor who guest-hosted the show, he joins the not-so-exclusive group of talented but average-looking and even dorky men at the show—and in society at large—who’ve gotten romantically involved with incredibly beautiful and accomplished women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch called the "Danny Horst Rule," poking fun at this phenomenon while underscoring how unlikely it is that the reverse would ever happen for a woman.

Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models, who signed on as both host and musical guest for this week’s show. Dazzled by his charms, Sally hits it off with Noah instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder whether there might actually be sparks flying. But this isn’t a romantic comedy; it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her...right?

With her keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age.]]> 309 Curtis Sittenfeld 0399590943 Alex 4 3.60 2023
author: Curtis Sittenfeld
name: Alex
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/11
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]]> 63834978 An intimate, sharply funny novel about a couple heading toward their wedding, and the three friends who may draw them apart

Meet Celine and Luke--for all intents and purposes the happy couple. Luke (a serial cheater) and Celine (more inter­ested in piano than in domestic life) plan to marry in a year. Archie (the best man) should be moving on from his love for Luke and up the corporate ladder, but he finds himself utterly stuck. Phoebe (the bridesmaid and Celine’s sister) just wants to get to the bottom of Luke’s frequent unexplained disappearances. And Vivian (a wedding guest), as the only one with any emotional distance, observes her friends like ants in a colony. As the wedding approaches and these five lives intersect, each will find themselves looking for a path to their happily ever after--but does it lie at the end of an aisle?]]> 240 Naoise Dolan Alex 5 Pack it up Sally Rooney 3.34 2023
author: Naoise Dolan
name: Alex
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/09
date added: 2023/04/09
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Pack it up Sally Rooney
]]> 62092265
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.� These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.]]> 303 Brandon Taylor 0593332334 Alex 3 3.5 3.34 2023
author: Brandon Taylor
name: Alex
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/06
date added: 2023/04/06
shelves:
review:
3.5
]]> 53780642 A workplace novel of the 22nd century

The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth.

The crew of the Six-Thousand ship consists of those who were born, and those who were created. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike find themselves longing for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.

Gradually, the crew members come to see themselves in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether their work can carry on as before � and what it means to be truly alive.

Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn’s crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.]]> 136 Olga Ravn Alex 4 3.69 2018
author: Olga Ravn
name: Alex
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/03
date added: 2023/04/03
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]]> 25333047 Pond is an absorbing chronicle of the pitfalls and pleasures of a solitudinous life told by an unnamed woman living on the cusp of a coastal town. Broken bowls, belligerent cows, swanky aubergines, trembling moonrises and horrifying sunsets, the physical world depicted in these stories is unsettling yet intimately familiar and soon takes on a life of its own. Captivated by the stellar charms of seclusion but restless with desire, the woman’s relationship with her surroundings becomes boundless and increasingly bewildering. Claire-Louise Bennett’s startlingly original first collection slips effortlessly between worlds and is by turns darkly funny and deeply moving.]]> 148 Claire-Louise Bennett 1906539464 Alex 3 3.54 2015
author: Claire-Louise Bennett
name: Alex
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/27
date added: 2023/03/27
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]]> 58703758
At the older woman's insistence they travel back to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.

Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree's playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.]]> 739 Geetanjali Shree Alex 3 3.5 3.65 2018
author: Geetanjali Shree
name: Alex
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/22
date added: 2023/03/22
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3.5
]]> 61860312 The mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home

'If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? That summer, the air was electric between us as we transmitted our feelings to each other across three countries.'

Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live?

Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.

A vivid portrait of a long-held identity coming apart, August Blue expands our understanding of the ways in which we seek to find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.]]> 256 Deborah Levy 0241421314 Alex 5 3.80 2023
author: Deborah Levy
name: Alex
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/18
date added: 2023/03/18
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]]> 49535227
Part breathless confession, part lucid critique, Acts of Desperation renders a consciousness split between rebellion and submission, between escaping degradation and eroticizing it, between loving and being lovable. With unsettling, electric precision, Nolan dissects one of life’s most elusive mysteries: Why do we want what we want, and how do we want it?

Heralding the arrival of a stunning new literary talent, Acts of Desperation interrogates the nature of fantasy, desire, and power, challenging us to reckon honestly with our own insatiability.]]> 288 Megan Nolan Alex 4 Uh oh 3.72 2021
author: Megan Nolan
name: Alex
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/16
date added: 2023/03/16
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Uh oh
]]> 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]> 336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Alex 3 3.69 2023
author: Jen Beagin
name: Alex
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/14
date added: 2023/03/14
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]]> 58837536 A beloved and blistering cult classic and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction finally back in print, Nevada follows a disaffected trans woman as she embarks on a cross-country road trip.

Maria Griffiths is almost thirty and works at a used bookstore in New York City while trying to stay true to her punk values. She's in love with her bike but not with her girlfriend, Steph. She takes random pills and drinks more than is good for her, but doesn't inject anything except, when she remembers, estrogen, because she's trans. Everything is mostly fine until Maria and Steph break up, sending Maria into a tailspin, and then onto a cross-country trek in the car she steals from Steph. She ends up in the backwater town of Star City, Nevada, where she meets James, who is probably but not certainly trans, and who reminds Maria of her younger self. As Maria finds herself in the awkward position of trans role model, she realizes that she could become James's savior—or his downfall.

One of the most beloved cult novels of our time and a landmark of trans literature, Imogen Binnie's Nevada is a blistering, heartfelt, and evergreen coming-of-age story, and a punk-smeared excavation of marginalized life under capitalism. Guided by an instantly memorable, terminally self-aware protagonist—and back in print featuring a new afterword by the author�Nevada is the great American road novel flipped on its head for a new generation.]]> 290 Imogen Binnie 0374606617 Alex 4 3.93 2013
author: Imogen Binnie
name: Alex
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/11
date added: 2023/03/11
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3.5 since the writing is just ok, but bumped to 4 since the voice is great
]]> 53168757
This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Vigdis Hjorth's trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.]]> 240 Vigdis Hjorth Alex 5 3.75 2012
author: Vigdis Hjorth
name: Alex
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/03
date added: 2023/03/03
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]]> 59070298
Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes's pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations.

With warm intellect, playful curiosity, and an infectious voice, Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman's midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.]]> 256 Martin Riker 0802160417 Alex 4 3.49 2023
author: Martin Riker
name: Alex
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/27
date added: 2023/02/27
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]]> 62052300
The success of Irby's career has taken her to new heights. She fields calls with job offers from Hollywood and walks the red carpet with the iconic ladies of Sex and the City. Finally, she has made it. But, behind all that new-found glam, Irby is just trying to keep her life together as she always had.

Her teeth are poisoning her from inside her mouth, and her diarrhea is back. She gets turned away from a restaurant for wearing ugly clothes, she goes to therapy and tries out Lexapro, gets healed with Reiki, explores the power of crystals, and becomes addicted to QVC. Making light of herself as she takes us on an outrageously funny tour of all the details that make up a true portrait of her life, Irby is once again the relatable, uproarious tonic we all need.]]> 290 Samantha Irby 0593315693 Alex 4 3.67 2023
author: Samantha Irby
name: Alex
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/24
date added: 2023/02/24
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]]> 61686012 “Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.�

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon the two discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to each other. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression.

Greek Lessons is the story of the unlikely bond between this pair and a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection—a novel to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive.]]> 192 Han Kang 0593595270 Alex 5 3.54 2011
author: Han Kang
name: Alex
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/19
date added: 2023/02/19
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]]> 55711559 Honestly, sometimes I think it’s the only recourse. Killing men in times like these.

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

Here is the electrifying debut novel from Lisa Taddeo, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Three Women, which was named to more than thirty best-of-the-year lists and hailed as “a dazzling achievement� (Los Angeles Times) and “a heartbreaking, gripping, astonishing masterpiece� (Esquire). Animal is a depiction of female rage at its rawest, and a visceral exploration of the fallout from a male-dominated society. With writing that scorches and mesmerizes, Taddeo illustrates one woman’s exhilarating transformation from prey into predator.]]> 336 Lisa Taddeo 1982122129 Alex 3 3.5 3.71 2021
author: Lisa Taddeo
name: Alex
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/18
date added: 2023/02/18
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3.5
]]> 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 Alex 3 3.5 3.98 2023
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Alex
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/18
date added: 2023/02/18
shelves:
review:
3.5
]]> 59366234
Lia, her husband Harry, and their beloved daughter, Iris, are a precisely balanced family of three. With Iris struggling to navigate the social tightrope of early adolescence, their tender home is a much-needed refuge. But when a sudden diagnosis threatens to derail each of their lives, the secrets of Lia’s past come rushing into the present, and the world around them begins to transform.

Deftly guided through time, we discover the people who shaped Lia’s youth; from her deeply religious mother to her troubled first love. In turn, each will take their place in the shifting landscape of Lia’s body; at the center of which dances a gleeful narrator, learning her life from the inside, growing more emboldened by the day.

Pivoting between the domestic and the epic, the comic and the heart-breaking, this astonishing novel unearths the darkness and levity of one woman’s life to symphonic effect.]]> 448 Maddie Mortimer 198218177X Alex 3
Torn on this one—did not jive with the writing too much, yet one of the most sweet and sad books I’ve read in the most genuine and good way that I can’t imagine having had the same effect not having been written in this style ]]> 3.97 2022
author: Maddie Mortimer
name: Alex
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/13
date added: 2023/02/13
shelves:
review:
3.5

Torn on this one—did not jive with the writing too much, yet one of the most sweet and sad books I’ve read in the most genuine and good way that I can’t imagine having had the same effect not having been written in this style
]]> 37506228
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks... And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.]]> 208 Jenny Offill 0385351100 Alex 3 3.57 2020
author: Jenny Offill
name: Alex
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/12
date added: 2023/02/12
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]]> 50144 Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, is an enchantingly original and deeply affecting book about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine of Kitchen, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, she is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who was once his father), Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale that recalls early Marguerite Duras. Kitchen and its companion story, "Moonlight Shadow," are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.]]> 160 Banana Yoshimoto 0802142443 Alex 4 3.91 1988
author: Banana Yoshimoto
name: Alex
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/12
date added: 2023/02/12
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]]> 60784815 128 Maggie Millner 0374607958 Alex 4 4.5 3.77
author: Maggie Millner
name: Alex
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/11
date added: 2023/02/11
shelves:
review:
4.5
]]> 59364173
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,� eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?� She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!�), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]> 320 Jennette McCurdy Alex 4 4.45 2022
author: Jennette McCurdy
name: Alex
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/08
date added: 2023/02/08
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]]> 44049371 In this stunning essay-collection-cum-prose-poem-cycle, Belcourt meditates on the difficulty and necessity of finding joy as a queer NDN in a country that denies that joy all too often. Out of the 'ruins of the museum of political depression' springs a 'tomorrow free of the rhetorical trickery of colonizers everywhere.' Happiness, this beautiful book says, is the ultimate act of resistance. --Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine
The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.

For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.

Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.]]> 192 Billy-Ray Belcourt 1937512940 Alex 4 4.22 2020
author: Billy-Ray Belcourt
name: Alex
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/30
date added: 2023/01/30
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]]> 22929602
What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.

Listening length: 6 hours, 11 minutes]]> 195 Garth Greenwell 0374288224 Alex 3 3.79 2016
author: Garth Greenwell
name: Alex
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/30
date added: 2023/01/30
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]]> 13591921 Crapalachia is a portrait of these formative years, coming-of-age in rural West Virginia.

Peopled by colorful characters and their quirky stories, Crapalachia interweaves oral folklore and area history, providing an ambitious and powerful snapshot of overlooked Americana.]]> 169 Scott McClanahan 1937512037 Alex 2 4.12
author: Scott McClanahan
name: Alex
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2023/01/28
date added: 2023/01/28
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]]> 60213492 218 Rachel Cusk 0312252560 Alex 4 3.55 1993
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Alex
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/18
date added: 2023/01/18
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]]> 55648627 Imagine Wanting Only This--a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society.

There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns.

In Seek You, Kristen Radtke's wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art, Radtke ushers us through a history of loneliness and longing, and shares what feels impossible to share.

Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to the rise of Instagram, the bootstrap-pulling cowboy to the brutal experiments of Harry Harlow, Radtke investigates why we engage with each other, and what we risk when we turn away. With her distinctive, emotionally charged drawings and deeply empathetic prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully shines a light on some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments, and asks how we might keep the spaces between us from splitting entirely.]]> 352 Kristen Radtke 1524748064 Alex 4 4.00 2021
author: Kristen Radtke
name: Alex
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/18
date added: 2023/01/18
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]]> 79550
Full of brusque humour and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own experience and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of the novels she wrote for adults. This new edition sees the return of a European literary gem—fresh, authentic and deeply humane.]]> 192 Tove Jansson 0954221710 Alex 3 4.05 1972
author: Tove Jansson
name: Alex
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1972
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/18
date added: 2023/01/18
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]]> 59147138 Brisk and shockingly witty, exuberantly scatological as well as deeply wise, The Novelist is a delight. Jordan Castro is a rare new talent: an author highly attuned to the traditions he is working within while also offering a refreshingly fun sendup of life beset by the endless scroll. —Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten

In Jordan Castro’s inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind.

The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor’s embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first person versus third examines choice and action; an Instagram post about the ethics of having children triggers mimetic rivalry; the act of doing the dishes is at once ordinary and profound: one of the many small commitments that make up a life of stability.

The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.]]> 196 Jordan Castro 1593767137 Alex 4 3.37 2022
author: Jordan Castro
name: Alex
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/18
date added: 2023/01/18
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]]> 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 Alex 4 3.58 2020
author: Amina Cain
name: Alex
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/18
date added: 2023/01/18
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]]> 56064463
Sara hasn't seen or heard from Lejla in years. She's comfortable with her life in Dublin, with her partner, their avocado plant, and their naturist neighbour. But when Lejla calls and demands she come home to Bosnia, Sara finds that she can't say no.

What begins as a road trip becomes a journey through the past, as the two women set off to find Armin, Lejla's brother who disappeared towards the end of the Bosnian War. Presumed dead by everyone else, only Lejla and Sara believed Armin was still alive.

Confronted with the limits of memory, Sara is forced to reconsider the things she thought she understood as a girl: the best friend she loved, the first experiences they shared, but also the social and religious lines that separated them, that brought them such different lives.

In Catch the Rabbit, Lana Bastašic tells the story of how we place the ones we love on pedestals, and then wait for them to fall off, how loss marks us indelibly, and how the traumas of war echo down the years.]]> 272 Lana Bastašić 1529039606 Alex 5 4.5 3.82 2018
author: Lana Bastašić
name: Alex
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2021/08/08
date added: 2023/01/14
shelves:
review:
4.5
]]> 58523626 Y/Na novel about a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a K-pop idol sends her to Seoul on a journey of literary self-destruction.

It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boyband, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic—in which you, the reader, insert [Your/Name] and play out an intimate relationship with the unattainable star.

Then Moon suddenly retires, vanishing from the public eye. As Y/N flies from Berlin to Seoul to be with Moon, our narrator, too, journeys to Korea in search of the object of her love. An escalating series of mistranslations and misidentifications lands her at the headquarters of the Kafkaesque entertainment company that manages the boyband until, at a secret location, together with Moon at last, art and real life approach their final convergence.

Surreal, hilarious, and shrewdly poignant, Y/N is a provocative literary debut about the universal longing for transcendence and the tragic struggle to assert one’s singular story amidst the amnesiac effects of globalization. Esther Yi’s prose unsettles the boundary between high and mass art, exploding our expectations of a novel about “identity� and offering in its place a sui generis picture of the loneliness that afflicts modern life.]]> 204 Esther Yi 1662601549 Alex 5 2.92 2023
author: Esther Yi
name: Alex
average rating: 2.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/11
date added: 2023/01/11
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My therapist is getting an audiobook from me
]]> 56347680 The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex.

How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.

How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity�its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power�we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.

We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.]]> 241 Amia Srinivasan 0374721033 Alex 5 4.27 2021
author: Amia Srinivasan
name: Alex
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/08
date added: 2023/01/08
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]]> 60165417 A Minor Chorus introduces the dazzling literary voice of a Lambda Literary Award winner and Canadian #1 national best-selling poet to the United States, shining much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.]]> 176 Billy-Ray Belcourt 132402142X Alex 4 4.03 2022
author: Billy-Ray Belcourt
name: Alex
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/06
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves:
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4.5, only because I felt it cut itself short! Wished this was longer, I would have happily read more and more and more
]]> 60065627 A Room of One’s Own and William H. Gass’s On Being Blue.

“Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts. Lightly. A diary of fiction. Or is that not what this is?�

A series of essayistic inquiries come together to form a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, A Horse at Night: On Writing moves associatively through a personal canon of authors—including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf—and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. Amina Cain’s first nonfiction book is an individual reckoning with the contemporary moment and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own or William H. Gass’s On Being Blue, books that are virtuosic arguments for—and beautiful demonstrations of—the essential unity of writing and life.]]> 136 Amina Cain 1948980134 Alex 5 4.04 2022
author: Amina Cain
name: Alex
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/05
date added: 2023/01/05
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]]> 59344312
Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity's notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn't expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of what really happened the day her daughter died.

Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents would devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen's feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife's words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue to love her.]]> 336 Colleen Hoover 153872474X Alex 3 What was that 4.29 2018
author: Colleen Hoover
name: Alex
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/03
date added: 2023/01/03
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What was that
]]> 58210933 An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.]]> 402 Hernan Diaz 0593420314 Alex 3 3.77 2022
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Alex
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/12
date added: 2022/12/12
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]]> 7147831
I en borende prosa som oppsøker det sårbare, det pinlige og det eksistensielt betydningsbærende, blir dette en dypt personlig roman, selvutprøvende og kontroversiell. Et eksistensielt omdreiningspunkt er farens død, et annet er kanskje hovedpersonens debut som forfatter.]]> 435 Karl Ove Knausgård 8252574580 Alex 4 4.15 2009
author: Karl Ove KnausgĂĄrd
name: Alex
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/11
date added: 2022/12/11
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Definitely reading the rest in 2023
]]> 55959528 A piercing howl of a novel about one young woman’s endless quest for an apartment of her own and the aspirations and challenges faced by the Millennial generation as it finds its footing in the world, from a shockingly talented debut author.

“A woman must have money and a room of one’s own.â€� So said Virginia Woolf in her classic A Room of One’s Own, but in this scrupulously observed, gorgeously wrought debut novel, Jo Hamya pushes that adage powerfully into the twenty-firstĚýcentury, to a generation of people living in rented rooms. What a woman needs now is an apartment of her own, the ultimate mark of financial stability, unattainable for many.

Set in one year, Three Rooms follows a young woman as she movesĚýfrom a rented room at Oxford, where she’s working as a research assistant; to a stranger’s sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where she’s been forced to return, jobless, even a room of her own out of reach. As politics shift to nationalism, the streets fill with protestors, and news drip-feeds into her phone, she struggles to live a meaningful life on her own terms, unsure if she’ll ever be able to afford to do so.]]> 208 Jo Hamya 0358572096 Alex 5 3.02 2021
author: Jo Hamya
name: Alex
average rating: 3.02
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/11
date added: 2022/12/11
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]]> 59576064
But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It's then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.]]> 320 Sarah Thankam Mathews 0593489128 Alex 3 3.83 2022
author: Sarah Thankam Mathews
name: Alex
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/10
date added: 2022/12/10
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]]> 58891551
As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.]]> 390 Douglas Stuart 0802159559 Alex 4 4.38 2022
author: Douglas Stuart
name: Alex
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/03
date added: 2022/12/03
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]]> 59693959 In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet

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

Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.]]> 313 Ottessa Moshfegh Alex 3 3.53 2022
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Alex
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/02
date added: 2022/12/02
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]]> 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 Alex 4 classics 3.96 1874
author: Thomas Hardy
name: Alex
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1874
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/26
date added: 2022/11/23
shelves: classics
review:

]]> 59808607 A gripping, heartbreaking new novel about female friendship, art, and memory by the award-winning author of Where Reasons End.

Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised--the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.

As children in a war-ravaged, backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves--until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a haunting story of friendship, art, exploitation, and memory by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.]]> 348 Yiyun Li 037460634X Alex 4 3.67 2022
author: Yiyun Li
name: Alex
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/23
date added: 2022/11/23
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Watch your backs Elena and Lila
]]> 60018643 How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. Smart, funny, galvanizing, and sometimes profane, Castillo attacks the stale questions and less-than-critical proclamations that masquerade as vital discussion: reimagining the cartography of the classics, building a moral case against the settler colonialism of lauded writers like Joan Didion, taking aim at Nobel Prize winners and toppling indie filmmakers, and celebrating glorious moments in everything from popular TV like The Watchmen to the films of Wong Kar-wai and the work of contemporary poets like Tommy Pico.

At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman's reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy--within ourselves, and with each other.]]> 340 Elaine Castillo 0593489632 Alex 4 4.03 2022
author: Elaine Castillo
name: Alex
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/15
date added: 2022/11/15
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]]> 31355127
Drawing us into the battleground of this marriage, Gwendoline Riley tells a transfixing story of mistakes and misalliances, of helplessness and hostility, in which both husband and wife have played a part. Could this possibly be, nonetheless, a story of love?]]> 169 Gwendoline Riley 1612196268 Alex 3 3.27 2017
author: Gwendoline Riley
name: Alex
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2022/11/07
date added: 2022/11/07
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]]> 62963 178 Eve Babitz Alex 4 4.12 1977
author: Eve Babitz
name: Alex
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/15
date added: 2022/10/15
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]]> 60843483 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat.

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.� She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.
Ěý
Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1644212196 Alex 5 3.47 2001
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Alex
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/15
date added: 2022/10/15
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]]> 17402288
Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.]]> 179 Jenny Offill 0385350813 Alex 4 3.76 2014
author: Jenny Offill
name: Alex
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/04
date added: 2022/10/04
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]]> 57137261 I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat. A college grad reunites with a high school crush when invited to his bachelor party, a lonely cat-sitter wreaks havoc on his friends� apartment, happy hour French fries leave more than grease on lips and fingers, and, squeezed into a diner booth, one man eats past his limit for the sake of friendship. Exploring the lives of bisexual and gay Puerto Rican men, these fifteen stories show a vulnerable, intimate world of yearning and desire. The stars of these narratives linger between living their truest selves and remaining in the wings, embarking on a journey of self-discovery to satisfy their hunger for companionship and belonging.]]> 126 Christopher Gonzalez 1951631218 Alex 5 3.88 2021
author: Christopher Gonzalez
name: Alex
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/01
date added: 2022/10/01
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]]> 58802411
Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.]]> 308 Alejandro Varela Alex 3 3.5 3.92 2022
author: Alejandro Varela
name: Alex
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/09/29
date added: 2022/09/29
shelves:
review:
3.5
]]> 58523656 How can we live with integrity and pleasure in this world of police brutality and racism? An Asian American activist is challenged by his mother to face this question in this powerful—and funny—debut novel of generational change, a mother’s secret, and an activist’s coming-of-age

Twenty-one-year-old Reed is fed up. Angry about the killing of a Black man by an Asian American NYPD officer, he wants to drop out of college and devote himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. But would that truly bring him closer to the moral life he seeks?

In a series of intimate, charged conversations, his mother—once the leader of a Korean-Black coalition—demands that he rethink his outrage, and along with it, what it means to be an organizer, a student, an ally, an American, and a son. As Reed zips around his hometown of Los Angeles with his mother, searching and questioning, he faces a revelation that will change everything.

Inspired by his family’s roots in activism, Ryan Lee Wong offers an extraordinary debut novel for readers of Anthony Veasna So, Rachel Kushner, and Michelle Zauner: a book that is as humorous as it is profound, a celebration of seeking a life that is both virtuous and fun, an ode to mothering and being mothered.]]> 175 Ryan Lee Wong 1646221486 Alex 4 3.59 2022
author: Ryan Lee Wong
name: Alex
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/21
date added: 2022/09/21
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]]> 7695 76 Annie Dillard 0060915439 Alex 5 4.23 1977
author: Annie Dillard
name: Alex
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at: 2022/09/21
date added: 2022/09/21
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]]> 59336344
“Captures the ache-inducing quality of art and desire . . . a deeply relatable and profoundly enjoyable read, one drenched in prismatic color and light.”—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of With Teeth

It’s 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarefied bubble. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old when she transfers to Wrynn as a scholarship student, but she soon finds herself adrift in an environment that prizes novelty over beauty. Complicating matters is Louisa’s unexpected attraction to her charismatic roommate, Karina Piontek, the preternaturally gifted but mercurial daughter of wealthy art collectors. Gradually, Louisa and Karina are drawn into an intense sensual and artistic relationship, one that forces them to confront their deepest desires and fears. But Karina also can’t shake her fascination with Preston Utley, a senior and anti-capitalist Internet provocateur, who is publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger—a once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain relevance.

When Preston concocts an explosive hoax, the fates of all four artists are upended as each is unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat New York art world. Now all must struggle to find new identities in art, in society, and among each other. In the process, they must find either their most authentic terms of life—of success, failure, and joy—or risk losing themselves altogether.

With a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses overturns notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future.]]> 368 Antonia Angress Alex 4 3.91 2022
author: Antonia Angress
name: Alex
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/21
date added: 2022/09/21
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]]> 49092634
We next meet San, aged twenty-two, as she starts a job in a flower shop. There, we are introduced to a colourful cast of characters, including the shop's mute owner, the other florist Su-ae, and the customers that include a sexually aggressive businessman and a photographer, who San develops an obsession for. Throughout, San's moment with Namae lingers in the back of her mind.

A story of desire and violence about a young woman who everyone forgot, VIOLETS is a captivating and sensual read, full of tragedy and beauty.]]> 218 Kyung-Sook Shin 1558612904 Alex 4 3.5 3.58 2001
author: Kyung-Sook Shin
name: Alex
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/17
date added: 2022/09/17
shelves:
review:
3.5
]]>