en-US Tue, 12 Mar 2024 09:32:25 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 59012057
Part revisionist history, part historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, imperialists, G-men and architects.

Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America.

Amusing, disturbing and fascinating, Bad Gays puts centre stage the queer villains and evil twinks in history.]]> 368 Huw Lemmey 1839763272 Amy 0 to-read 3.56 2022
author: Huw Lemmey
name: Amy
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/12
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]]> 36989467

The Hacking of the American The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains was published in September 2017. Written by Dr. Robert Lustig, it is his second attempt to keep his readers from succumbing to the pleasures of sugar, while also detailing his theory as to how America came to be in its current unhappy, drug-addicted, depressed state. According to Lustig, both big businesses and the government are to blame. Both are responsible for the promotion of items which cause guilty pleasure, such as pornography, sugar, and drugs. Guilty pleasures lead to addictive and/or depressive actions, which can spiral out of control. The book provides the author’s personal experiences and research into his theory, scientific data to verify his theory, and ways to avoid being unhappy. In addition, Lustig provides his “Four Cs of Contentment��, ways in which his readers can live the ultimate, contented life


A Brief Look


EVERY GOOD BOOK CONTAINS A WORLD FAR DEEPER than the surface of its pages. The characters and their world come alive, and the characters and its world still live on. Conversation Starters is peppered with questions designed to bring us beneath the surface of the page and invite us into the world that lives on.


These questions can be used to...


Create Hours of


Promote an atmosphere of discussion for groups
Foster a deeper understanding of the book
Assist in the study of the book, either individually or corporately
Explore unseen realms of the book as never seen before


This book you are about to enjoy is an independent resource meant to supplement the original book. If you have not yet read the original book, we encourage doing before purchasing this unofficial Conversation Starters.]]> Daily Books 1370714882 Amy 0 to-read 4.25
author: Daily Books
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]]> 11709037 An entertaining illumination of the stupid beliefs that make us feel wise.

Whether you’re deciding which smart phone to purchase or which politician to believe, you think you are a rational being whose every decision is based on cool, detached logic, but here’s the truth: You are not so smart. You’re just as deluded as the rest of us--but that’s okay, because being deluded is part of being human.

Growing out of David McRaney’s popular blog, You Are Not So Smart reveals that every decision we make, every thought we contemplate, and every emotion we feel comes with a story we tell ourselves to explain them, but often these stories aren’t true. Each short chapter--covering topics such as Learned Helplessness, Selling Out, and the Illusion of Transparency--is like a psychology course with all the boring parts taken out.

Bringing together popular science and psychology with humor and wit, You Are Not So Smart is a celebration of our irrational, thoroughly human behavior.]]> 302 David McRaney 1592406599 Amy 0 to-read 3.84 2011
author: David McRaney
name: Amy
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> 7838364 NB: 2-in-1 edition]

Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's stunning debut, tells the story of a young Jewish American's quixotic journey into an unexpected past. An arresting blend of high comedy and great tragedy, it is about searching for people and places that no longer exist, for the hidden truths that haunt every family, and for the delicate but necessary tales that link past and future.

In Foer's exhilarating second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, nine-year-old Oskar Schell sets out to find the lock that matches a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on September 11. With humor and tenderness, Foer confronts the traumas of our recent history through Oskar's affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey.

This beautiful '2 Works' edition brings together, for the first time, two works from one of this generation's most original writers.]]> 656 Jonathan Safran Foer 0547447264 Amy 0 4.22 2011
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: Amy
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> 60420628
From the mountains to the ocean shores, from the wetlands to the deserts, North America teems with flora and fauna in delicately balanced ecosystems found nowhere else on Earth. With this book in hand, you will understand the language of nature and see those wild places with new eyes. You'll learn to recognize the lobed leaf of an Oracle Oak, the webbed tracks of a River Otter, and the fine, cream-colored tentacles of a Frilled Anemone. This volume celebrates a tradition of knowledge established by the Nature Study Guild. For more than sixty years, the Guild's pocket guidebooks have helped hikers, campers, foragers, and explorers navigate the great outdoors. Now, the best of the guides' informative text and iconic illustrations are gathered in one handsome the perfect reference for today's ramblers.

FOR NATURE LOVERS OLD AND More and more people are invested in and curious about the natural world—from avid campers and hikers to those worried about climate change. This book, with its celebratory tone and charming vintage style, will appeal to anyone who cherishes the natural world.

NOSTALGIC The classic nature illustration style evokes memories of learning about flora and fauna in childhood, making this a wonderfully nostalgic gift.

BEAUTIFUL BLEND OF ART AND This volume presents detailed scientific information in a gorgeous package, a deluxe hardcover that will grace coffeetables and bookshelves. It makes a perfect gift for anyone interested in biology or illustration (or both!).

Perfect ]]> 392 Nature Study Guild 1797206869 Amy 0 to-read 3.74 2022
author: Nature Study Guild
name: Amy
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
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]]> 60321240 224 Cider Mill Press 1951511549 Amy 0 to-read 4.38
author: Cider Mill Press
name: Amy
average rating: 4.38
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rating: 0
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]]> 60382740
Stop shopping and start cooking what you have. Your pantry's possibilities are endless. Milk Street will help you transform whatever you already have into bright, bold meals from around the world.��

Got a can of chickpeas? It can become anything from a quick hummus to a curry spiked with sweet carrots, from a garlicky chickpea soup to a bowl of crispy canned beans with lemon and scallions.��

Or grab that can of tomatoes from the back of the cabinet. It can become spicy one-pot pasta all'arrabbiata, chilaquiles rojos, a rich shakshuka with poached eggs or a chicken and tortilla soup.

Turn to the refrigerator, where eggs and leftover vegetables are the start of cheesy migas, a Spanish tortilla with potato chips or a quick fried rice. Chicken breasts or thighs from the freezer become Hungarian chicken paprikash or hearty chicken salad with green tahini. Cooks in Amalfi, Italy, taught us to turn a wedge of Parmesan and lemons on the counter into a light yet flavorful pesto. And that's just the start. Desserts, too, come together easily with ingredients everyone keeps on hand.��

These 225 recipes begin with the most common ingredients in your kitchen, but they provide more than a lesson in practicality. They teach an improvisational, creative way to cook.��

That's when cooking becomes an adventure.��]]> 352 Christopher Kimball 0316387568 Amy 0 to-read 3.94
author: Christopher Kimball
name: Amy
average rating: 3.94
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]]> 50157871 Clever and quirky cross-stitch patterns that proudly show off your love for all things literary
��
Inside Book Riot’s Lit Stitch, you’ll find a number of badass, bookish cross-stitch patterns. Some of these are for bookmarks, others are for wall decor, and still others can take on a whole host of finished outcomes. What they have in common is their literary bent—the patterns speak to all manner of literary-minded book lovers, who are happy to display their nerdier sides. And what better way than through your own cross-stitch art to hang on your wall, prop on your desk, or even gift to friends and family. And most, if not all, are beginner friendly and can be completed in a few hours—instant stitchification! So grab yourself some excellent embroidery floss, hoops, and needles, and pick out one or more of these great cross-stitch patterns for your next project.
��]]> 144 Book Riot 1419743171 Amy 0 to-read 3.77
author: Book Riot
name: Amy
average rating: 3.77
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]]> 60310735
Astrology continues to be a popular trend—people are looking to the stars, the moon, and the sun for guidance, for relationship advice, even for cocktail recipes. Book Riot offers a new take on reading your sign, aimed appropriately at book lovers. Reading the Stars is where your favorite books, authors, and characters meet astrology, answering key What should you read based on your sign? Do you and your favorite fictional characters share the same sign? What about authors? And what does that mean for you? You’ll gain more insight into your own personal life and your favorite books with this in-depth guide.

Reading the Stars opens with an introduction to astrology, teaching you how to read your sign, what your rising sign is, and more. Then it takes that information a step further, allowing you to learn even more about yourself in a new way. Let’s say you’re a Sagittarius—optimistic, friendly, and curious—what book should you read? What author also shares your sign and speaks to those traits? What protagonist embarks on a journey that tempts you to join them? Or maybe it’s a tale that features your astrological soulmate, an Aries, whose vibe complements your own. Open up a whole new world of astrology with this literary exploration!

Including Color Illustrations]]> 160 Book Riot 141975887X Amy 0 to-read 3.27
author: Book Riot
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average rating: 3.27
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]]> 62952152 What if the murder you had to solve was your own?

Lou is a happily married mother of an adorable toddler. She's also the victim of a local serial killer. Recently brought back to life and returned to her grieving family by a government project, she is grateful for this second chance. But as the new Lou re-adapts to her old routines, and as she bonds with other female victims, she realizes that disturbing questions remain about what exactly preceded her death and how much she can really trust those around her.

Now it's not enough to care for her child, love her husband, and work the job she's always enjoyed--she must also figure out the circumstances of her death. Darkly comic, tautly paced, and full of surprises, My Murder is a devour-in-one-sitting, clever twist on the classic thriller.]]> 304 Katie Williams 0593543769 Amy 0 to-read 3.61 2023
author: Katie Williams
name: Amy
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 62365898 "Aisha Harris is one of our smartest, most entertaining modern cultural critics. The nine pieces offer insight on Stevie Wonder, the Spice Girls, Pen15, and New Girl--among many other pop artifacts, of course--which might as well be parlance for, 'Read me immediately.'"

--ELLE

Aisha Harris has made a name for herself as someone you can turn to for a razor-sharp take on whatever show or movie everyone is talking about. Now, she turns her talents inward, mining the benchmarks of her nineties childhood and beyond to analyze the tropes that are shaping all of us, and our ability to shape them right back.

In the opening essay, an interaction with Chance the Rapper prompts an investigation into the origin myth of her name. Elsewhere, Aisha traces the evolution of the "Black Friend" trope from its Twainian origins through to the heyday of the Spice Girls, teen comedies like Clueless, and sitcoms of the New Girl variety. And she examines the overlap of taste and identity in this era, rejecting the patriarchal ethos that you are what you like. Whatever the subject, sitting down with her book feels like hanging out with your smart, hilarious, pop culture-obsessed friend--and it's a delight.]]> 288 Aisha Harris 0063249944 Amy 0 to-read 3.81 2023
author: Aisha Harris
name: Amy
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
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]]> 59366223 ��The Great Displacement is closely observed, compassionate, and far-sighted.�� —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Under a White Sky

The untold story of climate migration in the United States—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future.

Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us still think about it in the future tense—we imagine that as global warming gets worse over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world fleeing famine and rising seas. What we often don’t realize is that the consequences of climate change are already visible, right here in the United States. In communities across the country, climate disasters are pushing thousands of people away from their homes.

A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is “a vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view�� (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth). From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last few decades, the federal government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas.

Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest migration in our country’s history. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives—erasing historic towns and villages, pushing people toward new areas, and reshaping the geography of the United States.]]> 368 Jake Bittle 1982178256 Amy 0 to-read 4.27 2023
author: Jake Bittle
name: Amy
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
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]]> 40656712 Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit�� Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.]]> 337 John Updike Amy 0 to-read 3.63 1960
author: John Updike
name: Amy
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1960
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]]> 40180010 Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds.


But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry into a state of crisis that a new “biological revolution�� was meant to alleviate. Harrington shows how little that biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in science, and why the field has fallen into a state of crisis in our own time.


Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry’s waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about race and gender. Government programs designed to empty the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, industry profit mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical media have all contributed to the story as well.


In focusing particularly on the search for the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high human stakes for the millions of people who have sought medical answers for their mental suffering. This is not just a story about doctors and scientists, but about countless ordinary people and their loved ones.


A clear-eyed, evenhanded, and yet passionate tour de force, Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future, both for those who suffer and for those whose job it is to care for them.]]> 384 Anne Harrington 0393071227 Amy 0 to-read 4.14 2019
author: Anne Harrington
name: Amy
average rating: 4.14
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]]> 119688 87 Susan Sontag 0374520739 Amy 0 to-read 3.98 1978
author: Susan Sontag
name: Amy
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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]]> 51022071
All the while, Farrow and his producer faced a degree of resistance that could not be explained - until now. And a trail of clues revealed corruption and cover-ups from Hollywood, to Washington, and beyond.

This is the untold story of the exotic tactics of surveillance and intimidation deployed by wealthy and connected men to threaten journalists, evade accountability and silence victims of abuse - and it's the story of the women who risked everything to expose the truth and spark a global movement.

Both a spy thriller and a meticulous work of investigative journalism, Catch and Kill breaks devastating new stories about the rampant abuse of power - and sheds far-reaching light on investigations that shook the culture.

In a dramatic account of violence and espionage, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow exposes serial abusers and a cabal of powerful interests hell-bent on covering up the truth, at any cost.]]> 608 Ronan Farrow 0316454133 Amy 0 to-read 4.33 2019
author: Ronan Farrow
name: Amy
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2019
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]]> 25330262 In pre-apocalyptic 1990s Los Angeles, Michelle, a queer artist and writer, must make the most of the time she has left before the world ends. Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south for LA. But soon it's officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird.

While living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping an eye on the encroaching apocalypse, Michelle begins a new novel, a sprawling and meta-textual exploration to complement her promises of maturity and responsibility. But as she tries to make queer love and art without succumbing to self-destructive vice, the boundaries between storytelling and everyday living begin to blur, and Michelle wonders how much she'll have to compromise her artistic process if she's going to properly ride out doomsday.]]> 176 Michelle Tea 0872866920 Amy 0 to-read 3.80 2016
author: Michelle Tea
name: Amy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> 124961437 A fearless, powerfully written on-the-ground account of a nation careening into violent autocracy—told through harrowing stories of the Philippines�� state-sanctioned killings of its citizens—from a journalist of international renown

“My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.��

Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines�� drug war. For six years, Evangelista chronicled the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs—a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.

The book takes its title from a vigilante whose words seemed to reflect the psychological accommodation that most of the country had made: “I’m really not a bad guy,�� he said. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.��

A profound act of witness and a tour de force of literary journalism, Some People Need Killing is also a brilliant dissection of the grammar of violence and an important investigation of the human impulses to dominate and resist.]]> 428 Patricia Evangelista 0593133137 Amy 0 to-read 4.19 2023
author: Patricia Evangelista
name: Amy
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 62315849
What's it like to be the first to enter an Egyptian burial chamber that's been sealed for thousands of years? What horrifying secret was found among the prehistoric ruins of the American Southwest? Who really was the infamous the Monster of Florence?

Douglas Preston's journalistic explorations have taken him from the haunted country of Italy to the jungles of Honduras. He was granted exclusive journalistic access to the largest tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, broke the story of an extraordinary mass grave of animals killed by the asteroid impact that ended the Cretaceous period and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and explored what lay hidden in the booby-trapped Money Pit on Oak Island. When he hasn't been co-authoring bestselling thrillers featuring FBI Agent Pendergast, Preston has been writing about some of the world’s strangest and most dramatic mysteries.

The Lost Tomb brings together an astonishing and compelling collection of true stories about buried treasure, enigmatic murders, lost tombs, bizarre crimes, and other fascinating tales of the past and present.
��]]> 300 Douglas Preston 1538741229 Amy 0 to-read 3.69 2023
author: Douglas Preston
name: Amy
average rating: 3.69
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]]> 4965
Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition.

As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. ]]> 304 Geraldine Brooks 0142001430 Amy 0 to-read 4.00 2001
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Amy
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
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]]> 22734091
An explorer’s whereabouts keeps a queen in waiting; a faith healer’s illegal radio broadcasts give hope to an oppressed people; a president’s offer of ice cream surprises a prostitute expecting to cooperate fully �� the three short fictions gathered in��The Great Exception��build into a vision of Cuba that is black-humored, brutal, and beautiful. Written prior to the publication of Rachel Kushner’s first acclaimed novel��Telex From Cuba, these stories, like Roberto Bolano’s��Antwerp, burst forth with the genesis of her fictional universe as though fired from a cannon. From the mythical title story, to the ominous “Debouchment�� �� originally published in her too short-lived journal��Soft Targets���� to the sexy and noirish “Strange Case of Rachel K,�� this is Kushner saddling up for a journey into the wilds of the modern novel.]]> 96 Rachel Kushner 0811224228 Amy 0 to-read 3.51 2015
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Amy
average rating: 3.51
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]]> 54303940 A career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture

Rachel Kushner has established herself as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd, she gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times—and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction.

In nineteen razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.

These pieces, new and old, are electric, phosphorescently vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers.]]> 272 Rachel Kushner 1982157690 Amy 0 to-read 3.85 2021
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Amy
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 15803141
The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. At its center is Kushner’s brilliantly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination.]]> 383 Rachel Kushner 1439142009 Amy 0 currently-reading 3.51 2013
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Amy
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> 175078
The Seven Storey Mountain tells of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man, who at the age of twenty-six, takes vows in one of the most demanding Catholic orders—the Trappist monks. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, "the four walls of my new freedom," Thomas Merton struggles to withdraw from the world, but only after he has fully immersed himself in it. At the abbey, he wrote this extraordinary testament, a unique spiritual autobiography that has been recognized as one of the most influential religious works of our time. Translated into more than twenty languages, it has touched millions of lives.
��]]> 467 Thomas Merton 0156010860 Amy 0 to-read 4.05 1948
author: Thomas Merton
name: Amy
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1948
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]]> 9596777 774 Michel de Montaigne 1178010945 Amy 0 to-read 4.40 1592
author: Michel de Montaigne
name: Amy
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1592
rating: 0
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]]> 48932367 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and pioneering journalist, an expansive look at how history has been shaped by humanity’s appetite for food, farmland, and the money behind it all—and how a better future is within reach.

The story of humankind is usually told as one of technological innovation and economic influence—of arrowheads and atomic bombs, settlers and stock markets. But behind it all, there is an even more fundamental driver: Food.

In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, trusted food authority Mark Bittman offers a panoramic view of how the frenzy for food has driven human history to some of its most catastrophic moments, from slavery and colonialism to famine and genocide—and to our current moment, wherein Big Food exacerbates climate change, plunders our planet, and sickens its people. Even still, Bittman refuses to concede that the battle is lost, pointing to activists, workers, and governments around the world who are choosing well-being over corporate greed and gluttony, and fighting to free society from Big Food’s grip.

Sweeping, impassioned, and ultimately full of hope, Animal, Vegetable, Junk reveals not only how food has shaped our past, but also how we can transform it to reclaim our future.]]> 384 Mark Bittman 1328974626 Amy 0 to-read 3.89 2021
author: Mark Bittman
name: Amy
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 55271784 A compelling exploration of how our pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy

We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change--even if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. In Why We Are Restless, Benjamin and Jenna Storey offer a profound and beautiful reflection on the roots of this malaise and examine how we might begin to cure ourselves.

Drawing on the insights of Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, Why We Are Restless explores the modern vision of happiness that leads us on, and the disquiet that follows it like a lengthening shadow. In the sixteenth century, Montaigne articulated an original vision of human life that inspired people to see themselves as individuals dedicated to seeking contentment in the here and now, but Pascal argued that we cannot find happiness through pleasant self-seeking, only anguished God-seeking. Rousseau later tried and failed to rescue Montaigne's worldliness from Pascal's attack. Steeped in these debates, Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831 and, observing a people "restless in the midst of their well-being," discovered what happens when an entire nation seeks worldly contentment--and finds mostly discontent.

Arguing that the philosophy we have inherited, despite pretending to let us live as we please, produces remarkably homogenous and unhappy lives, Why We Are Restless makes the case that finding true contentment requires rethinking our most basic assumptions about happiness.]]> 264 Benjamin Storey 0691211124 Amy 0 to-read 3.79 2021
author: Benjamin Storey
name: Amy
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57032570 Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure.

Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page--and never without touches of rich, honest humor--Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book--a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever--and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.]]> 86 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0593320808 Amy 0 to-read 4.26 2021
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Amy
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 41880608 A beautifully observed and deeply funny novel of May Attaway, a university gardener who sets out on an odyssey to reconnect with four old friends over the course of a year.

At forty, May Attaway is more at home with plants than people. Over the years, she's turned inward, finding pleasure in language, her work as a gardener, and keeping her neighbors at arm's length while keenly observing them. But when she is unexpectedly granted some leave from her job, May is inspired to reconnect with four once close friends. She knows they will never have a proper reunion, so she goes, one-by-one, to each of them. A student of the classics, May considers her journey a female Odyssey. What might the world have had if, instead of waiting, Penelope had set out on an adventure of her own?

RULES FOR VISITING is a woman's exploration of friendship in the digital age. Deeply alert to the nobility and the ridiculousness of ordinary people, May savors the pleasures along the way--afternoon ice cream with a long-lost friend, surprise postcards from an unexpected crush, and a moving encounter with ancient beauty. Though she gets a taste of viral online fame, May chooses to bypass her friends' perfectly cultivated online lives to instead meet them in their messy analog ones.

Ultimately, May learns that a best friend is someone who knows your story--and she inspires us all to master the art of visiting.]]> 290 Jessica Francis Kane 0525559221 Amy 0 3.68 2019
author: Jessica Francis Kane
name: Amy
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 41573546 When a young woman leaves her family to join a secret off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost, in this “stunning debut,�� (The New Yorker) “perfect for fans of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and the film Martha Marcy May Marlene�� (Booklist, starred review).At nineteen, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place of order and the Ash Family farm. There, she joins a community living off the fertile land of the mountains, bound together by high ideals and through relationships she can’t untangle. Berie—now renamed Harmony—renounces her old life and settles into her new one on the farm. She begins to make friends. And then they start to disappear. “An excellent debut, Molly Dektar probes life in a cult with a masterful hand, excavating the troubled mind of a young woman,�� (Publishers Weekly). The Ash Family explores what we will sacrifice in the search for happiness, and the beautiful and grotesque power of the human spirit as it seeks its ultimate place of belonging. “A captivating and haunting tale�� (New York Journal of Books).]]> 353 Molly Dektar 150114488X Amy 0 to-read 3.22 2019
author: Molly Dektar
name: Amy
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> 39854442
In this stirring and insightful novel, T.C. Boyle takes us back to the 1960s and to the early days of a drug whose effects have reverberated widely throughout our LSD.

In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology Ph.D. student and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research�� becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a free-wheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living. With his trademark humor and pathos, Boyle moves us through the Loneys�� initiation at one of Leary’s parties to his notorious summer seminars in Zihuatanejo until the Loneys�� eventual expulsion from Harvard and their introduction to a communal arrangement of thirty devotees—students, wives, and children—living together in a sixty-four room mansion and devoting themselves to all kinds of experimentation and questioning.

Is LSD a belief system? Does it allow you to see God? Can the Loneys�� marriage—or any marriage, for that matter—survive the chaotic and sometimes orgiastic use of psychedelic drugs? Wry, witty, and wise, Outside Looking In is an ideal subject for this American master, and highlights Boyle’s acrobatic prose, detailed plots, and big ideas. It’s an utterly engaging and occasionally trippy look at the nature of reality, identity, and consciousness, as well as our seemingly infinite capacities for creativity, re-invention, and self-discovery.]]> 401 T. Coraghessan Boyle 0062883003 Amy 0 to-read 3.59 2019
author: T. Coraghessan Boyle
name: Amy
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> 182052
Let’s face it: Life is something we all make up as we go along. No matter how carefully we formulate a “script,�� it is bound to change when we interact with people with scripts of their own. Improv Wisdom shows how to apply the maxims of improvisational theater to real-life challenges—whether it’s dealing with a demanding boss, a tired child, or one of life’s never-ending surprises. Patricia Madson distills thirty years of experience into thirteen simple strategies, including “Say Yes,�� “Start Anywhere,�� “Face the Facts,�� and “Make Mistakes, Please,�� helping readers to loosen up, think on their feet, and take on everything life has to offer with skill, chutzpah, and a sense of humor.]]> 160 Patricia Ryan Madson 1400081882 Amy 0 to-read 3.99 2005
author: Patricia Ryan Madson
name: Amy
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 3565289 16 Paul Beck 1592238041 Amy 0 to-read 4.45 2008
author: Paul Beck
name: Amy
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12521135
Essays included:

�� My Father's Brain
�� Imperial Bedroom
�� Why Bother? (The Harper's Essay)
�� Scavenging
�� Meet Me in St. Louis]]> 126 Jonathan Franzen Amy 0 to-read 3.63 2002
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Amy
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/04/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6945233 Now a Netflix Film, Starring and Directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor of 12 Years a Slave

William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, a country where magic ruled and modern science was mystery. It was also a land withered by drought and hunger. But William had read about windmills, and he dreamed of building one that would bring to his small village a set of luxuries that only 2 percent of Malawians could enjoy: electricity and running water. His neighbors called him misala—crazy—but William refused to let go of his dreams. With a small pile of once-forgotten science textbooks; some scrap metal, tractor parts, and bicycle halves; and an armory of curiosity and determination, he embarked on a daring plan to forge an unlikely contraption and small miracle that would change the lives around him.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind��is a remarkable true story about human inventiveness and its power to overcome crippling adversity. It will inspire anyone who doubts the power of one individual's ability to change his community and better the lives of those around him.]]> 320 William Kamkwamba 0061730335 Amy 3 4.09 2009
author: William Kamkwamba
name: Amy
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2014/09/29
date added: 2019/04/04
shelves:
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]]> 53413 Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.

The book is highly influenced by Henry Miller’s reckless and relentless search for truth in post-decadent Paris and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s modal teachings on Zen Buddhism.

Cortázar's employment of interior monologue, punning, slang, and his use of different languages is reminiscent of Modernist writers like Joyce, although his main influences were Surrealism and the French New Novel, as well as the "riffing" aesthetic of jazz and New Wave Cinema.

In 1966, Gregory Rabassa won the first National Book Award to recognize the work of a translator, for his English-language edition of Hopscotch. Julio Cortázar was so pleased with Rabassa's translation of Hopscotch that he recommended the translator to Gabriel García Márquez when García Márquez was looking for someone to translate his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude into English. "Rabassa's One Hundred Years of Solitude improved the original," according to García Márquez.]]> 564 Julio Cortázar 0394752848 Amy 0 to-read 4.24 1963
author: Julio Cortázar
name: Amy
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/01/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 87060 Freddy and Fredericka—a brilliantly refashioned fairy tale and a magnificently funny farce—only seems like a radical departure of form, for behind the laughter, Helprin speaks of leaps of faith and second chances, courage and the primacy of love. Helprin’s latest work, an extraordinarily funny allegory about a most peculiar British royal family, is immensely mocking of contemporary monarchy and yet deeply sympathetic to the individuals caught in its lonely absurdities.]]> 553 Mark Helprin 0143037250 Amy 4 3.80 2005
author: Mark Helprin
name: Amy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2018/06/28
date added: 2018/11/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 36373648 338 Rachel Kushner 1476756554 Amy 5 3.41 2018
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Amy
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2018/06/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 400
In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.]]> 480 Don DeLillo 0140156046 Amy 0 4.05 1988
author: Don DeLillo
name: Amy
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at: 2018/06/19
date added: 2018/06/19
shelves:
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]]> 52215
The scene is set for a magical story of love and loneliness, of terror and human frailty, of the mystery and grace of ordinary experience. Alice Hoffman's ability to fuse the domestic and the mythic in a narrative of such gentle yet magnetic force confirms her stature as one of the most gifted of American novelists.]]> 200 Alice Hoffman 0099429187 Amy 3 3.67 1987
author: Alice Hoffman
name: Amy
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2018/04/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 249 Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller’s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century."]]> 318 Henry Miller 0802131786 Amy 0 to-read 3.69 1934
author: Henry Miller
name: Amy
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12497 Alternate Cover Edition for ISBN 9780375706677

In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the setting of his famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones.

One day, Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.

As Moss tries to evade his pursuers–in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives–McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
No Country for Old Men is a triumph.]]> 309 Cormac McCarthy Amy 4 4.15 2005
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Amy
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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date added: 2018/02/20
shelves:
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]]> 7583324
But things don't stay quiet for long. Percy soon discovers there is trouble at Camp Half-Blood: The magical borders which protect Half-Blood Hill have been poisoned by a mysterious enemy, and the only safe haven for demigods is on the verge of being overrun by mythological monsters. To save the camp, Percy needs the help of his best friend, Grover, who has been taken prisoner by the Cyclops Polyphemus on an island somewhere in the Sea of Monsters--the dangerous waters Greek heroes have sailed for millenia--only today, the Sea of Monsters goes by a new name...the Bermuda Triangle.

Now Percy and his friends--Grover, Annabeth, and Tyson--must retrieve the Golden Fleece from the Island of the Cyclopes by the end of the summer or Camp Half-Blood will be destroyed. But first, Percy will learn a stunning new secret about his family--one that makes him question whether being claimed as Poseidon's son is an honor or simply a cruel joke.]]> 288 Rick Riordan Amy 4 4.32 2006
author: Rick Riordan
name: Amy
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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date added: 2018/02/20
shelves:
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]]> 561456
But when you're the son of a Greek god, it happens. And now my friend Annabeth is missing, a goddess is in chains and only five half-blood heroes can join the quest to defeat the doomsday monster.

Oh, and guess what? The Oracle has predicted that not all of us will survive...]]> 352 Rick Riordan Amy 4 4.37 2007
author: Rick Riordan
name: Amy
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2018/02/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 469571 302 Cormac McCarthy 0679744398 Amy 4 4.04 1992
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Amy
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1992
rating: 4
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date added: 2018/02/20
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]]> 8765
The woman who brought us "When Harry Met Sally"..., "Sleepless in Seattle", "You've Got Mail", and "Bewitched," and the author of best sellers "Heartburn," "Scribble Scribble," and "Crazy Salad," discusses everything -from how much she hates her purse to how much time she spends attempting to stop the clock: the hair dye, the treadmill, the lotions and creams that promise to slow the aging process but never do. Oh, and she can't stand the way her neck looks. But her dermatologist tells her there's no quick fix for that.

Ephron chronicles her life as an obsessed cook, passionate city dweller, and hapless parent. She recounts her anything-but-glamorous days as a White House intern during the JFK years ("I am probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House that the President did not make a pass at") and shares how she fell in and out of love with Bill Clinton - from a distance, of course. But mostly she speaks frankly and uproariously about life as a woman of a certain age.

Utterly courageous, wickedly funny, and unexpectedly moving in its truth telling, "I Feel Bad About My Neck" is a book of wisdom, advice, and laugh-out-loud moments, a scrumptious, irresistible treat.]]> 139 Nora Ephron 0307264556 Amy 3 3.72 2006
author: Nora Ephron
name: Amy
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2018/02/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 1842
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.

In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal]]> 498 Jared Diamond 0739467352 Amy 0 to-read 4.04 1997
author: Jared Diamond
name: Amy
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/01/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 287804 108 Søren Kierkegaard 0061300942 Amy 0 to-read 4.07 1846
author: Søren Kierkegaard
name: Amy
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1846
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/01/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6900035 Jesse Cannone 0976462486 Amy 1 2.85 2009
author: Jesse Cannone
name: Amy
average rating: 2.85
book published: 2009
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2017/11/05
shelves:
review:
Without the redundant examples and the needless metaphors, the useful parts of this 195-page book take about 25 pages.
]]> 13650 The Wave in the Mind includes some literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.]]> 314 Ursula K. Le Guin 1590300068 Amy 0 to-read 4.30 2004
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Amy
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 580200 226 Joanna Field 0874771935 Amy 0 to-read 3.99 1934
author: Joanna Field
name: Amy
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 85386 Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit�� Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.]]> 325 John Updike 0449911659 Amy 3 3.58 1960
author: John Updike
name: Amy
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1960
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2017/07/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 405556 Love and Rockets is finally being released in its most accessible form yet: As a series of compact, thick, affordable, mass-market volumes that present the whole story in perfect chronological order.


This volume will collect the second half of Gilbert Hernandez's acclaimed magical-realist tales of "Palomar," the small Central American town, beginning with the landmark "Human Diastrophism," named one of the greatest comic book stories of the twentieth Century by The Comics Journal, and continuing on through more modern-day classics.


"Human Diastrophism" is the only full graphic novel length "Palomar" story ever created by Gilbert. In it, a serial killer stalks Palomar—but his depredations, hideous as they are, only serve to exacerbate the cracks in the idyllic Central American town as the modern world begins to intrude. "Diastrophism" concludes with the death (the suicide, in fact) of one of Palomar's most beloved characters, and a postscript that provides one of the most hauntingly magical moments of the entire series as a rain of ashes drifts down upon Palomar.


Also included are all the post-"Diastrophism" stories, in which Luba's past (as seen in the epic Poison River) comes back to haunt her, and the seeds are sown for the "Palomar diaspora" that ends this dense, enthralling book.]]> 288 Gilbert Hernández 1560978481 Amy 0 to-read 4.36 2005
author: Gilbert Hernández
name: Amy
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 256566 276 Jonathan Safran Foer 0060529709 Amy 3 3.91 2002
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: Amy
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2017/03/07
date added: 2017/03/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 9118135
As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle.

Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness.

Stirring and luminous, "State of Wonder" is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss beneath the rain forest's jeweled canopy.]]> 353 Ann Patchett 0062049801 Amy 0 3.88 2011
author: Ann Patchett
name: Amy
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/02/10
shelves:
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]]> 28251250
White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback

Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition]]> 320 Don DeLillo 0143129554 Amy 5 3.88 1985
author: Don DeLillo
name: Amy
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2017/01/24
date added: 2017/01/24
shelves:
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]]> 20681123 The Boat.

Ten tales are told by the souls of animals killed in human conflicts in the past century or so, from a camel in colonial Australia to a cat in the trenches in World War I, from a bear starved to death during the siege of Sarajevo to a mussel that died in Pearl Harbour. Each narrator also pays homage to an author who has written imaginatively about animals during much the same time span: Henry Lawson, Colette, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Günter Grass, Julian Barnes, and others.

These stories are brilliantly plotted, exquisitely written, inevitably poignant but also playful and witty. They ask us to consider profound questions. Why do animals shock us into feeling things we can't seem to feel for other humans? Why do animals allow authors to say the unsayable? Why do we sometimes treat humans as animals, and animals as humans? Can fiction help us find moral meaning in a disillusioned world?

Ceridwen Dovey is a prodigiously gifted storyteller, an insightful thinker, and a prose writer of great range. Each of the storylines is an opening to a new way of considering the nature of violence and the relationship between human and animal experiences of the world. Only The Animals will ask you to believe again, just for a moment, in the redemptive power of reading and writing fiction.]]> 304 Ceridwen Dovey 1926428587 Amy 0 to-read 3.65 2014
author: Ceridwen Dovey
name: Amy
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2017/01/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 29812408 New Yorker writer and bestselling author), Trying to Float is a seventeen-year-old’s darkly funny, big-hearted memoir about growing up in New York City’s legendary Chelsea Hotel.

New York’s Chelsea Hotel may no longer be home to its most famous denizens—Andy Warhol, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, to name a few—but the eccentric spirit of the Chelsea is alive and well. Meet the family Rips: father Michael, a lawyer turned writer with a penchant for fine tailoring; mother Sheila, a former model and renowned artist who matches her welding outfits with couture; and daughter Nicolaia, a precocious high school junior at work on a record of her peculiar seventeen years.

Nicolaia is a perpetual outsider who has struggled to find her place in public schools populated by cliquish girls and loudmouthed boys. But at the Chelsea, Nicolaia need not look far to find her tribe. There’s her neighbor Stormé, a tall woman who keeps a pink handgun strapped to her ankle; her babysitter, Paris, who may or may not have a second career as an escort; her friend Artie, former proprietor of New York’s most famous nightclubs. The kids at school might never understand her, but as Nicolaia endeavors to fit in she begins to understand that the Chelsea’s motley crew could hold the key to surviving the perils of a Manhattan childhood.

Not since Holden Caulfield has there been such a fabulously compelling teen guide to New York City: Nicolaia Rips’s debut is a disarming, humble, heartfelt, and wise tale of coming-of-age amid the contradictions, complexities, and shifting identities of life in New York City. A bohemian Eloise for our times, Trying to Float is a triumphant parable for the power of embracing difference in all its forms.]]> 272 Nicolaia Rips 1471156869 Amy 0 to-read 3.48 2016
author: Nicolaia Rips
name: Amy
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2017/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22929486 A funny, fresh, and moving antidote to conventional attitudes about sex and the single woman

Emily Witt is single and in her thirties. She has slept with most of her male friends. Most of her male friends have slept with most of her female friends. Sexual promiscuity is the norm. But up until a few years ago, she still envisioned her sexual experience "eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center." Like many people, she imagined herself disembarking, finding herself face-to-face with another human being, "and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future."

But, as we all know, things are more complicated than that. Love is rare and frequently unreciprocated. Sexual acquisitiveness is risky and can be hurtful. And generalizing about what women want or don't want or should want or should do seems to lead nowhere. Don't our temperaments, our hang-ups, and our histories define our lives as much as our gender?

In Future Sex, Witt captures the experiences of going to bars alone, dating online, and hooking up with strangers. From her home in San Francisco, she decides to say yes to everything and to find her own path. She observes the subcultures she encounters with a wry sense of humor, capturing them in all of their strangeness, ridiculousness, and beauty. The result is an open-minded, honest account of the contemporary pursuit of connection and pleasure, and an inspiring new model of female sexuality--open, forgiving, and unafraid.]]> 214 Emily Witt 0865478791 Amy 0 to-read 3.40 2015
author: Emily Witt
name: Amy
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/12/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10910
Now, a heated murder trial plunges the town into upheaval, and drives a wedge into a contented marriage: Cameron, aiding the prosecution in their case against Jamie, is suddenly at odds with his devoted wife, Allie -- seduced by the idea of a man so in love with his wife that he'd grant all her wishes, even her wish to end her life. And when an inexplicable attraction leads to a shocking betrayal, Allie faces the hardest questions of the heart: when does love cross the line of moral obligation? And what does it mean to truly love another?

Praised for her "personal, detail-rich style" (Glamour), Jodi Picoult infuses this page-turning novel with heart, warmth, and startling candor, taking readers on an unforgettable emotional journey.]]> 400 Jodi Picoult 0743422449 Amy 1 3.57 1996
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Amy
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1996
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2016/12/02
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]]> 1054346 In Salthill-on-Hudson, a half-hour train ride from Manhattan, everyone is rich, beautiful, and -- though they look much younger -- middle-aged. But when Adam Berendt, a charismatic, mysterious sculptor, dies suddenly in a brash act of heroism, shock waves rock the town. But who was Adam Berendt? Was he in fact a hero, or someone more flawed and human?

]]> 464 Joyce Carol Oates 0066209463 Amy 0 3.65 2001
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Amy
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2016/12/02
date added: 2016/12/02
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]]> 2680150 160 Shawn Taylor 1556527349 Amy 0 to-read 3.62 2008
author: Shawn Taylor
name: Amy
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/11/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 533465 184 Dai Sijie 0385722206 Amy 0 to-read 3.64 2000
author: Dai Sijie
name: Amy
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/11/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 28185972 The new full-tilt, razor-sharp, unstoppably hilarious and entertaining novel from the best-selling author of Bad Monkey, Star Island, Nature Girl, et al.

When Lane Coolman's car is bashed from behind on the road to the Florida Keys, what appears to be an ordinary accident is anything but (this is Hiaasen!). Behind the wheel of the other car is Merry Mansfield--the eponymous Razor Girl--and the crash scam is only the beginning of events that spiral crazily out of control while unleashing some of the wildest characters Hiaasen has ever set loose on the page. There's Trebeaux, the owner of Sedimental Journeys--a company that steals sand from one beach to restore erosion on another . . . Dominick "Big Noogie" Aeola, a NYC mafia capo with a taste for tropic-wear . . . Buck Nance, a Wisconsin accordionist who has rebranded himself as the star of a redneck reality show called Bayou Brethren . . . a street psycho known as Blister who's more Buck Nance than Buck could ever be . . . Brock Richardson, a Miami product-liability lawyer who's getting dangerously--and deformingly--hooked on the very E.D. product he's litigating against . . . and Andrew Yancy--formerly Detective Yancy, busted down to the Key West roach patrol after accosting his then-lover's husband with a Dust Buster. Yancy believes that if he can singlehandedly solve a high-profile murder, he'll get his detective badge back. That the Razor Girl may be the key to Yancy's future will be as surprising as anything else he encounters along the way--including the giant Gambian rats that are livening up his restaurant inspections.]]> 335 Carl Hiaasen 0385349742 Amy 0 to-read 3.74 2016
author: Carl Hiaasen
name: Amy
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/11/20
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]]> 426504 Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything else in between.

Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths
Prologue
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition)
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939)
The Circular Ruins (1940)
The Lottery in Babylon (1941)
An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941)
The Library of Babel (1941)
The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
Part Two: Artifices
Prologue
Funes the Memorious (1942)
The Form of the Sword (1942)
Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944)
Death and the Compass (1942)
The Secret Miracle (1943)
Three Versions of Judas (1944)
The End (1953, 2nd edition only)
The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only)
The South (1953, 2nd edition only)]]> 174 Jorge Luis Borges 0802130305 Amy 0 to-read 4.46 1944
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Amy
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1944
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/11/20
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]]> 24493732
Solutions and Other Problems includes humorous stories from Allie Brosh’s childhood; the adventures of her very bad animals; merciless dissection of her own character flaws; incisive essays on grief, loneliness, and powerlessness; as well as reflections on the absurdity of modern life.

This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features all-new material with more than 1,600 pieces of art.]]> 528 Allie Brosh 0224101285 Amy 0 to-read 4.24 2020
author: Allie Brosh
name: Amy
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/10/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 17571564
Pictures
Words
Stories about things that happened to me
Stories about things that happened to other people because of me
Eight billion dollars*
Stories about dogs
The secret to eternal happiness*

*These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!]]> 371 Allie Brosh 1451666179 Amy 5 4.16 2013
author: Allie Brosh
name: Amy
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/10/06
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]]> 991197
Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming—both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.

Edgy, searingly observant, and candid, often heartbreaking but threaded throughout with raw humor and hard-earned wisdom��Persepolis is a stunning work from one of the most highly regarded, singularly talented graphic artists at work today.]]> 341 Marjane Satrapi 0375714839 Amy 0 to-read 4.38 2007
author: Marjane Satrapi
name: Amy
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/10/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 120220 Book by Jekel, Pamela Neal 448 Pamela Jekel 0821727257 Amy 0 to-read 4.06 1989
author: Pamela Jekel
name: Amy
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/08/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 26530338
She is the narrative of her passage, from her escape on a bus through her quiet, determined progress across the city’s unforgiving terrain. The journey takes her into and around the lives of Angelinos from all walks: a dancer whose hyperactive sense of smell makes her fiance’s presence insufferable; a penniless botanist who earns her keep creating sugar-icing flowers to decorate glamorous wedding cakes she can never afford; a dentist lamenting the abuses done to the teeth of a patient for whom he has cared dutifully. Her odd encounters, set against the backdrop of Los Angeles’s flagrant wealth, cast into relief its eccentricities and the everyday trials faced by its collection of lost souls.

Together these stories reflect and refract one another, illuminating a poignant, unflinching portrait of loss and the search for identity in its wake.]]> 256 Michelle Latiolais 0393285057 Amy 0 to-read 3.77 2016
author: Michelle Latiolais
name: Amy
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/07/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 12482658 ��
Crippled in his right arm and leg, Aaron spent his childhood fending off a sister who wants to manage him. So when he meets Dorothy, a plain, outspoken, self-dependent young woman, she is like a breath of fresh air. Unhesitatingly he marries her, and they have a relatively happy, unremarkable marriage. But when a tree crashes into their house and Dorothy is killed, Aaron feels as though he has been erased forever. Only Dorothy’s unexpected appearances from the dead help him to live in the moment and to find some peace.
��
Gradually he discovers, as he works in the family’s vanity-publishing business, turning out titles that presume to guide beginners through the trials of life, that maybe for this beginner there is a way of saying goodbye.
��
A beautiful, subtle exploration of loss and recovery, pierced throughout with Anne Tyler’s humor, wisdom, and always penetrating look at human foibles.]]> 198 Anne Tyler 0307957276 Amy 3 3.59 2012
author: Anne Tyler
name: Amy
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2016/06/24
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]]> 10805 345 Wallace Stegner 0140154418 Amy 4 4.13 1967
author: Wallace Stegner
name: Amy
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2016/06/18
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]]> 111180
What does it mean to be a good mother?
How far would you go in the name of love -- and justice?

In the course of her everyday work, career-driven assistant district attorney Nina Frost prosecutes child molesters and works determinedly to ensure that a legal system with too many loopholes keeps these criminals behind bars. But when her own five-year-old son, Nathaniel, is traumatized by a sexual assault, Nina and her husband, Caleb, a quiet and methodical stone mason, are shattered, ripped apart by an enraging sense of helplessness in the face of a futile justice system that Nina knows all too well. In a heartbeat, Nina's absolute truths and convictions are turned upside down, and she hurtles toward a plan to exact her own justice for her son -- no matter the consequence, whatever the sacrifice.]]> 368 Jodi Picoult 0743418735 Amy 4 3.96 2002
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Amy
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2016/06/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 397976 288 John Updike 0449211037 Amy 3 3.78 1979
author: John Updike
name: Amy
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1979
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2016/04/17
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]]> 135479 Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ...

Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he's the inventor of 'ice-nine', a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three ecentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker's Death Wish comes true when his last, fatal gift to humankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh...]]> 306 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Amy 4 4.17 1963
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Amy
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at: 2016/04/17
date added: 2016/04/17
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]]> 310612
His mother thinks he needs to go to work. He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has, like Don Quixote's, its own eerie logic.

His girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx, thinks he needs sex.

Ignatius is an intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt, and one-man war against everybody: Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times.

A tragicomedy, set in New Orleans.]]> 394 John Kennedy Toole 0802130208 Amy 4 3.89 1980
author: John Kennedy Toole
name: Amy
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1980
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2016/04/17
shelves:
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]]> 4987
Jailbird takes us into a fractured and comic, pure Vonnegut world of high crimes and misdemeanors in government—and in the heart. This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentiary as Watergate’s least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts and calculated greed of the mighty, giving a razor-sharp edge to an unforgettable portrait of power and politics in our times.

Praise for Jailbird

“[Vonnegut] is our strongest writer . . . the most stubbornly imaginative.�� —John Irving
��
“A gem . . . a mature, imaginative novel—possibly the best he has written . . .�� Jailbird ��is a guided tour de force of America. Take it!�� �� Playboy

“A profoundly humane comedy . . .�� Jailbird ��definitely mounts up on angelic wings—in its speed, in its sparkle, and in its high-flying intent.�� �� Chicago Tribune Book World
��
“Joyously inventive . . . gleams with the loony magic Vonnegut alone can achieve.�� �� Cosmopolitan
��
“Vonnegut is our great apocalyptic writer, the closest thing we’ve had to a prophet since . . . Lenny Bruce.�� �� Chicago Sun-Times
��
“Vonnegut at his impressive best. . . . His imaginative leaps alone . . . are worth the price of admission. . . . His far-reaching metaphysical and cultural concerns . . . are ultimately serious and worth our contemplation.�� �� The Washington Post]]> 310 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0385333900 Amy 4 3.83 1979
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Amy
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2016/04/11
shelves:
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]]> 17333223
Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.]]> 771 Donna Tartt 0316055433 Amy 5 3.94 2013
author: Donna Tartt
name: Amy
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/04/10
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]]> 51827 Alias Grace, bestselling author Margaret Atwood has written her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since The Handmaid's Tale. She takes us back in time and into the life of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century.

Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders.

Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Is Grace a female fiend? A bloodthirsty femme fatale? Or is she the victim of circumstances?]]> 468 Margaret Atwood 0385490445 Amy 0 4.01 1996
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Amy
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/04/10
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]]> 836957
Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Keret's stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best comic authors, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain-from a father's first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens.

Bus Driver includes stories from Keret's bestselling collections in Israel, Pipelines and Missing Kissinger, as well as Keret's major new novella, "Kneller's Happy Campers," a bitingly satirical yet wistful road trip set in the afterlife for suicides.]]> 130 Etgar Keret 1592641059 Amy 0 to-read 4.07 2001
author: Etgar Keret
name: Amy
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/03/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6798263 Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...

A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.]]> 112 Maggie Nelson 1933517409 Amy 0 to-read 4.09 2009
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Amy
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/03/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 233904
Through the syncopated rhythms of the ragtime era to the thumping, rocking beats of the 1970s, generations of Pecks have maintained a determined steadiness. Adamantly middle class—Peck-proud, as the family slogan goes—they are quick to sweep under the rug those members who do not live up to their standards. Maybe that’s why Caleb Peck took off with his violincello as a boy? Sixty years later, his brother Daniel is still wondering. No longer willing to live without answers, he turns to his daughter-in-law, Justine, another Peck family eccentric. A studied tarot card reader, Justine comes across one message over and over in the change is coming. With Daniel’s help, she’s hoping to find the courage to embrace whatever happens next.

An unlikely pair struggling against a stifling family, Daniel and Justine believe they’ll find freedom in just the right mix of magic, music, and mystery.]]> 328 Anne Tyler 0449911748 Amy 3 3.89 1975
author: Anne Tyler
name: Amy
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1975
rating: 3
read at: 2016/03/21
date added: 2016/03/21
shelves:
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]]> 22105022 ��
The debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives, from the author of Into the Water .
��
“Nothing is more addicting than�� The Girl on the Train. ”�� Vanity Fair

�� The Girl on the Train ��has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since�� Gone Girl . . . . [It] is liable to draw a large, bedazzled readership.”�� The New York Times
��
“Marries movie noir with novelistic trickery. . . hang on tight. You'll be surprised by what horrors lurk around the bend.”�� USA Today
��
“Like its train, the story blasts through the stagnation of these lives in suburban London and the reader cannot help but turn pages.”�� The Boston Globe

�� Gone Girl�� fans will devour this psychological thriller.”�� People ��

EVERY DAY THE SAME
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and night. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She's even started to feel like she knows them. Jess and Jason, she calls them. Their life--as she sees it--is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.

UNTIL TODAY
And then she sees something shocking. It's only a minute until the train moves on, but it's enough. Now everything's changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel goes to the police. But is she really as unreliable as they say? Soon she is deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?]]> 316 Paula Hawkins 038568231X Amy 5 3.78 2015
author: Paula Hawkins
name: Amy
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/03/19
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]]> 112322
Depressed and depleted, Ian is almost crushed under the weight of an unbearable, secret guilt.����Then one crisp January evening, he catches sight of a window with glowing yellow neon, the CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE.����He enters and soon discovers that forgiveness must be earned, through a bit of sacrifice and a lot of love...


A New York Times Notable Book]]> 337 Anne Tyler 0449911608 Amy 3 3.88 1991
author: Anne Tyler
name: Amy
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1991
rating: 3
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date added: 2016/03/19
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]]> 13429641 First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected �� and most popular �� of its kind.

The Best American Travel Writing 2012 includes

Bryan Curtis, Lynn Freed, J. Malcolm Garcia, Peter Gwin,
Pico Iyer, Mark Jenkins, Dimiter Kenarov, Robin Kirk,
Kimberly Meyer, Paul Theroux, and others]]> 256 William T. Vollmann 0547808976 Amy 0 to-read 3.68 2012
author: William T. Vollmann
name: Amy
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/03/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 112321 256 Anne Tyler 0449911780 Amy 0 3.53 1964
author: Anne Tyler
name: Amy
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at: 2016/02/06
date added: 2016/02/06
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]]> 17864232 "Heather McCloskey Beck is a spiritual visionary. Read this book and feel your life transform in amazing ways." �� Pat Benatar , four-time Grammy winner and author of Between a Heart and a Rock Place
Inspirational speaker, Heather McCloskey Beck, brings us her motivational book, Take the Leap , entirely about self-growth, creativity, and building a fulfilling life through personal joys.
With positive thinking and time, anything is possible . Author Heather McCloskey Beck struggled with not feeling happy with her own life at one point. She stopped doing what she loved and didn’t feel fulfilled in the life she made for herself. However, with just 15 minutes a day, she was able to change all of that. She began exercising her creativeness through the hobbies and outlets she loved, and through that, chose to be happy each and every day.
This isn’t just another self-help book. Take the Leap motivates you to create a life that you’re proud of, the one you’ve always wanted and envisioned. Feeling stuck and unengaged can be draining, and it’s important to find a way to express forms of creativity in order to create a better life. Whether it’s being mindful, getting back into an old hobby, or forming a new one that you’ve always wanted to try, Beck helps guide you through making those decisions and sticking to them in ways that feel fulfilling.
With Take the Leap , learn more
If you enjoyed books like 30 Days-Change Your Habits, Change Your Life , The Big Leap , or BEST LIFE-ing , you’ll love Take the Leap .]]> 155 Heather McCloskey Beck 1573245895 Amy 0 to-read 3.46 2013
author: Heather McCloskey Beck
name: Amy
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/02/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 77699 303 Anne Tyler 0449911594 Amy 0 3.81 1982
author: Anne Tyler
name: Amy
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at: 2016/01/03
date added: 2016/01/03
shelves:
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]]> 25490 182 Erich Fromm 0826417388 Amy 0 to-read 4.24 1976
author: Erich Fromm
name: Amy
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/12/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 14940 272 Edward Albee 0451218590 Amy 4 4.07 1962
author: Edward Albee
name: Amy
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2015/12/04
date added: 2015/12/04
shelves:
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]]> 12562624
Nearly two thousand years ago, nine hundred Jews held out for months against armies of Romans on Masada, a mountain in the Judean desert. According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived. Based on this tragic and iconic event, Hoffman’s novel is a spellbinding tale of four extraordinarily bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path. Yael’s mother died in childbirth, and her father, an expert assassin, never forgave her for that death. Revka, a village baker’s wife, watched the murder of her daughter by Roman soldiers; she brings to Masada her young grandsons, rendered mute by what they have witnessed. Aziza is a warrior’s daughter, raised as a boy, a fearless rider and expert marksman who finds passion with a fellow soldier. Shirah, born in Alexandria, is wise in the ways of ancient magic and medicine, a woman with uncanny insight and power.

The lives of these four complex and fiercely independent women intersect in the desperate days of the siege. All are dovekeepers, and all are also keeping secrets—about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them, and whom they love.]]> 505 Alice Hoffman 1451617488 Amy 0 4.11 2011
author: Alice Hoffman
name: Amy
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/12/02
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]]> 170162 How to Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. It's also why she puts up with her husband David, the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway.

But one fateful day, she finds herself in a Leeds parking lot, having just slept with another man. What Katie doesn't yet realize is that her fall from grace is just the first step on a spiritual journey more torturous than the interstate at rush hour. Because, prompted by his wife's actions, David is about to stop being angry. He's about to become good--not politically correct, organic-food-eating good, but good in the fashion of the Gospels. And that's no easier in modern-day Holloway than it was in ancient Israel.

Hornby means us to take his title literally: How can we be good, and what does that mean? However, quite apart from demanding that his readers scrub their souls with the nearest available Brillo pad, he also mesmerizes us with that cocktail of wit and compassion that has become his trademark. The result is a multifaceted jewel of a book: a hilarious romp, a painstaking dissection of middle-class mores, and a powerfully sympathetic portrait of a marriage in its death throes.

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry as we watch David forcing his kids to give away their computers, drawing up schemes for the mass redistribution of wealth, and inviting his wife's most desolate patients round for a Sunday roast. But that's because How to Be Good manages to be both brutally truthful and full of hope. It won't outsell the Bible, but it's a lot funnier. --Matthew Baylis]]> 305 Nick Hornby 1573229326 Amy 4 3.08 2001
author: Nick Hornby
name: Amy
average rating: 3.08
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2015/12/02
date added: 2015/12/02
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]]> 4264
For Nick Hornby, his devotion to the game has provided one of few constants in a life where the meaningful things - like growing up, leaving home, and forming relationships, both parental and romantic - have rarely been as simple or as uncomplicated as his love for Arsenal.

Fever Pitch is his tribute to a lifelong obsession. Part autobiography, part comedy, part incisive analysis of insanity, Hornby's award-winning memoir captures the fever pitch of fandom �� its agony and ecstasy, its community, and its defining role in thousands of young men's coming-of-age stories. Fever Pitch is one for the home team. But above all, it is one for everyone who knows what it really means to have a losing season.]]> 247 Nick Hornby 1573226882 Amy 2 3.78 1992
author: Nick Hornby
name: Amy
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1992
rating: 2
read at: 2015/08/19
date added: 2015/11/12
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]]> 156220 Foxfire is Joyce Carol Oates' strongest and most unsparing novel yet...an often engrossing, often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. Here, then, are the Foxfire chronicles -- the secret history of a sisterhood of blood, a haven from a world of lechers and oppressors, marked by a liberating fury that burns too hot to last. It is the story of Maddy Monkey, who writes it...of Goldie, whose womanly body masks a fierce, explosive temper...of Lana, with her Marilyn Monroe hair and packs of Chesterfields...of timid Rita, whose humiliation leads to the first act of Foxfire revenge. Above all, it is the story of Legs Sadovsky, with her lean, on-the-edge, icy beauty, whose nerve, muscle, hate, and hurt make her the spark of Foxfire, its guiding spirit, its burning core.

At once brutal and lyrical, this is a careening joyride of a novel -- charged with outlaw energy and lit by intense emotion. The story moves over the years from the first eruption of adolescent anger at sexual abuse to a shared life financed by luring predatory men into traps baited with sex. But then the gang's very success leads to disaster -- as Foxfire makes a last tragic stand against a society intent on swallowing it up. Yet amid scenes of violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and vengeance lies this novel's greatest power: the exquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the girls of Foxfire together -- especially that betweenMaddy, the teller of the tale, and Legs, whose quintessential strength and bedrock bravery make her one of the most vivid and vital heroines in modern fiction.]]> 328 Joyce Carol Oates 0525936327 Amy 4 3.82 1993
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Amy
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2015/11/12
date added: 2015/11/12
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]]> 66497 --back cover]]> 291 Anne Tyler 034549234X Amy 3 3.49 2006
author: Anne Tyler
name: Amy
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2006
rating: 3
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date added: 2015/11/11
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]]> 865 197 Paulo Coelho 0061122416 Amy 0 3.85 1988
author: Paulo Coelho
name: Amy
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/10/19
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]]> 14280 Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships.

In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own. (back cover)

Runaway
Chance
Soon
Silence
Passion
Trespasses
Tricks
Powers]]> 335 Alice Munro 1400077915 Amy 0 4.00 2004
author: Alice Munro
name: Amy
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at: 2015/10/19
date added: 2015/10/19
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]]> 25508114 The Liars�� Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.

For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning graduate teaching prizes for her highly selective seminar at Syracuse, where she mentored such future hit authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas. In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black belt sinner,�� providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.

Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers�� experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told�� and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.

Joining such classics as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms—a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.]]> 225 Mary Karr 0062223062 Amy 0 to-read 4.13 2015
author: Mary Karr
name: Amy
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/10/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 16729
A Southerner living abroad, Jack McCall is scarred by tragedy and betrayal. His desperate desire to find peace after his wife’s suicide draws him into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family’s past that can heal his anguished heart. Spanning three generations and two continents, from the contemporary ruins of the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, from the unutterable horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life’s pain and glory. It is a novel of lyric intensity and searing truth, another masterpiece among Pat Conroy’s legendary and beloved novels.]]> 800 Pat Conroy 0553381539 Amy 3 4.17 1995
author: Pat Conroy
name: Amy
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1995
rating: 3
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date added: 2015/09/10
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]]> 111126 Hateship Loveship), Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.

A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best, tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.]]> 323 Alice Munro 0375727434 Amy 4 4.08 2001
author: Alice Munro
name: Amy
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2001
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/09/10
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]]>