en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:12:18 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 57926000 A propulsive debut with a wicked sense of humor in which two American ex-pats obsessed with the Amanda Knox trial find themselves at the nexus of murder and celebrity in glittering late-aughts Berlin.

Hoping to escape the pain of the recent murder of her best friend, art student Zoe Beech finds herself studying abroad in the bohemian capital of Europe--Berlin. Zoe, rudderless, relies on the arrangements of fellow exchange student Hailey Mader, who idolizes Warhol and Britney Spears and wants nothing more than to be an art star. On Craigslist, Hailey unknowingly stumbles on an apartment sublet posted by a well-known thriller writer. Feeling as though they've won the lottery, the women move into the high-ceilinged pre-war flat. Soon they realize that their landlady, Beatrice, who is supposed to be on a residency in Vienna, is watching them--and her next book appears to be based on their lives. Taking stock of their mundane routines--Law and Order binges and nightly nachos--Hailey insists they become people worthy of a novel. As the year unravels and events spiral out of control, they begin to wonder whose story they are living, and how will it end?

Other People's Clothes is brilliant on the sometimes dangerous intensity of female friendships, on millennial life in the city, on the lengths people will go to in order to eradicate emotional pain.]]> 320 Calla Henkel 0385547358 Kinsey 3 3.69 2022
author: Calla Henkel
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves:
review:
I feel like the first 120 pages were not necessary to the story. It was so slow I don’t think you can call it a thriller.
]]> 18085520 Two Serious Ladies is a modernist cult classic, mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny, that follows two "respectable" women as they descend into debauchery—updated with an introduction by Claire Messud, bestselling author of The Emperor's Children and The Woman Upstairs.

Christina Goering, eccentric and adventurous, and Frieda Copperfield, anxious but enterprising, are two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves. Old friends, each will take a surprising path in search of salvation: during a visit to Panama, Mrs. Copperfield abandons her husband, finding solace in a relationship with a teenage prostitute; while Miss Goering, a wealthy spinster, pursues sainthood via sordid encounters with the basest of men. At the end the two women meet again, each radically altered by her experience.]]> 221 Jane Bowles 006228312X Kinsey 4 3.47 1943
author: Jane Bowles
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves:
review:
I actually really enjoyed this one! I loved reading about Mrs. Copperfield specifically. I think the ending could have been a little bit stronger.
]]> 59804101
Vanessa has just started working on an English translation of a titillating, experimental thriller by a dead author when she’s offered a more prominent gig: translating the latest book by an Extremely Famous French Writer who is not in any way based on Michel Houellebecq. As soon as she agrees to meet this writer, however, her other, more obscure project begins to fight back―leading Vanessa down into a literary hell of traps and con games and sadism and doppelgangers and mystic visions and strange assignations and, finally, the secret of life itself.

Peppered with “sponsored content�� providing cocktail recipes utilizing a brand of liquor imported by the film director Steven Soderbergh, and with a cameo from the actress Juno Temple, Bad Eminence is at once an old-school literary satire in the mode of Vladimir Nabokov as well as a jolly thumb in the eyes of contemporary screen-life and digital celebrity.]]> 289 James Greer 1913505340 Kinsey 2 3.22 2022
author: James Greer
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/22
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves:
review:
I got like 80% of the way and couldn’t get any further.
]]> 43603721
When journalist Maureen Callahan first heard about Israel Keyes in 2012, she was captivated by how a killer of this magnitude could go undetected by law enforcement for over a decade. And so began a project that consumed her for the next several years--uncovering the true story behind how the FBI ultimately caught Israel Keyes, and trying to understand what it means for a killer like Keyes to exist. A killer who left a path of monstrous, randomly committed crimes in his wake--many of which remain unsolved to this day.

American Predator is the ambitious culmination of years of interviews with key figures in law enforcement and in Keyes's life, and research uncovered from classified FBI files. Callahan takes us on a journey into the chilling, nightmarish mind of a relentless killer, and to the limitations of traditional law enforcement.]]> 304 Maureen Callahan 0698191064 Kinsey 4 4.17 2019
author: Maureen Callahan
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves:
review:
I blew through this book. It’s infuriating to read about how law enforcement completely botched this investigation
]]> 53961811
These eleven stories from one of Granta’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists�� are psychogeographies of dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards. They act as microscopes fixed upon the regions of our interior lives we often neglect, where the death of God and the failures of institutions have given way to alternative modes of making sense of the world. They are cracked bedroom mirrors. Do you like what you see?]]> 184 Elvira Navarro 1949641090 Kinsey 4 I quite liked these stories. 3.43 2019
author: Elvira Navarro
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves:
review:
I quite liked these stories.
]]> 150778801 A Guardian Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Editors' Choice Selection

“A work of stirring genius, a catalogue of intimacies and inventions, desires and dreams."
―Jacob Brogan, Washington Post

An exhilarating debut from a radiant new voice, After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century. �� The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho ,�� so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf “I want to make life fuller and fuller.�� Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past. “This book is Impish, irate, deep, courageous. . . . Brava!”―Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport]]> 272 Selby Wynn Schwartz 1324094478 Kinsey 1 3.64 2022
author: Selby Wynn Schwartz
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/14
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves:
review:
One of my most disappointing reads. I thought I was going to love this, but the writing was bad, there was absolutely no story, and it made the lives of every single woman boring as hell.
]]> 176443704 “A bittersweet study in both grief and joy.�� ­�� Time

“A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes�� (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author) that explores coming of age in your middle age—from the bestselling poet and author of Keep Moving .

“Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.��

In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful , poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman’s personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful , like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is “extraordinary�� (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.]]> 336 Maggie Smith 1982185864 Kinsey 4 3.94 2023
author: Maggie Smith
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves:
review:
I love when poets write outside of poetry. I find the writing so beautiful and moving.
]]> 49247150
Akash's mum, Renu, is also plagued by guilt. She had it all: doting husband, beautiful house, healthy sons. But as the one-year anniversary of her husband's death approaches Renu can't stop wondering if she chose the wrong life thirty-five years ago and should have stayed in London with her first love.

Together, Renu and Akash pack up the house, retreating further into the secrets that stand between them. When their pasts catch up to them, Renu and Akash must decide between the lives they left behind and the ones they've since created.

By turns irreverent and tender, filled with the beats of '90s R&B, Tell Me How to Be is about our earliest betrayals and the cost of reconciliation. But most of all, it is the love story of a mother and son each trying to figure out how to be in the world.]]> 336 Neel Patel 1250184975 Kinsey 3 4.14 2021
author: Neel Patel
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:
This was a nice quick read for me. I enjoyed Patel’s writing, and I think he wrote his characters well. I sympathized with both Renu and Akash.
]]> 51822833 A stylish, stunningly precise, and suspenseful meditation on adolescent desire, female friendship, and the female body that shimmers with rage, wit, and fierce longing—an audacious, darkly observant, and mordantly funny literary debut for fans of Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Jenny Offill.

One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure and to escape her overbearing mother—a woman as grounded as her father is mercurial—Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center.

Once there, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens, which Olivia refers to as “Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls��. Soon, she finds herself drawn into the company of a close-knit trio of girls determined to transcend their circumstances, by any means necessary. Led by the elusive and beautiful Serena, and her aloof, secretive acolytes, Janet and Laurel, the girls decide this is the summer they will finally achieve enlightenment—and learn to levitate, to defy the weight of their bodies, to experience ultimate lightness.��

But as desire and danger intertwine, and Olivia comes ever closer to discovering what a body—and a girl—is capable of, it becomes increasingly clear that this is an advanced and perilous practice, and there’s a chance not all of them will survive. Set over the course of one fateful summer that unfolds like a fever dream, The Lightness juxtaposes fairy tales with quantum physics, cognitive science with religious fervor, and the passions and obsessions of youth with all of these, to explore concepts as complex as faith and as simple as loving people—even though you don’t, and can’t, know them at all.


]]> 288 Emily Temple 0062905325 Kinsey 3 3.40 2020
author: Emily Temple
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves:
review:
I think this book was trying to do too much. The focus was all over the place, and none of the points really landed for me.
]]> 212342605 Hungerstone��is a thrillingly seductive sapphic romance for fans of S.T. Gibson’s��A Dowry of Blood��and Emilia Hart’s��Weyward.

For what do you hunger, Lenore?

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day.

The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger.

Torn between regaining her husband's affection and Carmilla's ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .

Set against the violent wilderness of the moors and the uncontrolled appetite of the industrial revolution,��Hungerstone��is a compulsive feminist reworking of��Carmilla, the book that inspired��Dracula: a captivating story of appetite and desire.]]> 336 Kat Dunn 1638932166 Kinsey 5 4.02 2025
author: Kat Dunn
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves:
review:
Five stars for lesbian vampires.
]]> 55957489
Sex trafficking. Self-help coaching. Forced labour. Mentorship. Multi-level marketing. Gaslighting. Investigative journalist Sarah Berman explores the shocking practices of NXIVM, a global organization run by Keith Raniere and his high-profile enablers (Seagram heir Clare Bronfman; Smallville actor Allison Mack; Battlestar Galactica actor Nicki Clyne). Through the accounts of central NXIVM figures, Berman unravels how young women seeking creative coaching and networking opportunities found themselves blackmailed, literally branded, near-starved, and enslaved. With the help of the Bronfman fortune Raniere built a wall of silence around these abuses, leveraging the legal system to go after enemies and whistleblowers.

Don't Call It a Cult shows that these abuses looked very different from the inside, where young women initially received mentorship and protection. Don't Call It a Cult is a riveting account of NXIVM's rise to power, its ability to evade prosecution for decades, and the investigation that finally revealed its dark secrets to the world. It explores why so many were drawn to its message of empowerment yet could not recognize its manipulative and harmful leader for what he was—a criminal.]]> 320 Sarah Berman 1586422766 Kinsey 4 4.06 2021
author: Sarah Berman
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 57936507
A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a run-down guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French graphic novelist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape.

The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on his trips to discover an ‘authentic�� Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows: the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. She is pulled into his drawings but troubled by his vision of her �� until she strikes upon a way to finally be seen]]> 139 Elisa Shua Dusapin 194883099X Kinsey 3 3.63 2016
author: Elisa Shua Dusapin
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:
Cute and quick read. Lacking a bit of depth but overall I enjoyed it.
]]> 50144 Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, is an enchantingly original and deeply affecting book about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine of Kitchen, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, she is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who was once his father), Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale that recalls early Marguerite Duras. Kitchen and its companion story, "Moonlight Shadow," are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.]]> 160 Banana Yoshimoto 0802142443 Kinsey 4 3.91 1988
author: Banana Yoshimoto
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:
I loved Yoshimoto’s descriptions of grief and loneliness. It was packaged in this neat little book that I treasure.
]]> 91501
In his brilliant translation, Breon Mitchell masterfully reproduces the distinctive poetics of Kafka's prose, revealing a novel that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written.]]> 288 Franz Kafka 0805208488 Kinsey 2 3.98 1925
author: Franz Kafka
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1925
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves:
review:
I’ve really been struggling to get through books lately and this was such a discouraging read for me.
]]> 20256754
It is Nenna’s domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws the relations among this scrubby community together into ever more complex and comic patterns. The result is one of Fitzgerald’s greatest triumphs, a novel the Booker judges deemed “flawless.��

Winner of the Booker Prize]]> 181 Penelope Fitzgerald 0544361512 Kinsey 3 3.68 1979
author: Penelope Fitzgerald
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1979
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:
I am stuck in one of the worst reading slumps of my life and that means this book was just okay for me.
]]> 176443740
AIDS, cholera, the Spanish flu—epidemics become catastrophic not only by chance, but by human design. With clear-eyed research and accessible prose, A History of the World in Six Plagues shows that throughout history, outbreaks of disease have been exacerbated by the racial, economic, and sociopolitical divides we allow to bloom in times of good health. These self-defeating practices have time and again undermined public health efforts, and ultimately furthered damage to the already marginalized and vulnerable communities they target.

Princeton-trained historian Edna Bonhomme’s examination of humankind’s disastrous treatment of pandemic disease takes us across place and time from Port-au-Prince to Tanzania, and from plantation-era America to our modern COVID-19-scarred world to unravel the shocking truths about the history of race, class, and gender-based discrimination in the face of disease. From Haitians targeted and ostracized as the alleged source of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, to the creation of concentration camps and depraved medical experimentations in the face of sleeping sickness in western Africa, and to marginalized communities overlooked and scapegoated while the wealthy sheltered from COVID-19 in relative safety, Bonhomme effortlessly shows us the oppressive practices that shape our history and our present. Much more than a remarkable history, A History of the World in Six Plagues is also a rising call to action for change.]]> 320 Edna Bonhomme 1982197838 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.11
author: Edna Bonhomme
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.11
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34937311 The addictive debut novel about four young friends navigating the cutthroat world of music and their complex relationships with each other, as ambition, passion, and love intertwine over the course of their lives.

Brit is the second violinist, a beautiful and quiet orphan; the viola is Henry, a prodigy who’s always had it easy; the cellist is Daniel, the oldest, the angry skeptic who sleeps around; and on first violin is Jana, their flinty, resilient leader. Together, they are the Van Ness String Quartet.

In The Ensemble, each character picks up the melody, from the group’s youthful rocky start through to adulthood. As they navigate devastating failures and wild success, heartbreak and marriage, triumph and loss, betrayal and enduring loyalty, they are always tied together—by career, by the intensity of their art, by the secrets they carry together, and by choosing each other over and over again.

Following these four unforgettable characters, Aja Gabel’s debut novel gives a behind-the-scenes look into the highly competitive, mysterious world of high-level musicians. The story of Brit and Henry and Daniel and Jana, The Ensemble is a heart-skipping portrait of ambition, friendship, and the tenderness of youth.]]> 339 Aja Gabel 073521476X Kinsey 3 3.46 2018
author: Aja Gabel
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves:
review:
This book was just okay for me. I didn’t quite understand why these four felt so tied together. Their dynamic wasn’t super compelling to read.
]]> 214152327 The acclaimed author of the “stirring, definitive, and engrossing�� (NPR) The Woman’s Hour returns with an eye-opening and inspiring account of four activists��Septima Clark, Myles Horton, Esau Jenkins, and Bernice Johnson—and their work to ensure the voting rights of Black Americans.

In the summer of 1954, Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark travelled to Tennessee’s Highlander Center, a rural interracial training school for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white educator with roots in the labor movement. There, the three united behind a shared preparing Black southerners to pass the suppressive literacy tests required to vote in the era of Jim Crow.

Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Johnson, they launched the effort known as the Citizenship Schools project. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, this audacious, grassroots undertaking had grown into a subversive network of nine hundred schools, not only preparing thousands of Black citizens to vote, but creating a generation of activists trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and essential tactics of resistance and struggle.

In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a crucial and inspiring lens into our past, and a deeply moving and necessary narrative for our present.]]> 384 Elaine Weiss 1668002698 Kinsey 0 to-read 4.54
author: Elaine Weiss
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.54
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 26238021 Librarian's Note: This is an alternate cover edition for 9780385486804.

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.]]> 215 Jon Krakauer Kinsey 3 3.79 1996
author: Jon Krakauer
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves:
review:
I think Krakauer is a gifted storyteller. However, the book seemed to wander too far from the central story at times. I appreciate the grace he had for McCandless. The cause of death exploration was a little rushed and confusing.
]]> 123018721 WINNER of the Pulitzer Prize
The Sunday Times Bestseller
Best Books of 2022 pick - New York Times, Obama, TIME, Slate, Oprah Daily, Kirkus, LA Times, EW, Sarah Jessica Parker

Read by a full cast of narrators, Trust by Hernan Diaz is a sweeping, unpredictable novel about power, wealth and truth, set against the backdrop of turbulent 1920s New York. Perfect for fans of Succession.

Can one person change the course of history?

A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. But now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage, and this wealthy man’s story - of greed, love and betrayal - is about to slip from his grasp.

Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.

'One of the great puzzle-box novels, it’s the cleverest of conceits, wrapped up in a page-turner' �� Telegraph

'Genius' �� Lauren Groff, author of Matrix]]> 416 Hernan Diaz 0593420322 Kinsey 4 3.84 2022
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves:
review:
Still trying to collect my thoughts on this one
]]> 50878085 These impossibly cheerful essays on the routine horrors of the present era explain everything from the resurgence of measles to the fiasco of the presidency.

In Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, acclaimed Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri offers perfectly logical, reassuring reasons for everything that has happened in recent American politics and culture that will in no way unsettle your worldview.

In essays both new and adapted from her viral Post columns, Petri reports that the Trump administration is as competent as it is uncorrupted, white supremacy has never been less rampant, and men have been silenced for too long. Q-Anon makes perfect sense! Perhaps the abyss is staring back at you because your outfit looks extra nice today! At the center of the book is a virtuosic account of the past four years, a history as surreal and deranged as the Trump administration itself. This Panglossian venture into the swampy present will soothe—and terrify—readers who have died laughing to ClickHole, the Onion, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, or Veep.]]> 211 Alexandra Petri 1324006455 Kinsey 3 3.81 2020
author: Alexandra Petri
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:
I don’t think this worked as a collection. The essays were so short I couldn’t really keep my head straight from one to the next.
]]> 58999184
For readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Mona Awad, this fearless debut chronicles one woman’s escape into a world of obsessive imagination. Bonnie Lincoln just wants to be left alone. To come home from work, shut out the ghosts of some devastating losses, and unwind in front of the nostalgic, golden glow of her favorite TV show, Three’s Company . When Bonnie wins the lottery, a more grandiose vision―to completely shuck off her own troublesome identity―takes shape. She plans a drastic move to an isolated mountain retreat where she can re-create the iconic apartment set of Three’s Company and slip into the lives of its main characters: no-nonsense Janet Wood, pleasantly airheaded Chrissy Snow, and confident Jack Tripper. While her best friend, Krystal, tries to drag her back to her old life, Bonnie is determined to transcend pain, trauma, and the baggage of her past by immersing herself in the ultimate binge-watch.]]> 272 Ashley Hutson 0393866645 Kinsey 3 3.76 2022
author: Ashley Hutson
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
review:
This book wasn’t nearly unhinged enough.
]]> 337107 232 Flannery O'Connor 0374505845 Kinsey 4 3.83 1952
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
I feel conflicted about this one. It’s impossible to ignore the racism of the author and how it bleeds into the book. The Southern Gothic elements are where the novel shines.
]]> 35820358 The Stranger Besides Me meets Prep—that presents an intimate and thought-provoking portrait of girlhood within Manhattan’s exclusive prep-school scene in the early 1990s, and a thoughtful meditation on adolescent obsession and the vulnerability of youth

Piper Weiss was fourteen-years-old when her middle-aged tennis coach, Gary Wilensky, one of New York City’s most prestigious private instructors, killed himself after a failed attempt to kidnap one of his teenage students. In the aftermath, authorities discovered that this well-known-figure among the Upper East Side tennis crowd was actually a frightening child predator, who had built a secret torture chamber—a “Cabin of Horrors”—in his secluded rental in the Adirondacks.

Before the shocking scandal broke, Piper had been thrilled to be one of “Gary’s Girls.�� “Grandpa Gary,�� as he was known among his students, was different from other adults—he treated Piper like a grown-up, taking her to dinners, engaging in long intimate conversations, and sending her special valentines. As reporters swarmed her private community in the wake of Wilensky’s death, Piper learned that her mentor was a predator with a sordid history of child stalking and sexual fetish. But why did she still feel protective of Gary, and why was she disappointed that he hadn’t chosen her?

Now, twenty years later, Piper examines the event as both a teenage eyewitness and a dispassionate investigative reporter, hoping to understand and exorcise the childhood memories that haunt her to this day. Combining research, interviews, and personal records, You All Grow Up and Leave Me explores the psychological manipulation of child predators—their ability to charm their way into seemingly protected worlds—and the far-reaching effects their actions have on those who trust them most.]]> 352 Piper Weiss 0062456571 Kinsey 3 3.27 2018
author: Piper Weiss
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves:
review:
As always, I hate rating memoirs. I won’t speak on the authors personal experience, but the book is pitched as something different to what it is. It’s not so much a “blend of memoir and true crime�� as it is a memory dump of the authors life. True crime signals some sort of reporting and laying out of the facts, but the author seemed extremely selective in what she chose to include about the crimes.
]]> 60258642 For fans of My Dark Vanessa and Celeste Ng, Bad Fruit is an unforgettable portrayal of a toxic mother-daughter relationship and a young woman's search for truth and liberation.

Just graduated from high school and waiting to start college at Oxford, Lily lives under the scrutiny of her volatile Singaporean mother, May, and is unable to find kinship with her elusive British father, Charlie. When May suspects that Charlie is having an affair, there's only one thing that calms May down: a glass of perfectly, spoiled orange juice served by Lily, who must always taste it first to make sure it's just right.

As her mother becomes increasingly unhinged, Lily starts to have flashbacks that she knows aren't her own. Over a sweltering London summer, all semblance of civility and propriety is lost, as Lily begins to unravel the harrowing history that has always cast a shadow on her mother. The horrifying secrets she uncovers will shake her family to its core, culminating in a shattering revelation that will finally set Lily free.

Beautiful and shocking, Bad Fruit is as compulsive as it is thought-provoking, as nuanced as it is explosive. A masterful exploration of mothers and daughters, inherited trauma and the race to break its devastating cycle, Bad Fruit will leave readers breathlessly questioning their own notions of femininity, race and redemption.]]> 256 Ella King 1662601492 Kinsey 4 3.73 2022
author: Ella King
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves:
review:
This book is an emotional journey. At times I wanted to scream, cry, or physically pull my hair out while reading what Lily endured at the hands of her parents. Learning to break out and overcome is not impossible.
]]> 61953668 An extraordinary chronicle of war and an occult story of love between a father and his son from one of Iraq’s most celebrated contemporary writers

“Whenever he told lies, the birds would fly away. It had been that way since he was a child. Whenever he told a lie, something strange would happen.��

So begins Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate, a phantasmagoric warren of fact, fabrication, and mystical allegory, set in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s rule and Iraq’s Kurdish conflict.

Muzafar-i Subhdam, a peshmerga fighter, has spent the last twenty-one years imprisoned in a desert yearning for his son, Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was captured. Upon his release, Muzafar begins a frantic search, only to learn that Saryas was one of three identical boys who became enmeshed in each other’s lives as war mutilated the region.

An inlet to the recesses of a terrifying historical moment, and a philosophical journey of formidable depths, The Last Pomegranate interrogates the origins and reverberations of atrocity. It also probes, with a graceful intelligence, unforgettable acts of mercy.]]> 322 Bachtyar Ali 1953861407 Kinsey 0 to-read 4.22 2002
author: Bachtyar Ali
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 274186 here.

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.�� But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness�� and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served.]]> 245 Kazuo Ishiguro 0679731725 Kinsey 3 4.17 1989
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1989
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves:
review:
This is always talked about as one of Ishiguro’s best works, but it definitely wasn’t my favorite. I did appreciate the longing from Miss Kenton and the obliviousness of Stevens. Their dynamic was complex and I loved reading about it, but it was weight down by other plot points that didn’t quite connect for me.
]]> 23461003 That's My Partner! A eats mostly popsicles and oranges, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials�� particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that exists only in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a local celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up a Wally's Supermarket's entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.

Meanwhile, B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who in turn hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C's pornography addiction. Maybe something like what's gotten into her neighbors across the street, the family who's begun "ghosting" themselves beneath white sheets and whose garage door features a strange scrawl of graffiti: he who sits next to me, may we eat as one.

An intelligent and madly entertaining novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass, Alexandra Kleeman's unforgettable debut is a missing-person mystery told from the point of view of the missing person; an American horror story that concerns sex and friendship, consumption and appetite, faith and transformation, real food and reality television; and, above all, a wholly singular vision of modern womanhood by a frightening, "stunning" (Conjunctions), and often very funny voice of a new generation.]]> 304 Alexandra Kleeman 0062388673 Kinsey 2 3.25 2015
author: Alexandra Kleeman
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:
I disliked how disconnected this novel feels. I had to force myself to pick it up every time I put it down. It feels like multiple books.
]]> 59228410
Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.

Source: penguinrandomhouse.com]]> 342 Bryan Stevenson Kinsey 5 4.66 2014
author: Bryan Stevenson
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.66
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves:
review:
This was such a thoughtful memoir. The work is important and the stories are heartbreaking. Stevenson and the EJI have my attention.
]]> 52185082
Orphaned and friendless, apprenticed to an older Sin Eater who cannot speak to her, May must make her way in a dangerous and cruel world she barely understands. When a deer heart appears on the coffin of a royal governess who did not confess to the dreadful sin it represents, the older Sin Eater refuses to eat it. She is taken to prison, tortured, and killed. To avenge her death, May must find out who placed the deer heart on the coffin and why.

The Sin Eater walks among us, unseen, unheard
Sins of our flesh become sins of Hers
Following Her to the grave, unseen, unheard
The Sin Eater Walks Among Us.

The Handmaid’s Tale meets Alice in Wonderland in this gripping and imaginative historical novel about a shunned orphan girl in 16th-century England who is ensnared in a deadly royal plot and must turn her subjugation into her power.]]> 284 Megan Campisi 1982124105 Kinsey 4 3.62 2020
author: Megan Campisi
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves:
review:
I enjoyed this book. It was slow at times and didn’t necessarily have a good payoff at the end, but I appreciated it. I loved the symbolism.
]]> 537716 170 Djuna Barnes 0811200051 Kinsey 1 3.67 1936
author: Djuna Barnes
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1936
rating: 1
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves:
review:
I hate that I struggled with this one so much. I could not connect to a single character or plot point in this novel.
]]> 11455485 Satantango is proof that “the devil has all the good times.��

The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. “At the center of Satantango,�� George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and the tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.��

“You know,�� Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”]]> 274 László Krasznahorkai 0811217345 Kinsey 0 to-read 4.19 1985
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13269 Poetics of Space remains one of the most appealing and lyrical explorations of home. Bachelard takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories, and dreams.

"A magical book. . . . The Poetics of Space is a prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced-and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." -from the new foreword by John R. Stilgoe]]> 282 Gaston Bachelard 0807064734 Kinsey 0 to-read 4.20 1957
author: Gaston Bachelard
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195472988 But the book is more than a simple It's a roadmap of the literary world, exploring the past century and all of its violence and turmoil—especially in Yugoslavia, Ugresic's birth country—and providing a direction for the future of feminist writing.��
One of the greatest thinkers of the past hundred years, Ugresic was one-of-a-kind, who novels and literary essays pushed the bounds of form and content, and A Muzzle for Witches offers the chance to see her at her most raw, and most playful.��]]> 120 Dubravka Ugrešić 1960385259 Kinsey 0 to-read 4.20
author: Dubravka Ugrešić
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50640953 A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author’s encounters with gun violence.

Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of indigenous women, on indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten.

In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her own experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses. "The Worry Line" explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. "At the Workshop" focuses on her graduate school years, during which a workshop classmate repeatedly killed off thinly veiled versions of her in his stories. In "Women in the Fracklands", Jensen takes the listener inside Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and bears witness to the peril faced by women in regions overcome by the fracking boom.

In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history - as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one’s country is not the same as surviving one’s country.]]> 294 Toni Jensen 1984821180 Kinsey 4 4.25 2020
author: Toni Jensen
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves:
review:
There is so much beauty and grace within these pages. I find it difficult to rate memoirs, so I’ll just say I appreciated what Jensen was looking to convey and think she did a great job.
]]> 54614429 WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .

A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk 0525541349 Kinsey 3 3.88 2009
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves:
review:
I loved the protagonist in this one. She surprised me throughout the book. It wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be, so I think I was a bit disappointed by the end.
]]> 117834 314 W. Somerset Maugham 0140185232 Kinsey 2 4.16 1944
author: W. Somerset Maugham
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1944
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves:
review:
I feel I’m missing something after finishing this novel. I did not enjoy my time reading it. I feel Maugham’s use of himself as the narrator was a choice I could have lived without.
]]> 55970539 One of the best books of this dreadful year.--Irish Independent

When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.

I am eleven, a dark-haired child given to staring out window ... Her voice makes it 1773, a fine day in May, and puts English soldiers crouching in ambush; I add ditch-water to drench their knees. Their muskets point towards a young man who is falling from his saddle in slow, slow motion. A woman hurries in and kneels over him, her voice rising in an antique formula of breath and syllable the teacher calls a caoineadh, a keen to lament the dead.

In the eighteenth century, on discovering her husband has been murdered, an Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament that reaches across centuries to the young Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose fascination with it is later rekindled when she narrowly avoids fatal tragedy in her own life and becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the poem Peter Levi has famously called "the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain" during its era. A kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, autofiction, and literary studies, A Ghost in the Throat moves fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and the people who make it.]]> 248 Doireann Ní Ghríofa 177196412X Kinsey 3 4.03 2020
author: Doireann Ní Ghríofa
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves:
review:
I had such high hopes for this one. I love when writers meditate on other writers. This one was hard to get through at times. I thought there were some issues w the pacing and structure. I did love the translation of the poem at the end.
]]> 40122000 An eerie, watery reimagining of the Oedipus myth set on the canals of Oxford, from the author of Fen

The dictionary doesn't contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries.

One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel's name for the thing she feared most. And now that she's searching for her mother, she'll have to face it.

In this electrifying reinterpretation of a classical myth, Daisy Johnson explores questions of fate and free will, gender fluidity, and fractured family relationships. Everything Under--a debut novel whose surreal, watery landscape will resonate with fans of Fen--is a daring, moving story that will leave you unsettled and unstrung.]]> 269 Daisy Johnson 1555978266 Kinsey 3 3.56 2018
author: Daisy Johnson
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:
I didn’t love this one, but I thought it was okay. I have loved previous works from Daisy Johnson. I thought it was an interesting take on the Oedipus myth.
]]> 58532214 Little Rabbit first meets the choreographer at an artists' residency in Maine, it's not a match. She finds him loud, conceited, domineering. He thinks her serious, guarded, always running away to write. But when he reappears in her life in Boston and invites her to his dance company's performance, she's compelled to attend. Their interaction at the show sets off a summer of expanding her own body's boundaries: She follows the choreographer to his home in the Berkshires, to his apartment in New York, and into submission during sex. Her body learns to obediently follow his, and his desires quickly become inextricable from her pleasure. This must be happiness, right?

Back in Boston, her roommate Annie's skepticism amplifies her own doubts about these heady weekend retreats. What does it mean for a queer young woman to partner with an older man, for a fledgling artist to partner with an established one? Is she following her own agency, or is she merely following him? Does falling in love mean eviscerating yourself?

Combining the sticky sexual politics of Luster with the dizzying, perceptive intimacy of Cleanness, Little Rabbit is a wholly new kind of coming-of-age story about lust, punishment, artistic drive, and desires that defy the hard-won boundaries of the self.]]> 256 Alyssa Songsiridej 1635578698 Kinsey 3 3.72 2022
author: Alyssa Songsiridej
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves:
review:
I have very mixed feelings on this one.
]]> 50403464
In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy--the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world's most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, innocents, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship.

A librarian and journalist, Rosenbloom is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a cofounder of their Death Salon, a community that encourages conversations, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning. In Dark Archives--captivating and macabre in all the right ways--she has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.]]> 275 Megan Rosenbloom 0374134707 Kinsey 3 4.01 2020
author: Megan Rosenbloom
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves:
review:
The premise of this book is so fascinating, but the execution was lacking. The author veers off into multiple subjects that are tangentially related to human skin books, but not enough to have entire chapters dedicated to them. I wished there was more about the groups research process and study results.
]]> 61497472
'So well researched, pacily written and sympathetic to the Auld Cause that it almost makes one a Jacobite' Andrew Roberts, Spectator

'Enthralling . . . Throws us straight into the fresh air, heather, rain and midges of the Hebrides, followed by the swamps and creeks of North America . . . Full of unforgettable glimpses' The Times

The year is 1746. The Jacobite rebellion has failed catastrophically and Scotland is reeling in the devastating aftermath of the battle of Culloden. Far to the west, on an island in the Outer Hebrides, twenty-four-year-old Flora Macdonald is woken in the dead of night by a messenger with urgent intelligence.

Bonnie Prince Charlie is outside, begging for her help.

With Flora's assistance, the Stuart prince is disguised as an Irish maid and smuggled to the Isle of Skye, evading government troops. Flora's bravery and determination will see her immortalised in ballads and proclaimed a Scottish heroine. But her efforts also result in her capture and detention in London. Released the following year and returning to Skye, Flora goes on to marry and emigrate to North Carolina, only then to be caught up in the American Revolutionary War.

In Pretty Young Rebel, award-winning biographer Flora Fraser tells the remarkable story of Flora Macdonald. It is a tale of adventure and daring, wit and charm, struggle and survival, and of a woman who showed extraordinary courage in the face of great danger.]]> 368 Flora Fraser Kinsey 0 to-read 3.59 2023
author: Flora Fraser
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15801685 IN THE LONG RUN, WE’RE ALL DEAD. But for some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure.

The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer’s office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs, and nether regions have embarked on voyages that crisscross the globe and stretch the imagination.

Counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln’s corpse. Einstein’s brain went on a cross-country road trip. And after Lord Horatio Nelson perished at Trafalgar, his sailors submerged him in brandy—which they drank.

From Mozart to Hitler, Rest in Pieces connects the lives of the famous dead to the hilarious and horrifying adventures of their corpses, and traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward death.]]> 329 Bess Lovejoy 1451654987 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.82 2013
author: Bess Lovejoy
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213736146 The Divine Comedy, and thoughts on finding love in the damned shadow of God. A hellish, sacrilegious must-read." �� rafael nicolás, author of Angels Before Man

Two of the Bible's greatest villains...

After his betrayal with a kiss, Judas Iscariot dies in despair and goes to Hell. When Christ saves other souls during the Harrowing of Hell, he leaves Judas behind—but not alone in the ninth circle, where the most detestable traitors go. Callous, resigned, and abandoned by God long ago, the Devil sees Judas as a pathetic wretch, but he soon finds a kindred spirit. As the centuries pass, they struggle to find even a sliver of happiness in Hell.

Doomed by the narrative, will they find happiness, or will their story continue to be a tragedy?]]> 218 Morgan Dante Kinsey 0 to-read 4.04
author: Morgan Dante
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50729298 A beautifully written atmospheric story of trauma, grief and redemption, Still Water is a debut from a bright new voice in literary fiction.

When Jane Douglas returns to the Shetland Islands, she thinks she has escaped the dark shadows of her childhood. She carves out a simple life on the bleak, windswept island, working at the salmon fishery and spending quiet evenings at home. And for the first time in her life, she’s happy.

Then the body of Jane’s long-missing mother is found in a flooded quarry. Her mother disappeared when Jane was a teenager, following the death of Jane’s baby brother. Jane has spent her life running from her past, living in fear that she has inherited her mother’s demons. Now, Jane must face what actually happened on that fateful, tragic day twenty years ago…]]> 400 Rebecca Pert Kinsey 0 to-read 4.11 2021
author: Rebecca Pert
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 23282286 Mother Millett

"Read it in one sitting. . . . Literally breathless. This first-person torch song for 'the pink brute' reminds us why French schoolgirls are the emblem for naughty passions as literary classics."—Sarah Schulman, author of The Gentrification of the Mind

"School-aged, yet sage in their desires, Thérèse and Isabelle called forth an endless night—a dark and delicate space for them to explore the complexity of their love. I have waited a very long time to slip back into the unexpurgated, delicious darkness with these iconic lesbian lovers."—Amber Dawn, author of How Poetry Saved My Life

Thérèse and Isabelle is the tale of two boarding school girls in love. In 1966 when it was originally published in France, the text was censored because of its explicit depiction of young homosexuality. With this publication, the original, unexpurgated text—a stunning literary portrayal of female desire and sexuality—is available to a US audience for the first time. Included is an afterword by Michael Lucey, professor of French and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Violette Leduc (1907��1972) has been referred to as "France's greatest unknown writer." Admired by Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Albert Camus, Leduc was championed by Simone de Beauvoir when she published her scandalous autobiography La Batarde (1964).]]> 245 Violette Leduc 1558618899 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.62 1954
author: Violette Leduc
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1954
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213011009
What really happened to Nora Willet? The religious community of Bethel, Alabama can’t agree on the truth. They always said she was trouble. Later, they said she was possessed. Maybe she lost her mind, killing three people and injuring many others.

In a part confessional, part plea for Nora to come home, Nora’s childhood friend Abigail Barnes tells of another girl’s gruesome eighteenth birthday, of the time Nora may have fully revived a snake, of the intimacy of their private encounters at the lakeside, of Nora’s deliverance ceremony. Where, Abigail wonders, is Nora now?

In this tender and horrific debut, religious dogmatism sniffs out two girls whose innocent affections threaten an entire town and way of life, making one a traitor to a homeland in which only Abigail and Nora know the bittersweet truth. A homeland in which Nora can only say, “There’s a snake speaking to me, Abby-girl.”]]> 134 Dori Lumpkin 1951971183 Kinsey 0 to-read 4.14 2024
author: Dori Lumpkin
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213570812 "I'm in your blood, and you are in mine��"

The Netherlands, 1887. Lucy's twin sister Sarah is unwell. She refuses to eat, mumbles nonsensically, and is increasingly obsessed with a centuries-old corpse recently discovered on her husband's grand estate. The doctor has diagnosed her with temporary insanity caused by a fever of the brain. To protect her twin from a terrible fate in a lunatic asylum, Lucy must unravel the mystery surrounding her sister's condition, but it's clear her twin is hiding something. Then again, Lucy is harboring secrets of her own, too.

Then, the worst happens. Sarah's behavior takes a turn for the strange. She becomes angry�� and hungry.��

Lucy soon comes to suspect that something is trying to possess her beloved sister. Or is it madness? As Sarah changes before her very eyes, Lucy must reckon with the dark, monstrous truth, or risk losing her forever.]]> 368 Johanna van Veen 1728281571 Kinsey 0 to-read 4.01 2025
author: Johanna van Veen
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 64041063
In this powerful and deeply felt polemic memoir, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a chronological document of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border, and of the people she has encountered along the way. Tracing her family’s long and fluid relationship to the border, each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande, and having worked on asylum cases since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone's trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the American immigration system.

In Rivermouth, Oliva focuses on the physical spaces that make up different phases of immigration and looks at how language and opportunity move through each of them; from the river as the waterway that separates the US and Mexico, to the table as the place over which Oliva prepares asylum seekers for their Credible Fear Interviews, and finally, to the wall as the behemoth imposition that runs along America’s southernmost border.

With lush prose and perceptive insight, Oliva encourages readers to approach the painful questions that this crisis poses with equal parts critique and compassion. By which metrics are we measuring who “deserves�� American citizenship? What is the point of humanitarian systems that distribute aid conditionally? What do we owe to our most disenfranchised?

As investigative and analytical as she is meditative and introspective, sharp as she is lyrical, and incisive as she is compassionate, in Rivermouth, Oliva argues for a better world while guiding us through the suffering that makes the fight necessary and the joy that makes it worth fighting for.]]> 320 Alejandra Oliva Kinsey 0 to-read 4.25 2023
author: Alejandra Oliva
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 32073572 Dive into this classic from the singular mind of Edgar Allan Poe, who is widely regarded as the master of short horror fiction. The Fall of the House of Usher recounts the terrible events that befall the last remaining members of the once-illustrious Usher clan before it is—quite literally—rent asunder. With amazing economy, Poe plunges the reader into a state of deliciously agonizing suspense. It's a must-read for fans of the golden era of horror writing.

]]> 48 Edgar Allan Poe 1620117584 Kinsey 3 Classic 3.63 1839
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1839
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves:
review:
Classic
]]> 26041948
“The Grownup,�� originally appeared as “What Do You Do?�� in George R. R. Martin’s Rogues anthology.]]> 64 Gillian Flynn Kinsey 3 3.65 2014
author: Gillian Flynn
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:
Such a cool concept and good writing. I felt like the ending could have been built up a bit more to really set the tone.
]]> 34563821
Set on the remote Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth draws us into the world of an astonishing cast of characters, all connected by an unfathomable crime. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty �� densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska �� and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.

In a story as propulsive as it is emotionally engaging, and through a young writer's virtuosic feat of empathy and imagination, this powerful novel provides a new understanding of the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.

Beautifully written, thought-provoking, intense and cleverly wrought, this is the most extraordinary first novel from a mesmerising new talent.]]> 312 Julia Phillips Kinsey 3 3.82 2019
author: Julia Phillips
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:
I think the story is written in a really intricate and intriguing way, but the last chapter felt so random and out of place.
]]> 40801462 220 Waubgeshig Rice 1773052462 Kinsey 5 3.88 2018
author: Waubgeshig Rice
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:
Immaculate. I adored the way Rice was able to set the tone for this novel, slow, creeping, and unsettling. The perfect winter read.
]]> 6366085 The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Pierre Athens, the greatest food critic in the world, is dying. Revered by some and reviled by many, Monsieur Arthens has been lording it over the world’s most esteemed chefs for years, passing judgment on their creations, deciding their fates with a stroke of his pen, destroying and building reputations on a whim. But now, during these his final hours, his mind has turned to simpler things. He is desperately searching for that singular flavor, that sublime something once sampled, never forgotten, the Flavor par excellence. Indeed, this flamboyant and self-absorbed man desires only one thing before he dies: one last taste.

Thus begins a charming voyage that traces the career of Monsieur Arthens from childhood to maturity across a celebration of all manner of culinary delights. Alternating with the voice of the supercilious Arthens is a chorus belonging to his acquaintances and familiars—relatives, lovers, a would-be protege, even a cat. Each will have his or her say about M. Arthens, a man who has inspired only extreme emotions in people. Here, as in The Elegance of Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery’s story celebrates life’s simple pleasures and sublime moments while condemning the arrogance and vulgarity of power.]]> 156 Muriel Barbery 1933372958 Kinsey 2 3.26 2000
author: Muriel Barbery
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2000
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves:
review:
I think I would have liked this more if I was a foodie. I just didn’t find it compelling or engaging.
]]> 51542000 A harrowing, compulsively readable novel about breaking free of sexual obsession

"No one found Howard Rose interesting, that is, but me."

Judith is an ambitious book editor in her late twenties living and working in New York City. Inexperienced with romantic love, she works hard, sees a small group of friends, and visits Dr. Munch, her beloved therapist, on whom she is dependent. Three weeks after her therapist's death, Judith reluctantly attends a cocktail party. Her life changes the instant she meets Howard Rose, a charismatic and commanding lawyer thirteen years her senior with whom she becomes sexually obsessed.

Swept off her feet, everything she does is now about Howard: He calls her at work, instructs her on what to wear to dinner, and takes control of her body and sexuality with complete ownership. Judith becomes dependent on the push-pull of their sexual entanglement and on Howard's attention and approval, convinced she's found the man of her dreams. Until, that is, she understands he's the man of her nightmares: hostile, reckless, and manipulative, he seems intent on obliterating any sense of self and autonomy that Judith possesses. Escaping Howard's grasp--and her own perverse enjoyment of being under his control--becomes her mission.

Narrated by a Howard-free Judith years later, Daphne Merkin's Twenty-Two Minutes of Unconditional Lovecharts the persistent hold our pasts have on us. Stylistically varied and punctuated by provocative ruminations on love, family, sex, gender, and relationships, Twenty-Two Minutes of Unconditional Love is a psychologically voracious descent into sexual obsession, the story of the hazardous extent to which one woman will go to achieve erotic bliss, and of her resolve to reclaim her agency.]]> 256 Daphne Merkin 0374140383 Kinsey 2 2.62 2020
author: Daphne Merkin
name: Kinsey
average rating: 2.62
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:
I really did not like this. The relationship between Judith and Howard was barely explored. I also hated the authorial asides.
]]> 49247242 In America, demons wear white hoods.

In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.

Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan's demons straight to Hell. But something awful's brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up.

Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?]]> 185 P. Djèlí Clark 1250767024 Kinsey 3 3.96 2020
author: P. Djèlí Clark
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves:
review:
Quick, interesting read. Grabs you from the beginning. I thought it was too short to be fully realized.
]]> 57846774 They say it takes 28 Questions to fall in love. Then what?

'Funny, clever, sad without self-pity, and with an uplift that is the writing itself'��Jeanette Winterson

'If it's an addictive read you're after, consider this your next stop.'�� Stylist
'An intensely beautiful cleverly layered story of young queer love. An intense but entertaining read. Highly recommend.�� Juno Roche

A queer��When Harry Met Sally��for the Sally Rooney Generation

‘Reader, imagine yielding to someone with a power so strong she has the ability to slice time. Before. Her. After.��
��
When first-year music student Amalia stumbles into her Oxford college bar, she has no idea that everything is about to change. Seated across from her is Alex, a velvety-voiced fellow Australian with eyes the colour of her native sky. They strike up a friendship that is immediate - its intensity both thrilling and terrifying.
��
As the days and weeks go by, they spend more and more time philosophising, hypothesising, questioning everything. There is nothing they cannot talk about, except the one thing that matters most. Dare they risk a romantic entanglement if it threatens this most perfect of friendships?

Set across four years and five cities, and suffused with music, literature, art, dance, sex, and the exquisite pain and pleasure of first love, 28 Questions��is a passionate and unforgettable first novel about love in all its guises, growing up, and figuring out who you are along the way.��

��]]> 368 Indyana Schneider 1398501115 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.87 2022
author: Indyana Schneider
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 179844474 A black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman’s struggle to be free.

When Winona Dalloway begins her day �� in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet��, wake up �� she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed.

On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices �� a mind both wild and precise.

And meanwhile, a storm is brewing …]]> 160 Miranda Darling 1761380397 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.51
author: Miranda Darling
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.51
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 17557470 288 Donnie Eichar 1452112746 Kinsey 4 3.94 2013
author: Donnie Eichar
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves:
review:
I appreciated the research that went into this book. It was thoughtful and well written. I wish there would have been more discussion/debunking of theories. I thought the one presented at the end was solid.
]]> 6361913
Provenance is the extraordinary narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate deceptions in art history. Investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo brilliantly recount the tale of a great con man and unforgettable villain, John Drewe, and his sometimes unwitting accomplices.

Chief among those was the struggling artist John Myatt, a vulnerable single father who was manipulated by Drewe into becoming a prolific art forger. Once Myatt had painted the pieces, the real fraud began. Drewe managed to infiltrate the archives of the upper echelons of the British art world in order to fake the provenance of Myatt's forged pieces, hoping to irrevocably legitimize the fakes while effectively rewriting art history.

The story stretches from London to Paris to New York, from tony Manhattan art galleries to the esteemed Giacometti and Dubuffet associations, to the archives at the Tate Gallery. This enormous swindle resulted in the introduction of at least two hundred forged paintings, some of them breathtakingly good and most of them selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of these fakes are still out in the world, considered genuine and hung prominently in private houses, large galleries, and prestigious museums. And the sacred archives, undermined by John Drewe, remain tainted to this day.

Provenance reads like a well-plotted thriller, filled with unforgettable characters and told at a breakneck pace. But this is most certainly not fiction; Provenance is the meticulously researched and captivating account of one of the greatest cons in the history of art forgery.

]]> 327 Laney Salisbury 1594202206 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.90 2009
author: Laney Salisbury
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 41086837 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780571338757.

In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous.

Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.]]> 352 Anna Burns Kinsey 3 3.59 2018
author: Anna Burns
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves:
review:
Very dense. Stream of consciousness which I struggle with a lot. Took me a long time to get through, and the parts where action was happening were enough to keep me interested through the rest.
]]> 15793575
In the late 1500s a Nuremberg man named Frantz Schmidt began to do something utterly remarkable for his era: he started keeping a journal. But what makes Schmidt even more compelling to us is his day job. For forty-five years, Schmidt was an efficient and prolific public executioner, employed by the state to extract confessions and put convicted criminals to death. In his years of service, he executed 361 people and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. Is it possible that a man who practiced such cruelty could also be insightful, compassionate, humane—even progressive?

In his groundbreaking book, the historian Joel F. Harrington looks for the answer in Schmidt’s journal, whose immense significance has been ignored until now. Harrington uncovers details of Schmidt’s medical practice, his marriage to a woman ten years older than him, his efforts at penal reform, his almost touching obsession with social status, and most of all his conflicted relationship with his own craft and the growing sense that it could not be squared with his faith.

A biography of an ordinary man struggling for his soul, The Faithful Executioner is also an unparalleled portrait of Europe on the cusp of modernity, yet riven by conflict and encumbered by paranoia, superstition, and abuses of power. In his intimate portrait of a Nuremberg executioner, Harrington also sheds light on our own fraught historical moment.]]> 320 Joel F. Harrington 0809049929 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.99 2013
author: Joel F. Harrington
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 132621927 0 Constance Elizabeth Maud Kinsey 0 to-read 3.25 1911
author: Constance Elizabeth Maud
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.25
book published: 1911
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 45734815 An intimate, revealing memoir from one of the most important activists of our time.

While working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq for the United States Army in 2010, Chelsea Manning disclosed more than seven hundred thousand classified military and diplomatic records that she had smuggled out of the country on the memory card of her digital camera. In 2011 she was charged with twenty-two counts related to the unauthorized possession and distribution of classified military records, and in 2013 she was sentenced to thirty-five years in military prison.

The day after her conviction, Manning declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition, seeking hormones through the federal court system. In 2017, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and she was released from prison.

In README .txt, Manning recounts how her pleas for increased institutional transparency and government accountability took place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman. Manning details the challenges of her childhood and adolescence as a naive, computer-savvy kid, what drew her to the military, and the fierce pride she has about the work she does. This powerful, observant memoir will stand as one of the definitive testaments of our digital, information-driven age.]]> 272 Chelsea Manning 0374279276 Kinsey 5 4.23 2022
author: Chelsea Manning
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves:
review:
I loved this one. Chelsea Manning has an incredible story to tell. This memoir is extremely well written and flows beautifully from one chapter to the next. Highly recommend.
]]> 55835653
Edith Widder's childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist was almost derailed in college, when complications from a surgery gone wrong caused temporary blindness. A new reality of shifting shadows drew her fascination to the power of light—as well as the importance of optimism.

As her vision cleared, Widder found the intersection of her two passions in oceanic bioluminescence, a little-explored scientific field within Earth's last great unknown frontier: the deep ocean. With little promise of funding or employment, she leaped at the first opportunity to train as a submersible pilot and dove into the darkness.

Widder's first journey into the deep ocean, in a diving suit that resembled a suit of armor, took her to a depth of eight hundred feet. She turned off the lights and witnessed breathtaking underwater fireworks: explosions of bioluminescent activity. Concerns about her future career vanished. She only wanted to know one thing: Why was there so much light down there?

Below the Edge of Darkness takes readers deep into our planet's oceans as Widder pursues her questions about one of the most important and widely used forms of communication in nature. In the process, she reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of behaviors and animals, from microbes to leviathans, many never before seen or, like the legendary giant squid, never before filmed in their deep-sea lairs. Alongside Widder, we experience life-and-death equipment malfunctions and witness breakthroughs in technology and understanding, all set against a growing awareness of the deteriorating health of our largest and least understood ecosystem.

A thrilling adventure story as well as a scientific revelation, Below the Edge of Darkness reckons with the complicated and sometimes dangerous realities of exploration. Widder shows us how when we push our boundaries and expand our worlds, discovery and wonder follow. These are the ultimate keys to the ocean's salvation—and thus to our future on this planet.]]> 352 Edith Widder 0525509240 Kinsey 0 did-not-finish 4.16 2021
author: Edith Widder
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> 60784369
One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia’s luck around. He offers her a lucrative “modeling�� job at his family’s funeral home. Magnolia accepts. But despite things looking up, Magnolia’s problems fatten along with her wallet. When Cotton’s requests become increasingly weird, Magnolia discovers there’s a lot more at stake than just her rent.

Sharp as a belted knife, this sly social commentary cuts straight to the bone, revealing the aftermath of the American plantation and what it means to be poor, Black, and a woman in the God fearing south.]]> 304 Monica Brashears 1250851912 Kinsey 3 2.99 2023
author: Monica Brashears
name: Kinsey
average rating: 2.99
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves:
review:
This was just fine for me. I had really high hopes that weren’t met. I felt like there were so many things added into the story that would have made me rethinking picking it up. The pregnancy especially.
]]> 54860174 A darkly feminist, modern gothic tale pitched against a haunting backdrop, and populated by an electrifying cast of heroines

For 150 years, high above rocky Scottish cliffs, Caldonbrae Hall has sat untouched, a beacon of excellence in an old ancestral castle. A boarding school for girls, it promises that the young women lucky enough to be admitted will emerge “resilient and ready to serve society.��

Into its illustrious midst steps Rose Christie: a 26-year-old Classics teacher, Caldonbrae’s new head of the department, and the first hire for the school in over a decade. At first, Rose is overwhelmed to be invited into this institution, whose prestige is unrivaled. But she quickly discovers that behind the school’s elitist veneer lies an impenetrable, starkly traditional culture that she struggles to reconcile with her modernist beliefs—not to mention her commitment to educating “girls for the future.��

It also doesn’t take long for Rose to suspect that there’s more to the secret circumstances surrounding the abrupt departure of her predecessor—a woman whose ghost lingers everywhere—than anyone is willing to let on. In her search for this mysterious former teacher, Rose instead uncovers the darkness that beats at the heart of Caldonbrae, forcing her to confront the true extent of the school’s nefarious purpose, and her own role in perpetuating it.

A darkly feminist tale pitched against a haunting backdrop, and populated by an electrifying cast of heroines, Madam will keep readers engrossed until the breathtaking conclusion.]]> 352 Phoebe Wynne 1250272041 Kinsey 5 3.20 2021
author: Phoebe Wynne
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves:
review:
4.5 rounded up to five. I really enjoyed this one. I felt like some of the reveals were so obvious it was frustrating that Rose didn’t see them coming. I loved the 4th year girls and their courage.
]]> 30199426
In 1518, in a small town in Alsace, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn’t stop. She danced until she was carried away six days later, and soon thirty-four more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month more than 400 people had been stricken by the mysterious dancing plague. In late-seventeenth-century England an eccentric gentleman founded the No Nose Club in his gracious townhome―a social club for those who had lost their noses, and other body parts, to the plague of syphilis for which there was then no cure. And in turn-of-the-century New York, an Irish cook caused two lethal outbreaks of typhoid fever, a case that transformed her into the notorious Typhoid Mary.

Throughout time, humans have been terrified and fascinated by the diseases history and circumstance have dropped on them. Some of their responses to those outbreaks are almost too strange to believe in hindsight. Get Well Soon delivers the gruesome, morbid details of some of the worst plagues we’ve suffered as a species, as well as stories of the heroic figures who selflessly fought to ease the suffering of their fellow man. With her signature mix of in-depth research and storytelling, and not a little dark humor, Jennifer Wright explores history’s most gripping and deadly outbreaks, and ultimately looks at the surprising ways they’ve shaped history and humanity for almost as long as anyone can remember.]]> 336 Jennifer Wright 1627797467 Kinsey 0 to-read 4.27 2017
author: Jennifer Wright
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 192631581 200 Ángel Bonomini 1945492856 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.66 2024
author: Ángel Bonomini
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 17347730
“To see the SCUM Manifesto’s humor, to let it crack you up page after page, is not to read it as a joke. It’s not. The truth of the world as seen though Valerie’s eyes is patently absurd, a cosmic joke. Humor such as this is a muscle, a weapon�� It was the truth, and the truth is so absurd it’s painful.�� —Michelle Tea

“Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals��, the respect of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around... You’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM’s been through it all, and they’re now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out.�� —Valerie Solanas

Valerie Solanas was a radical feminist playwright and social propagandist who was arrested in 1968 after her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol. Deemed a paranoid schizophrenic by the state, Solanas was immortalized in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol.
]]> 89 Valerie Solanas 1849351805 Kinsey 0 3.83 1967
author: Valerie Solanas
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves:
review:
I don’t know how to rate this so I won’t try. I’m thankful for this important work and will absolutely be thinking about it in the years to come.
]]> 799266 The Sorrows of Satan was one of the first modern bestsellers and was influential in establishing some of the major trends in twentieth-century bestselling fiction.

The setting is London, 1895, and the Devil is on the loose. He is searching for someone morally strong enough to resist temptation, but there seems little chance he will succeed. Britain is all but totally corrupt. The aristocracy is financially and spiritually bankrupt; church leaders no longer believe in God; Victorian idealism has been banished from literature and life; and sexual morality is being undermined by the pernicious doctrines of the "New Woman." Everything and everyone is up for sale, and it takes a special kind of moral courage to resist the Devil's seductions.]]> 412 Marie Corelli 0192832204 Kinsey 0 to-read 4.00 1895
author: Marie Corelli
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1895
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 196841887
On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn had been a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong?

This is the question that has plagued acclaimed author Sarah Gerard and driven her obsessive pursuit to understand this horrifying tragedy. In Sarah’s exploration into Carolyn’s life and death, she spent thousands of hours interviewing her and Render’s friends and family, poring over court documents and news media, attending memorials for Carolyn, and Render’s trial, and reading obscure writings and internet posts from both parties. Even as she gleaned through this work a deeper understanding of Carolyn, her murderer, and the reasons for the crime, Sarah couldn’t help but turn her gaze to the greater forces that enabled it.

Sarah’s relentless instinct to follow a story and its characters to even their darkest ends makes this work at once a gripping work of true crime, a striking homage to Carolyn’s life, and an explosive excavation of a society in which murderous crimes committed by white men have become a disturbing norm.]]> 368 Sarah Gerard 1638930465 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.14 2024
author: Sarah Gerard
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205030494 384 William Peter Blatty 0063412934 Kinsey 3 4.31 1971
author: William Peter Blatty
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1971
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves:
review:
I think I would have enjoyed this more if I had read it before seeing the movie. I still appreciated it, but wasn’t scared by it.
]]> 829375 Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester.

Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel's heroine. This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys's brief, beautiful masterpiece.]]> 156 Jean Rhys 0141185422 Kinsey 4 3.65 1966
author: Jean Rhys
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:
I enjoyed this but wished it was entirely in Antoinette’s POV
]]> 29939268
Jeremy works at the counter of Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town—the first “a�� in the name is pronounced ay—smack in the center of the state. This is the late 1990s, pre-DVD, and the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut. But there are regular customers, a predictable rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: It’s a job; it’s quiet and regular; he gets to watch movies; he likes the owner, Sarah Jane; it gets him out of the house, where he and his dad try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.

But when Stephanie Parsons, a local schoolteacher, comes in to return her copy of Targets, starring Boris Karloff—an old movie, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store—she has an odd complaint: “There’s something on it,�� she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, Lindsey Redinius brings back She’s All That, a new release, and complains that there’s something wrong with it: “There’s another movie on this tape.��

So Jeremy takes a look. And indeed, in the middle of the movie the screen blinks dark for a moment and She’s All That is replaced by a black-and-white scene, shot in a barn, with only the faint sounds of someone breathing. Four minutes later, She’s All That is back. But there is something profoundly disturbing about that scene; Jeremy’s compelled to watch it three or four times. The scenes recorded onto Targets are similar, undoubtedly created by the same hand. Creepy. And the barn looks a lot like a barn just outside of town.

Jeremy doesn’t want to be curious. In truth, it freaks him out, deeply. This has gone far enough, maybe too far already. But Stephanie is pushing, and once Sarah Jane takes a look and becomes obsessed, there’s no more ignoring the disturbing scenes on the videos. And all of a sudden, what had once been the placid, regular old Iowa fields and farmhouses now feels haunted and threatening, imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. For Jeremy, and all those around him, life will never be the same . . .]]> 214 John Darnielle 0374282102 Kinsey 3 I�� don’t know what this was 3.18 2017
author: John Darnielle
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves:
review:
I�� don’t know what this was
]]> 60323152 An explosive oral history of emo's takeover from 1999 to 2008, featuring

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE, FALL OUT BOY, PARAMORE, PANIC! AT THE DISCO, TAKING BACK SUNDAY, JIMMY EAT WORLD, DASHBOARD CONFESSIONAL, AND MANY MORE

If Meet Me in the Bathroom traced New York City's early 2000's rock scene, Where Are Your Boys Tonight? gives the inside story of the turn-of-the-millennium emo subculture that became bigger than anyone thought possible. There was Pete Wentz, the Fall Out Boy leader who launched a litany of scene-stealing bands and preposterous side-hustles, and Gerard Way, the wizard behind My Chemical Romance and The Black Parade. Panic! At the Disco and Paramore emerged soon after--a pair of intrepid outsiders who got massive playing by their own rules. As they ascended, MySpace took over the internet and the age of influencers dawned, with emo its choice aesthetic.

Music journalist Chris Payne experienced emo's mainstream takeover from sweaty crowds and mosh pits growing up in New Jersey. In Where Are Your Boys Tonight? he offers an authoritative, impassioned, and occasionally absurd account told through interviews with more than 150 people, from the scene's biggest bands, producers, and managers to the teenage fans who helped redefine American music culture.]]> 496 Chris Payne 0063251280 Kinsey 4 4.41 2023
author: Chris Payne
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves:
review:
I appreciated this book for what it was. It didn’t quite feel complete, and there were definitely some big voices missing. Overall I liked hearing the history from the members themselves.
]]> 185767233 Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise meets Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in a Black woman’s coming-of-age story, chronicling a life-changing friendship, the interplay between music fandom and identity, and the slipperiness of sanity

Set in the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is an immersive journey into the life and mind of Khaki Oliver, who’s perennially trying to disappear into something: a codependent friendship, an ill-advised boyfriend, the punk scene, or simply, the ether. These days it’s a meaningless job and a comfortingly empty apartment. Then, after a decade of estrangement, she receives a letter from her former best friend. Fiona’s throwing a party for her newly adopted daughter and wants Khaki to join the celebration.

Khaki is equal parts terrified and tempted to reconnect. Their platonic love was confusing, all-consuming, and encouraged their worst impulses. While stalling her RSVP, Khaki starts crafting the perfect mixtape—revisiting memories of formative shows, failed romances, and the ups and downs of desire and denial—while weighing the risks and rewards of saying yes to Fiona again.

One song at a time, from 1980s hardcore to 2010s emo, the shared and separate contours of each woman’s mind come into focus. Will listening to the same old songs on repeat doom Khaki to a lonely life of arrested development? Or will hindsight help her regain her sense of self and pave a healthy path for the future, with or without Fiona?]]> 336 Mariah Stovall 1593767609 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.17 2024
author: Mariah Stovall
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52918279 A dazzling debut novel about a young woman’s dark obsession with her privileged classmate and the lengths she’ll go to win his love—from prizewinning Chinese American author Susie Yang.

Ivy Lin is a thief and a liar—but you’d never know it by looking at her.

Raised outside of Boston, Ivy’s immigrant grandmother relies on Ivy’s mild appearance for cover as she teaches her granddaughter how to pilfer items from yard sales and second-hand shops. Thieving allows Ivy to accumulate the trappings of a suburban teen—and, most importantly, to attract the attention of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of a wealthy political family. But when Ivy’s mother discovers her trespasses, punishment is swift and Ivy is sent to China, and her dream instantly evaporates.

Years later, Ivy has grown into a poised yet restless young woman, haunted by her conflicting feelings about her upbringing and her family. Back in Boston, when Ivy bumps into Sylvia Speyer, Gideon’s sister, a reconnection with Gideon seems not only inevitable—it feels like fate.

Slowly, Ivy sinks her claws into Gideon and the entire Speyer clan by attending fancy dinners, and weekend getaways to the cape. But just as Ivy is about to have everything she’s ever wanted, a ghost from her past resurfaces, threatening the nearly perfect life she’s worked so hard to build.

Filled with surprising twists and offering sharp insights into the immigrant experience, White Ivy is both a love triangle and a coming-of-age story, as well as a glimpse into the dark side of a woman who yearns for success at any cost.]]> 368 Susie Yang 1982100613 Kinsey 2 3.69 2020
author: Susie Yang
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/16
shelves:
review:
Maaaaaan I really did not like this
]]> 22747761
Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now she is married and her “mid-climacteric�� approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby �� alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller �� believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it.

From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of Arundel's snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia’s black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.]]> 432 Hermione Eyre 0553419358 Kinsey 3 3.24 2014
author: Hermione Eyre
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/14
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves:
review:
This book went on for so long and said so little. Some characters like Mary Tree had so little time to shine. It feels like a lot of words were wasted here.
]]> 23847957 "Witches are gathering."

Although a self-proclaimed skeptic, Alex Mar has secretly longed for revelation, envying people with unshakable beliefs. And so when she set out to direct the documentary American Mystic, she was drawn deep into the world of present-day witchcraft. Most people hear "witches" and think of horror films and Halloween, but to the one million Americans who practice Paganism, it's a nature-worshipping, polytheistic, and very real religion.

Witches of America follows Mar on her trip into Paganism and the occult, from its roots in 1950s England to its current American mecca in the Bay Area; from a gathering of more than a thousand witches in the Illinois woods to the New Orleans branch of one of the world's most influential magical societies. She takes part in dozens of rituals, some vast and some intimate, alongside all sorts of people-single mothers, programmers, veterans, and one California priestess who becomes a close friend. This world gives Mar the freedom to confront what she believes is possible-or hopes might be.

With the wit of Susan Orlean and the insight of Leslie Jamison, Mar provides a fresh, unexpected take on faith in America. Whether evangelical, pagan priestess, or atheist, each of us craves a system of meaning to give structure to our lives, and we sometimes find it in unexpected places. Witches of America asks the central question: Why do we choose to believe in anything at all?]]> 288 Alex Mar 0374291373 Kinsey 2 3.24 2015
author: Alex Mar
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves:
review:
This wasn’t what I thought it would be. It was more personal narrative than informational text on “Witches in America��. I think the scope here was very narrow and the explorations of “darkness�� were unsatisfying.
]]> 752815 165 Oscar Wilde Kinsey 3 3.96 1890
author: Oscar Wilde
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1890
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/29
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves:
review:
The beginning and ending of this book were both so strong, but the middle lagged so much.
]]> 44074748
When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.

Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from from Herman Melville, H.P. Lovecraft, and anonymous 'creepypastas', Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.]]> 264 Mónica Ojeda 1566896215 Kinsey 4 3.56 2023
author: Mónica Ojeda
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves:
review:
I think girlhood is so hard and weird and terrible and this book embodies it so well.
]]> 31449412 The Past once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural" (Washington Post), in a collection of stories that elevate the mundane into the exceptional.

The author of six critically acclaimed novels, Tessa Hadley has proven herself to be the champion of revealing the hidden depths in the deceptively simple. In these short stories it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket.

Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: each of these stories illuminate crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists.

A girl accepts a lift in a car with some older boys; a young woman reads the diaries she discovers while housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, some that can reverberate across decades; private fantasies can affect other people, for better and worse. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories demonstrates yet again that Tessa Hadley "puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master" (Lily King, author of Euphoria).]]> 240 Tessa Hadley 0062476661 Kinsey 3 3.73 2017
author: Tessa Hadley
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves:
review:
These stories were just fine. Easily readable but nothing I’ll remember a few months from now. Liked the last story, Silk Brocade, the most
]]> 56268846


'Elegant, filthy �� and quite possibly the queerest thing you will read all year.' - Guardian


'Intriguing and inventive.' - Electric Literature, "Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year"


'A dizzyingly enticing and kaleidoscopic take on the spectrum of sexual experiences.' - Publishers Weekly, starred review
_____________

A daring, category-confounding, and ruthlessly funny novel from National Book Award honored author Edmund White that explores polyamory and bisexuality, aging and love.

Sicilian aristocrat and musician, Ruggero, and his younger American wife, Constance, agree to break their marital silence and write their Confessions. Until now they had a ban on speaking about the past, since transparency had wrecked their previous marriages. As the two alternate reading the memoirs they’ve written about their lives, Constance reveals her multiple marriages to older men, and Ruggero details the affairs he’s had with men and women across his lifetime―most importantly his passionate affair with the author Edmund White.

Sweeping outward from the isolated Swiss ski chalet where the couple reads to travel through Europe and the United States, White’s new novel pushes for a broader understanding of sexual orientation and pairs humor and truth to create his most fascinating and complex characters to date. As in all of White’s earlier novels, this is a searing, scintillating take on physical beauty and its inevitable decline. But in this experimental new mode―one where the author has laid himself bare as a secondary character―White explores the themes of love and age through numerous eyes, hearts and minds.

Delightful, irreverent, and experimental, A Previous Life proves once more why White is considered a master of American literature.]]> 288 Edmund White 1635577276 Kinsey 0 did-not-finish 2.94 2022
author: Edmund White
name: Kinsey
average rating: 2.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> 39391177 A trans artist explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl—and how we might re-imagine gender for the twenty-first century.

Vivek Shraya has reason to be afraid. Throughout her life she's endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and not feminine enough as a girl. To survive childhood she had to learn to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak.

With raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate. I'm Afraid of Men. is a journey from camouflage to a riot of color and a blueprint for how we might cherish all that makes us different and conquer all that makes us afraid.]]> 87 Vivek Shraya 0735235937 Kinsey 3 4.21 2018
author: Vivek Shraya
name: Kinsey
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/18
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves:
review:
I was not as moved by this as I thought I would be. Maybe I read it too fast and didn’t give it enough time to win me over.
]]> 54388240
Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention��

Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.]]> 297 Eliza Clark 1910312630 Kinsey 4 3.86 2020
author: Eliza Clark
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves:
review:
There are so many LOTR references in this novel.
]]> 49122825 A "provocative and seductive debut" of desire and doubleness that follows the life of a young Palestinian American woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities as she endeavors to lead an authentic life (O, The Oprah Magazine)

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of "You exist too much," she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East--from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine--Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings--for love, and a place to call home.]]> 320 Zaina Arafat 1948226510 Kinsey 4 3.81 2020
author: Zaina Arafat
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 983730 The Lost Estate is Robin Buss's translation of Henri Alain-Fournier's poignant study of lost love, Le Grand Meaulnes. This Penguin Classics edition also contains an introduction by Adam Gopnik.

When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house - and his love for the beautiful girl hidden within it, Yvonne de Galais - his life has been changed forever. In his restless search for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence.

Robin Buss's translation of Le Grand Meaulnes sensitively and accurately renders Alain-Fournier's poetically charged, expressive and deceptively simple style. In his introduction, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik discusses the life of Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the First World War after writing this, his only novel.

I read it for the first time when I was seventeen and loved every page. I find its depiction of a golden time and place just as poignant now as I did then
Nick Hornby]]> 227 Henri Alain-Fournier 0141441895 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.72 1913
author: Henri Alain-Fournier
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1913
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57845081
Brief, intense and haunting, Ditlevsen's novel recreates the experience of madness from the inside, with all the vividness of lived experience.]]> 144 Tove Ditlevsen 1250838193 Kinsey 5 3.93 1968
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/09
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves:
review:
Adored this one. Writing doesn’t get much better than this.
]]> 210359893 2024 Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist for Fantasy

“It’s amazing what the spirit can cope with to preserve the body. My spirit is a mighty oak that just won’t fall.��

In a fantastical aftermath of the Salem witch trials, magical women known as the Dirty have signed a contract swearing off their innate magic in exchange for freedom from violence by non-magical Freemen. Two hundred years later, in a Catskills orphanage, headmistress Whitetail has sprouted antlers—proof of a violated contract. When her wealthy benefactor visits, proposing marriage, her appearance sparks abuse. Rushing to her teacher’s defense, eight-year-old Rabbit curses the Beard dead, and Whitetail’s arrested on trumped-up charges. As Whitetail awaits her trial and execution, Rabbit is groomed as the Freemen’s star witness and learns of the terrifying reality to which they aspire. With her magic at stake and a loose tooth in her mouth, Rabbit has little left to lose. And a revolution to gain.]]> 380 Meg Ripley 1951971140 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.83
author: Meg Ripley
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 196674636 Survival is a moral quandary in this jagged, otherworldly debut charting forbidden love during an apocalypse.

In a near future devastated by war and unspecified natural disaster, a young man and his mother cling to survival at the edge of a forest. Society is militarized and dangerous, with men with shaved heads patrolling the land as families are uprooted and nature is all but decimated. The young man spends his days helping his mother, who is traumatized from her experience working in the ominous Factory, and exchanging letters with his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the forest. It’s barely a life, but it’s life nonetheless.

After a brutal act of desperate violence and the arrival of armed men at their doorstep, the young man leaves his mother and finds Boris, who travels with him through the forest to the city. Escaping slavers and trekking through the empty landscape, the two find moments of intimacy despite their circumstances. But as their survival comes with increasingly violent demands, the young man is forced to confront whether, in his effort to stay alive, he’s become the very thing he’s fought to escape.

An award-winning, breakout novel from a blazingly original Catalonian poet, Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its beauty and devastation. Sparse, quick, and wrestling with big ideas, from the despoiling of the environment and totalitarianism to queerness and manhood, Guasch’s debut is an unrelenting and extraordinarily artful exploration of the moral murkiness of survival.]]> 256 Pol Guasch 0374612951 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.44 2021
author: Pol Guasch
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209527753 228 Anna Bogutskaya 0571385788 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.99 2024
author: Anna Bogutskaya
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 203579301 This is a story of girl meets printer.

A customer service assistant spends her long workdays printing letters. Her one friend is the printer and, in the dark confines of her office, she begins to open up to him, talking about her fears, her past, her hopes and dreams.

To her, it seems like a beautiful friendship is blossoming. To her boss, it seems like she's losing her mind.

Diagnosed with burnout and placed on leave, she faces severance and - worse - separation from her beloved printer. But she's not about to give up on her only friend without a fight. And, it turns out, neither is he...]]> 256 Fien Veldman 1035906449 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.21 2023
author: Fien Veldman
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201036078
Struggling to deal with the familial trauma of her Catholic upbringing, hotel cleaner, Noelle, travels to the Isle of Bute. There, she meets a man who claims to be a vampire, and a relationship blooms between them based solely on confession. But as talk turns sacrilegious, and the weather outside grows colder, Noelle struggles to come to terms with her blasphemous sexuality. She becomes hounded by memories of her past: her mother’s affair with the local priest, and the part she played in ending it.]]> 336 Genevieve Jagger 1912489961 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.50 2024
author: Genevieve Jagger
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216867498
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom.

With this gothic coming-of-age tale, novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]> 336 Lucy Rose 1399619713 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.91 2025
author: Lucy Rose
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214971929 164 Emma Glass 1739440560 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.71 2024
author: Emma Glass
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62982170
Over-educated and underpaid, Phoebe Forde is finally settling into her new life in Copenhagen with her anxious dog Dolly. Almost three years into her gender transition, she has learned to move through the world carefully, savouring small moments of joy. A woman without a past can be anyone she wants - that is, until an unexpected visit from her first (and only) girlfriend brings her face-to-face with a life she thought she would never see again.

In the course of a single weekend, as their old romance kindles something radical and new, Grace helps Phoebe to navigate the jagged edges of migration and alienation.

Wild Geese is an intimate and moving novel of past lives, messy feelings and the desire to start afresh. With wit and warmth, it charts the dislocations and relocations, encounters, accidents and memories, and the layers of love and loss that constitute a life.]]> 240 Soula Emmanuel 1804440140 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.84 2023
author: Soula Emmanuel
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53202685
I sin nya roman är Hanna Nordenhök tillbaka i 1800-talets disciplinära idéer och mekanismer, bland manlig hybris och ensamma barn på samhällets botten, bland smuts, fångenskap och skenande visioner. Ur en skildring som vagt bygger på historiska skeenden och gestalter väller en dockskåpslik värld präglad av övervakning och straff, av övergrepp och instängning, som skär rakt in i vår egen tid. Caesaria är en berättelse på gränsen mellan roman och saga som i drömlikt belysta bilder skildrar en omöjlig längtan ut.]]> 244 Hanna Nordenhök 9113102117 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.42
author: Hanna Nordenhök
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.42
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199454309 The New Yorker) about a smart, sensitive, yet deeply troubled young woman fighting to live on her own terms.

I am glad I have the radiance. This time I am wiser. No one will know�� The radiance drifts blue circles around my head. If I wanted to I could float up and through them. I am weightless. My brain is cool like rippling waves. Conflict does not exist. For a moment I cannot see—the lights are large orange flowers.

Ellen has two lives. A single artist living alone on New York’s Upper West Side in the 1970s, she periodically descends into episodes she describes as “radiances.�� While under the influence of the radiance, she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street the kingdom over which she rules. Life as Esmeralda is a colorful, glorious, liberating experience for Ellen, and despite the chaos and stigma these episodes can bring, she relishes the respite from the confines of the everyday. And yet those around her, particularly the men in her life, are threatened by her incarnation as Esmeralda and the freedom it gives her.

In what would turn to be her final published work, originally released in 1979, Elaine Kraf tackles a dark and disturbing subject in an utterly original, witty, and inventive manner. Provocative at the time of its publication and thoroughly iconoclastic, The Princess of 72nd Street is a remarkable portrait of an unforgettable woman.]]> 160 Elaine Kraf 0593731808 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.78 1979
author: Elaine Kraf
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 31944863 Les Méconnus

Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette never knew her maternal grandmother. Hoping to understand why the sometime painter and poet associated with Les Automatistes, a movement of dissident artists that included Paul-Émile Borduas, abandoned her husband and young family, Barbeau-Lavalette hired a private detective to piece together Suzanne's life.

Suzanne is a fictionalized account of Suzanne's life over eighty five years - from Montreal to Brussels to New York, from lover to lover, through a series of personal and artistic travails that mirror the political movements of the times: the Great Depression, Quebec's Quiet Revolution, women's liberation, and the American civil rights movement. Along the way, Suzanne offers an unforgettable portrait of a volatile, fascinating woman and the near-century she witnessed, while chronicling a granddaughter's search for understanding, forgiveness, and a familial past.]]> 265 Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette 1552453472 Kinsey 0 to-read 3.93 2015
author: Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette
name: Kinsey
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read
review:

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