en-US Sun, 09 Feb 2025 17:26:02 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 207006355 What do you want, when no one is watching?
What do you want, when the lights are off?
What do you want, when you are anonymous?

When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet for many reasons � some complicated, some not � so many of us don't talk about it. Our deepest, most intimate fears and fantasies remain locked away inside of us, until someone comes along with the key. Here's the key. In this generation-defining book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous letters of hundreds of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous letter). Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous.]]> 372 Gillian Anderson 1419777297 Danimal 0 to-read 3.43 2024
author: Gillian Anderson
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198563717
Come to Paris, August 2021, when the City of Lights was still empty of tourists, and a thirst for long overdue pleasure gripped those who wandered its streets.

After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged 46, unmarried with no children, spent 16 months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it. Leaving felt like less of a risk than a necessity.

What follows is a decadent, unexpected journey into one woman’s pursuit of radical enjoyment.

The weeks in Paris are filled with friendship and food and sex. There is dancing on the Seine; a plethora of gooey cheese; midnight bike rides through empty Paris; handsome men; afternoons wandering through the empty Louvre; nighttime swimming in the ocean off a French island. And yes, plenty of nudity.

In the spirit of Deborah Levy and Annie Ernaux, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is an intimate, insightful, powerful, and endlessly pleasurable memoir of an intensely lived experience whose meaning and insight expands far beyond the personal narrative. MacNicol is determined to document the beauty, excess, and triumph of a life that does not require permission.

The pursuit of enjoyment is a political act, both a right and a responsibility. Enjoying yourself—as you are—is not something the world tells you is possible, but it is.

Here’s the proof.]]> 288 Glynnis MacNicol 0593655753 Danimal 0 to-read 3.39 2024
author: Glynnis MacNicol
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 173404158
You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer,Ěý The Ěý Village Ěý Voice Ěýwas the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, theĚý Voice ’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms of criticism and storytelling and revolutionized journalism, spawning hundreds of copycats.Ěý
Ěý
With more than 200 interviews, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Colson Whitehead, cultural critic Greg Tate, gossip columnist Michael Musto, and feminist writers Vivian Gornick and Susan Brownmiller,Ěýformer ĚýVoiceĚý writerĚýTricia RomanoĚýpays homage to the paper that saved NYC landmarks from destruction and exposed corrupt landlords and judges. With interviews featuring post-punk band, Blondie, sportscaster Bob Costas, and drummer Max Weinberg, of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, in this definitive oral history, RomanoĚýtells the story of journalism, New York City and American culture—and the most famous alt-weekly of all time.]]> 608 Tricia Romano 1541736397 Danimal 4 4.24
author: Tricia Romano
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/07
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves:
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I love an oral history! And one about the best weekly paper of all time? And one that talks serious smack about the asshats from New Times (where I worked briefly many decades ago)? That is juicy and righteous and woeful, all together? Loved it.
]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Danimal 4
But over time the story grew on me and the characters grew on me. They evolved, they deepened and I cared for them. lt became a more resonant story about family and love and alternative relationships. I was sad when it was over. ]]> 3.87 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves:
review:
Better than the third book and not as good as the first two. I mean, that’s pretty much the story for many authors. At first I thought it was following the schema from book 3: telling two stories, only one of which I enjoyed. Plus there’s the experimental voice she uses for the older brother, which I really never got to like.

But over time the story grew on me and the characters grew on me. They evolved, they deepened and I cared for them. lt became a more resonant story about family and love and alternative relationships. I was sad when it was over.
]]> 198530925
They were just friends. Best friends. Allies. They spent entire summers sitting on Shiloh’s porch steps, dreaming about the future. They were both going to get out of north Omaha—Shiloh would go to college and become an actress, and Cary would join the Navy. They promised each other that their friendship would never change.

Well, Shiloh did go to college, and Cary did join the Navy. And yet, somehow, everything changed.

Now Shiloh’s thirty-three, and it’s been fourteen years since she talked to Cary. She’s been married and divorced. She has two kids. And she’s back living in the same house she grew up in. Her life is nothing like she planned.

When she’s invited to an old friend’s wedding, all Shiloh can think about is whether Cary will be there—and whether she hopes he will be. Would Cary even want to talk to her? After everything?

The answer is yes. And yes. And yes.

Slow Dance is the story of two kids who fell in love before they knew enough about love to recognize it. Two friends who lost everything. Two adults who just feel lost.

It’s the story of Shiloh and Cary, who everyone thought would end up together, trying to find their way back to the start.]]> 400 Rainbow Rowell 0063380196 Danimal 0 to-read 3.63 2024
author: Rainbow Rowell
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 203956646 From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex (“introspective and breathtakingly honest”�New York Times Book Review,), a memoir about sex, drugs, and techno in a time of madness

In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.

In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.

Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.]]> 264 Emily Witt 0593317645 Danimal 3 couldn-t-finish
A. this was a library book who needed to be returned.

B. I didn't really care how it ended.

Way better written than her last book. I enjoyed reading the insider's view of Berghain and the other German / NY techno parties. And I thought she ably described dance club parties and drug parties.

But again I didn't really care what happened in the end. Not sure why. Maybe she just didn't seem that likable? Sorry!]]> 3.50 2024
author: Emily Witt
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: couldn-t-finish
review:
I couldn't finish because

A. this was a library book who needed to be returned.

B. I didn't really care how it ended.

Way better written than her last book. I enjoyed reading the insider's view of Berghain and the other German / NY techno parties. And I thought she ably described dance club parties and drug parties.

But again I didn't really care what happened in the end. Not sure why. Maybe she just didn't seem that likable? Sorry!
]]> 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story�

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 Danimal 2
And then there's a twist of sorts. I don't think it's a spoiler that eventually you see the woman in the couple's point of view. And that it's more interesting. I wonder if the book shouldn't have been split between the two POVS throughout. Would've been less of a slog in the early going. And more entertaining/insightful, like the end.]]> 3.85 2023
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves:
review:
I was kinda intrigued by this because it felt like a Nick Hornby book but written by a woman. But then it takes the view point of a man! And spends the first 150 pages wallowing in his breakup. Only when he starts seeing other people does it get interesting - the wallowing doesn't tell us anything we don't already know about it.

And then there's a twist of sorts. I don't think it's a spoiler that eventually you see the woman in the couple's point of view. And that it's more interesting. I wonder if the book shouldn't have been split between the two POVS throughout. Would've been less of a slog in the early going. And more entertaining/insightful, like the end.
]]> 204316973 The beloved and award-winning author of BLACK HOLE's haunting and visually arresting story of an artist's obsessions, and the value and cost of pushing the boundaries of creativity

As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make sci-fi films in their yards, convincing their friends to star as victims of grisly murders, smearing lipstick on the "bodies" to simulate blood. Now a talented artist and aspiring filmmaker, Brian, along with Jimmy, Jimmy's friend Tina, and Laurie—his reluctant muse—sets off to a remote cabin in the woods with an old 8 millimeter camera to make a true sci-fi horror movie, an homage to Brian's favorite movie: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams, his damsel in distress, and his savior wrapped into one. Rife with references to classic sci-fi and horror movies and filled with panels of stunning depictions of nature, film and the surreal, Burns blurs the line between Brian's dreams and reality, imagination and perception. A master of the form at his finest, Final Cut is an astonishing look at what it means to truly express oneself through art.]]> 224 Charles Burns 0593701704 Danimal 0 to-read 3.73 2024
author: Charles Burns
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 205166232
“When you order CBD gummies for your anxiety but forget to consider your eating disorder.�

Known for her buzzing colors, delightful patterns, sharp humor, and unflinching vulnerability, Tara Booth does not miss any mark in this exquisitely woven collection of pure and nasty magic. Part advice column and exhibit, exploration of psychic pollution and tranquility, Processing is—quite simply—intrepid: in its honesty; its unapologetic grossness; its unrivaled and frank portrayal of life with a body that bleeds.

In the grand tradition of underground women cartoonists like Julie Doucet and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Booth draws a horned up woman laying rose petals on the bed, to distract from the bedbugs before her hookup arrives. She bears witness to the reality of wearing a t-shirt with no bra—when you stretch, your boobs, sometimes, pop right out. This is all just life but we don’t often see it on the page. Undaunted, Booth draws it.

When advice from spiritual gurus like Tara Brach and Ram Dass just aren’t cutting it, take solace in the genuine arms of Tara Booth: a fearless cartoonist who is unafraid to put her existential angst, blemishes, and stains right on the page, and who—with relentless relatability—makes us all feel a bit more at home in our too-human vessels. With color that vibrates and fluids that impose, Processing lays Booth bare—literally and figuratively.]]> 396 Tara Booth 1770467327 Danimal 0 to-read 4.31
author: Tara Booth
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.31
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 201632498 A woman questions the style of her new glasses.
A teacher considers quitting teaching.
A figure-drawing model considers quitting modeling.
A man drives into a fog bank and is unsure how to get home.

In Blurry, Shaw renders doubts around everyday decisions as startling cliffhangers, presenting us with the kinds of choices that can make a life expand or contract in equal measure. Drawn in clear lines and washes, Shaw captures the humor and anxiety of life in a one-of-a-kind structure that bends back to a thrilling, lyrical finish.]]> 480 Dash Shaw 1681378469 Danimal 0 to-read 3.92 2024
author: Dash Shaw
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 38337192 Olivier Schrauwen Danimal 0 to-read 4.43 2018
author: Olivier Schrauwen
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 138540631 0 Olivier Schrauwen Danimal 0 to-read 0.0 2014
author: Olivier Schrauwen
name: Danimal
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Danimal 0 to-read 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 55200729 Have you met Ms. Jones?

One night in 1979, a woman in a red beret skyrocketed to fame after a performance on Saturday Night Live. The song was “Chuck E’s in Love,� and the singer, Rickie Lee Jones. A vital part of the burgeoning Los Angeles jazz pop scene, she would soon be pronounced “Duchess of Coolsville� by TIME magazine.

Last Chance Texaco is the first no-holds-barred account of the life of one of rock’s hardest working women in her own words. With candour and lyricism, Rickie Lee Jones takes us on the journey of her exceptional life, including her nomadic childhood as the granddaughter of vaudevillian performers; her father’s abandonment of the family and her years as a teenage runaway; her beginnings at LA’s Troubadour club; her tumultuous relationship with Tom Waits and her battle with drugs; and her longevity as a woman in rock and roll.

These are never-before-told stories of the girl in the raspberry beret, a songwriter who would inspire American culture for decades.]]> 384 Rickie Lee Jones 1443464627 Danimal 0 to-read 4.09 2021
author: Rickie Lee Jones
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats� from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge�: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as �1847� or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,� “Spotify,� and “the collapse of the British Empire.� But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Danimal 0 to-read 3.54 2024
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 211004894
"Kari Ferrell’s memoir is a zippy, intimate account of low-level trickery before the era of scams fully erupted." —The Atlantic

"Raw and riveting. With a combination of bruising vulnerability and self-deprecating humor, Ferrell’s audacious coming-of-age tale pairs the thrill of true crime with the redemptive arc of a good memoir. It’s a deliciously edgy testament to reinvention." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The compelling, edgy, compassionate, laugh-out-loud memoir from Kari Ferrell, formerly known as the "Hipster Grifter"

Before Anna Delvey, before the Tinder Swindler, there was Kari Ferrell. Adopted at a young age by a Mormon family in Utah, Kari struggled with questions of self-worth and identity as one of the few Asian Americans in her insulated community, leading her to run with the “bad crowd� in an effort to fit in.

Soon, stealing from superstores turned into picking up men (and picking their pockets), and before she knew it, Kari graduated from petty theft to Utah’s most wanted list. Though Kari was able to escape the Southwest, she couldn’t outrun her new moniker: the Hipster Grifter.

New York City’s indie sleaze scene had found its newest celebrity—just as Kari found herself in a heap of trouble. Jail time, riots, bad checks, and an explosion of internet infamy and fetishization put her name in the spotlight. Beyond the gossip and Gawker posts, there’s a side to Kari the media never saw—until now.]]> 288 Kari Ferrell 1250288223 Danimal 0 to-read 3.33 2025
author: Kari Ferrell
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

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

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Danimal 0 to-read 3.92 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 22929486 A funny, fresh, and moving antidote to conventional attitudes about sex and the single woman

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

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

In Future Sex, Witt captures the experiences of going to bars alone, dating online, and hooking up with strangers. From her home in San Francisco, she decides to say yes to everything and to find her own path. She observes the subcultures she encounters with a wry sense of humor, capturing them in all of their strangeness, ridiculousness, and beauty. The result is an open-minded, honest account of the contemporary pursuit of connection and pleasure, and an inspiring new model of female sexuality--open, forgiving, and unafraid.]]> 214 Emily Witt 0865478791 Danimal 2 3.40 2015
author: Emily Witt
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> 205363936 In this electrifying novel, Richard Price, the author of Clockers and a writer on The Wire, shines a light in every corner of New York City.Boom! A June morning on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. Suddenly, where a five-story building had stood is nothing but fuming low hills of rubble, the cars parked in front pancaked and coated in ash. Sirens. Havoc. Confusion. Destruction. And people missing.Richard Price, our greatest chronicler of the city today, describes the effect of the disaster on the outer and inner lives of a rich and compelling group of characters. Anthony Walker is pulled from the rubble and, miraculously, survives, to find himself inspired by a religious sense of mission. Royal Lyons, who owns a failing funeral parlor, discovers a new lease on life. And Mary Roe, a hard-bitten NYPD detective, embarks on a personal quest to find a man who is missing.Price's first novel since the bestselling Lush Life presents a bravura portrait of a community on the edge of disintegration. Rich with indelible characters and incredible drama, Lazarus Man is a compelling work of suspense and social vision by one of our preeminent writers.]]> 352 Richard Price 0374168156 Danimal 0 to-read 3.45 2024
author: Richard Price
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 150778765 In Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman brings her unparalleled wit and knack for social observation to the world of work.

At a big-box store in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every morning at 3:55. Under the eye of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before customers arrive. When a golden opportunity for a promotion presents itself, the diverse members of Movement―among them a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging to her “cool kid� status from high school, a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together and set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot into motion. A darkly comic workplace caper that explores the aches and uses of solidarity, Help Wanted is a deeply human portrait of people trying, against increasingly long odds, to make a living.]]> 288 Adelle Waldman 132402044X Danimal 0 to-read 3.56 2024
author: Adelle Waldman
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Danimal 0 to-read 4.46 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59808430 Alternative cover edition of ISBN 9781644452080

A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising

The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing� in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.�) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he’ll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks.

With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill’s desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, “Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.�

Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn’t to say that it’s not about anything. In fact, it’s about villains. Bond villains. And that’s not nothing.]]> 262 Percival Everett Danimal 0 to-read 3.67 2022
author: Percival Everett
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56269278 309 Percival Everett 164445064X Danimal 0 to-read 4.06 2021
author: Percival Everett
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 208430621
In this fresh take on love and trouble in America, Brock Hobson, an insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher, finds his equilibrium disturbed by the results of a predictive blood test. Baxter, a master storyteller, brings us a gradually building rollercoaster narrative, and a protagonist who is impertinent, searching, and hilariously relatable. From his good-as-gold, gentle girlfriend to the excessively macho subcontractor guy his ex-wife left him for, not to mention his well-raised teenage kids, now exploring sex and sexuality, the secondary characters in Brock's life all contribute meaningfully to the drama, as increasing challenges to his sense of self and purpose crash over him. The final battle—no spoilers, but there is one—couldn't be more delightful, as this quick and bracing novel reminds us to choose the best people to love, accept the ones we love even if we didn’t choose them, and love them all well.]]> 224 Charles Baxter 0593700856 Danimal 0 to-read 3.07 2024
author: Charles Baxter
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 150247348 New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel about a young woman whose gift of second sight complicates her coming of age in late 19th century Scotland.

Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective—she doesn’t, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her “pictures� foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful truth: she may glimpse the future, but she can seldom change it.

Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis, visiting Belhaven for the harvest, begins to court her. Why have the adults around her not revealed that the touch of a hand can change everything? After following Louis to Glasgow, though, she learns the limits of his devotion. Faced with a seemingly impossible choice, she makes a terrible mistake. But her second sight may allow her a second chance.

Luminous and transporting, The Road from Belhaven once again displays “the marvelous control of a writer who conjures equally well the tangible, sensory world... and the mysteries, stranger and wilder, that flicker at the border of that world.� - The Boston Globe]]> 272 Margot Livesey 0593537041 Danimal 0 to-read 3.62 2024
author: Margot Livesey
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 176443441
It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy is a year out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, and as she searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn, Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.

Then the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls� mother—a newly devout Messianic Jew—starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. A trip home to Florida ends in disaster. Amy Klobuchar may or may not have rabies. And Jules struggles halfheartedly to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly coming to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, permanent fixtures in each other’s lives—must ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.

Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 304 Alexandra Tanner 1668018616 Danimal 0 to-read 3.32 2024
author: Alexandra Tanner
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 196845475 A young mother, in denial after the death of her sister, navigates the dizzying landscapes of desire, guilt, and grief in this darkly comic, highly anticipated debut novel from Kimberly King Parsons, author of the story collection, Black Light (longlisted for the National Book Award).

The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit’s best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They’ll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she’s lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and—most heartbreaking of all—her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.

When she returns to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle into her routine—long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother’s phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit’s mind, she’s reminiscing about the band she used to be in—and how they’d go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She’s imagining an impossible threesome with her kid’s pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?

Neon bright in its insight, both devastating and laugh-out-loud funny, We Were the Universe is an ambitious, inventive novel from a revelatory new voice in American fiction—a fearless exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, friendship, marriage, psychedelics, and the many strange, transcendent shapes love can take.]]> 288 Kimberly King Parsons 0525521852 Danimal 0 to-read 3.60 2024
author: Kimberly King Parsons
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Danimal 0 to-read 3.34 2024
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

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

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

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Danimal 0 to-read 3.53 2024
author: Danzy Senna
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60670034 336 Paul Gorman 0500022631 Danimal 0 to-read 3.95
author: Paul Gorman
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.95
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59737226 192 Ryan North Danimal 4 4.02 2020
author: Ryan North
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/23
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]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Danimal 5 3.52 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/08/23
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review:
Yet another masterpiece of quirk and oddness but with even more relatable humanity than ever!
]]> 193781998 An exuberant debut, The Husbands delights in how do we navigate life, love, and choice in a world of never-ending options?

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.

As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actuallyĚýliving?]]> 352 Holly Gramazio 0385550618 Danimal 3 3.50 2024
author: Holly Gramazio
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/08/23
shelves:
review:
Hmm, this was the kind of book I kept reading long after I really wanted to just to find out how she resolved it. I liked the concept but in the end I didn’t care about the main character and definitely not about any of the husbands or friends. It felt like it was written by a gamer, which it was.
]]> 78130090 An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.

Hey girlfriend I got a proposition goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want

Kathleen Hanna’s band Bikini Kill embodied the punk scene of the 90s, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like “Rebel Girl� and “Double Dare Ya� are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?

In Rebel Girl, Hanna’s raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumul­tuous childhood to her formative college years and her first shows. As Hanna makes clear, being in a punk “girl band� in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.

But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her, including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman. And her friendships with musicians like Kurt Cobain, Ian MacKaye, Kim Gordon, and Joan Jett reminded her that, despite the odds, the punk world could still nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its exclusivity.

In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how they continue to fuel her revolutionary art and music.]]> 326 Kathleen Hanna 0062825232 Danimal 3 4.40 2024
author: Kathleen Hanna
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/08/23
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review:
Lots of great stories and lots of boring chapters about in fighting in punk and zine worlds. I was a little disappointed because she was way more compelling in interviews about her life than in writing about it.
]]> 202907408 A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world with no place for the undocumented. Her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties, and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: She is both fascinated and repulsed.

Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved?]]> 224 Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 0593449096 Danimal 0 to-read 3.57 2024
author: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 37858194 Belly Up is a story collection that contains ghosts, mediums, a lover obsessed with the sound of harps tuning, teenage girls who believe they are actually plants, gulag prisoners who outsmart a terrible warden, and carnivorous churches. Throughout these grotesque and tender stories, characters question the bodies they've been given and what their bodies require to be sustained.

“At the intersection of the surreal and the real, Rita Bullwinkel has carved out a unique space in which the mundane and the strange cohabitate and sometimes frolic. The sharp, precise writing and careful observations of the human condition in her excellent first collection Belly Up signal the debut of a major new talent.� —Jeff VanderMeer

“These stunning stories take place in the spaces between ordinary objects and events. They are mysterious, strange, and fearlessly funny in their expression of human isolation, and they contain the existential surprises of great literature. Belly Up is a powerful debut by an unusually gifted writer.� —Lorrie Moore

“Bullwinkel's delightful, passionate stories of disturbance and worried words have the best kind of frenetic energy.� —Deb Olin Unferth]]> 192 Rita Bullwinkel 0998518433 Danimal 4 3.87 2018
author: Rita Bullwinkel
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2018
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/05/11
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]]> 174156218 An electrifying debut novel from an “unusually gifted writer� (Lorrie Moore) about the radical intimacy of physical competition

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors� pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.]]> 224 Rita Bullwinkel 0593654102 Danimal 0 currently-reading 3.49 2024
author: Rita Bullwinkel
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 60413581 288 Bruce Adams 1477321209 Danimal 2
I read maybe a third and then skimmed the rest and it was kind of a nice walk down memory lane and kinda a waste of time. ]]> 3.87 2022
author: Bruce Adams
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/05/11
date added: 2024/05/11
shelves:
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I’m not exactly sure WHO this book is for. It should be me - I was a college/community radio station dj in the 90s and then a zine maker and alt/weekly writer. So I know a lot of these bands. But basically it’s just a list of the bands who were big and small in Chicago in the 90s. Not a lot about how Kranky Records made its way.

I read maybe a third and then skimmed the rest and it was kind of a nice walk down memory lane and kinda a waste of time.
]]> 123209437 Monica is a series of interconnected narratives that collectively tell the life story � actually, stories � of its title character. Clowes calls upon a lifetime of inspiration to create the most complex and personal graphic novel of his distinguished career. Rich with visual detail, an impeccable ear for language and dialogue, and thrilling twists, Monica is a multilayered masterpiece in comics form that alludes to many of the genres that have defined the medium � war, romance, horror, crime, the supernatural, etc. � but in a mysterious, uncategorizable, and quintessentially Clowesian way that rewards multiple readings.
Five years in the making, Monica marks the apex of creativity from one of the defining voices of the graphic novel boom over the past quarter-century. A new book from Clowes is always a huge event in comics and literary circles; Monica will be the biggest literary event of 2023.]]> 106 Daniel Clowes 1683968824 Danimal 3 3.92 2023
author: Daniel Clowes
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/11
date added: 2024/05/11
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]]> 127482608
It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior.]]> 400 Kiley Reid 0593328205 Danimal 4 3.32 2024
author: Kiley Reid
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/29
date added: 2024/05/11
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]]> 70251573
"An intimate portrait of a woman on an earnest search to reclaim her passion and her body from the quotidian obligations of her various roles."—Christie Tate, bestselling author of Group and BFF

Molly Roden Winter was a mom of two young children in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a husband, Stewart, who often worked late. One night when Stewart missed the kids' bedtime, again , she stormed out of the house to clear her head. At impromptu drinks with a friend, she met Matt, an unbelievably hot younger man. When Molly told her husband that Matt had asked her out, she was surprised that he encouraged her to accept.

So begins Molly's unexpected open marriage, and with it a life-changing journey of self-discovery. Molly and Stewart, who also begins to see other people, set ground rules to Don’t date an ex. Don’t date someone you work with. Don't go to anyone's house. And above all, don't fall in love. Spoiler They end up breaking most of their rules, even the most important one.

Molly follows her sexual desire onto dating sites and to public places around New York City. In therapy sessions, fueled by the discovery that her parents had an open marriage, too, she grapples with her past and what it means to be both a mother and her truest self. Molly Roden Winter narrates her journey with warmth and style in this magnetic, intensely personal debut memoir.]]> 304 Molly Roden Winter 0385549458 Danimal 2 3.41 2024
author: Molly Roden Winter
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/06
date added: 2024/03/06
shelves:
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Pretty poorly written, full of cliches (writing and life/poly), and just so damn basic.
]]> 61913604
Fourteen years in the making, renowned and beloved graphic novelist Sammy Harkham finally delivers his epic story of artistic ambition, the heartbreak it can bring, and what it means to be human

YOU CAN BURN IN HELL
Ěý
Set primarily in Los Angeles in 1971, Blood of the Virgin is the story of twenty‑seven‑year‑old Seymour, an Iraqi Jewish immigrant film editor who works for an exploitation film production company. Sammy Harkham brings us into the underbelly of Los Angeles during a crucial evolutionary moment in the industry from the last wheeze of the studio system to the rise of independent filmmaking.
Ěý
Seymour, his wife, and their new baby struggle as he tries to make it in the movie business, writing screenplays on spec and pining for the chance to direct. When his boss buys one of his scripts for a project called Blood of the Virgin and gives Seymour the chance to direct it, what follows is a surreal, tragicomic making-of journey. As Seymour’s blind ambition propels the movie, his home life grows increasingly fraught. The film’s production becomes a means to spiral out into time and space, resulting in an epic graphic novel that explores the intersection of twentieth‑century America, parenthood, sex, the immigrant experience, the dawn of early Hollywood, and, shockingly, the Holocaust.
Ěý
Like a cosmic kaleidoscope, Blood of the Virgin shifts and evolves with each panel, widening its context as the story unfolds, building an intricate web of dreams and heartbreak, allowing the reader to zoom in to the novel’s the bittersweet cost of coming into one’s own.
Ěý
Ěý]]> 296 Sammy Harkham 059331669X Danimal 0 to-read 3.65 2023
author: Sammy Harkham
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62315670 In her keenly observed graphic memoir, Impossible People,Ěýcelebrated cartoonist Julia Wertz chronicles her haphazard attempts at sobriety and the relentlessly challenging, surprisingly funny, and occasionally absurd cycle of addiction and recovery.

Opening atĚýthe culmination of a disastrous trip to Puerto Rico, Impossible PeopleĚýfinds Wertz standing stupefied in the middle of the jungle beside a rental Jeep she'sĚýjust crashed. From this moment, the story flashes back to the beginning of her five-year journey towards sobriety that includes group therapy sessions, relapses, an ill-fated relationship, terrible dates, and an unceremoniousĚýeviction from her New York City apartment.ĚýFar from the typical addiction narrative that follows an upward trajectory from rock bottom to rehab to recovery, Impossible People portrays the lesser told but more common story: that the road to recover is not always linear. With unflinching honesty, Wertz details the arduous, frustrating, and hilarious story of trying and failing and trying again.]]> 320 Julia Wertz 0762468254 Danimal 0 currently-reading 4.32 2023
author: Julia Wertz
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/29
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 56898210 This “wickedly pacey page-turner� (Total Film) unfurls the behind-the-scenes story of the making of The Godfather, fifty years after the classic film’s original release.

The story of how The Godfather was made is as dramatic, operatic, and entertaining as the film itself. Over the years, many versions of various aspects of the movie’s fiery creation have been told—sometimes conflicting, but always compelling. Mark Seal sifts through the evidence, has extensive new conversations with director Francis Ford Coppola and several heretofore silent sources, and complements them with colorful interviews with key players including actors Al Pacino, James Caan, Talia Shire, and others to write “the definitive look at the making of an American classic� (Library Journal, starred review).

On top of the usual complications of filmmaking, the creators of The Godfather had to contend with the real-life members of its subject matter: the Mob. During production of the movie, location permits were inexplicably revoked, author Mario Puzo got into a public brawl with an irate Frank Sinatra, producer Al Ruddy’s car was found riddled with bullets, men with “connections� vied to be in the cast, and some were given film roles.

As Seal notes, this is the tale of a “movie that revolutionized filmmaking, saved Paramount Pictures, minted a new generation of movie stars, made its struggling author Mario Puzo rich and famous, and sparked a war between two of the mightiest powers in America: the sharks of Hollywood and the highest echelons of the Mob.”]]> 432 Mark Seal 198215859X Danimal 3 4.29 2021
author: Mark Seal
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/29
date added: 2024/01/29
shelves:
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]]> 60784815 128 Maggie Millner 0374607958 Danimal 2 3.77
author: Maggie Millner
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/17
date added: 2024/01/17
shelves:
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I just don't like poetry, even if it's about sex and relationships, two of my favorite topics.
]]> 75537559 Baseball's most outspoken fireballer brings the high heat in a book that calls out the hacks, cheats, ridiculous rules, and more that have tarnished the game--from the field of play to the clubhouse, front office, broadcast booth, and beyond--and serves up A-plus stuff on how to make baseball pure, fun, and damn near perfect.


Baseball has an image problem, the chorus of nonbelievers gets louder every year, and the Major Leagues have made an art of tuning them out. It wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be anymore. Enter Joe Kelly: a walking, talking, fastball-throwing embodiment of why baseball matters and why we should love it. He's got some things to say about what's gone wrong with baseball, what makes it great, and what needs to happen to make it damn near f*cking perfect.




A Damn Near Perfect Game is the loudest insider's expos� of the laws and culture of Major League Baseball since Jim Bouton's classic Ball Four. From his perspective as a two-time World Series Champion, baseball's most meme-able player according to ESPN, Big League firebrand, and current pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, Kelly takes readers on a house-cleaning tour of the clubhouse, the field of play, the bullpen, the front office, the commissioner's office, and a ballplayer's restricted life off-the-field. Kelly goes off on rule changes that matter and sticking to them (pitch clocks, no designated hitter, and more); baseball hacks (overused analytics, shifts, sign-stealing, and more); the promotion of baseball to a new generation of fans (letting players get edgy on social media, merchandising in truly trend-setting ways, and more); encouraging actual emotion (let the players fight, let them bat-flip, let them talk sh*t); and fixing all that's wrong with the front office and the Commissioner's Office.





And to show what happens when baseball has some piss and vinegar, he gives the inside scoop on his legendary exploits--starting a bench-clearing brawl with the Yankees' Tyler Austin, his famous "pouty face" scene when calling out the notorious sign-stealing Houston Astros, and wearing a Mariachi jacket to the White House visit with his World Series Champion Los Angeles Dodgers.]]> 235 Joe Kelly 1635769663 Danimal 0 to-read 3.69
author: Joe Kelly
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.69
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60791423
To achieve the proper work-life balance perhaps we just need the right therapist to coach us through our day-to-day. Anita, Sandra, and Dex have ambitions. Anita wants to move from making utility ceramics to fine art sculpture but her pent up dissatisfaction results in an outburst that puts her studio mate’s work at risk. Sandra juggles her practical administrative day job at a startup with her wellness influencer channel, finding both in jeopardy when a messy affair with her coworker comes to light. In another corner of the same startup, Dex’s innovative ideas are rejected, leading him to spend his days hacking and working as a bike courier. All three are disillusioned with their daily grinds. As the pressure for self-improvement builds they all end up looking to the same therapist for answers.

Soon the boundaries between work and life begin to bleed into each other and it becomes increasingly impossible to find balance. All the solace the characters expect their therapist to provide is obscured by her quirks, whims, and psycho-parlance, leading to sessions that are neglectful at best and actively inhibit growth at worst. In striking colors and trippy transformational sequences, Aisha Franz captures the comedic absurdity of contemporary work-life and wellness culture.

Work Life Balance is translated from the German by Nicholas Houde.]]> 256 Aisha Franz Danimal 3 3.18 2022
author: Aisha Franz
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/01/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 35209826 The definitive oral history of the iconic and beloved TV show The Wire, as told by the actors, writers, directors, and others involved in its creation.

Since its final episode aired in 2008, HBO's acclaimed crime drama The Wire has only become more popular and influential. The issues it tackled, from the failures of the drug war and criminal justice system to systemic bias in law enforcement and other social institutions, have become more urgent and central to the national conversation. The show's actors, such as Idris Elba, Dominic West, and Michael B. Jordan, have gone on to become major stars. Its creators and writers, including David Simon and Richard Price, have developed dedicated cult followings of their own. Universities use the show to teach everything from film theory to criminal justice to sociology. Politicians and activists reference it when discussing policy. When critics compile lists of the Greatest TV Shows of All Time, The Wire routinely takes the top spot. It is arguably one of the great works of art America has produced in the 20th century.

But while there has been a great deal of critical analysis of the show and its themes, until now there has never been a definitive, behind-the-scenes take on how it came to be made. With unparalleled access to all the key actors and writers involved in its creation, Jonathan Abrams tells the astonishing, compelling, and complete account of The Wire, from its inception and creation through its end and powerful legacy.]]> 340 Jonathan Abrams 0451498143 Danimal 4 4.29 2018
author: Jonathan Abrams
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/17
date added: 2024/01/17
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]]> 62047984
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 319 R.F. Kuang 000853277X Danimal 2 3.69 2023
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/17
date added: 2024/01/17
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]]> 125930473
Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.

Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez’s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.]]> 256 Sigrid Nunez 0593715519 Danimal 0 to-read 3.59 2023
author: Sigrid Nunez
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60784844
Claire and Mark are both plagued by the idea that this is all a dream. Didn’t they have different lives? When reports of an imminent nuclear war come on the radio, the truth begins to dawn on them: This is not the life they chose.

A couple struggles through their unhappy marriage in this dark science-fiction comedy. Why Don’t You Love Me? is a pitch-black comedy about marriage, alcoholism, depression, and mourning lost opportunities. Paul B. Rainey has created a hilariously terrifying alternate reality where confusion and pain might lead people to make bad choices but might also eventually led to freedom... maybe.]]> 224 Paul B. Rainey 1770466312 Danimal 3 3.99 2023
author: Paul B. Rainey
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/12/28
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]]> 62207006 443 Jillian Tamaki Danimal 4 3.75 2023
author: Jillian Tamaki
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/12/28
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]]> 60784641 From New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hawkins comes a deliciously wicked gothic suspense, set at an Italian villa with a dark history, for fans of Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware.

As kids, Emily and Chess were inseparable. But by their 30s, their bond has been strained by the demands of their adult lives. So when Chess suggests a girls trip to Italy, Emily jumps at the chance to reconnect with her best friend.

Villa Aestas in Orvieto is a high-end holiday home now, but in 1974, it was known as Villa Rosato, and rented for the summer by a notorious rock star, Noel Gordon. In an attempt to reignite his creative spark, Noel invites up-and-coming musician, Pierce Sheldon to join him, as well as Pierce’s girlfriend, Mari, and her stepsister, Lara. But he also sets in motion a chain of events that leads to Mari writing one of the greatest horror novels of all time, Lara composing a platinum album––and ends in Pierce’s brutal murder.

As Emily digs into the villa’s complicated history, she begins to think there might be more to the story of that fateful summer in 1974. That perhaps Pierce’s murder wasn’t just a tale of sex, drugs, and rock & roll gone wrong, but that something more sinister might have occurred––and that there might be clues hidden in the now-iconic works that Mari and Lara left behind.

Yet the closer that Emily gets to the truth, the more tension she feels developing between her and Chess. As secrets from the past come to light, equally dangerous betrayals from the present also emerge––and it begins to look like the villa will claim another victim before the summer ends.]]> 279 Rachel Hawkins 125028001X Danimal 0 couldn-t-finish 3.59 2023
author: Rachel Hawkins
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/28
shelves: couldn-t-finish
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]]> 62192504 In this immersive, spell-binding memoir, an acclaimed screenwriter tells the story of her childhood growing up with the infamous Lyman Family cult--and the complicated and unexpected pain of leaving the only home she'd ever known

On January 5, 1975, the world was supposed to end. Under strict instructions from her Family Leader, seven-year-old Guinevere Turner put on her best dress, grabbed her favorite toy, and waited for her salvation--a spaceship that would take her and her peers to live on Venus. But the spaceship never came.

Guinevere did not understand her family was a cult. She spent most of her days on a compound in Kansas, living with dozens of other children who worked in the sorghum fields and roved freely through the surrounding pastures, eating mulberries and tending to farm animals. But there was a dark side to this bucolic existence: When selected girls in her community turned twelve or thirteen, they were "given" to older men on the compound as wives in training. Turner was part of the Lyman Family, a cult spearheaded by Mel Lyman, a self-proclaimed "world savior," committed to isolation from a world he declared had lost its way. When Guinevere caught the attention of Jessie, the "queen" of the Family, her status was elevated and suddenly she was traveling in the inner-circle caravan between communities in Los Angeles, Boston, and Martha's Vineyard.

Then, at age eleven, Guinevere's world as she had known it ended. Her mother, from whom she had been separated since age three, left the Family with a disgraced member, and Guinevere and her four-year-old sister were forced to go with her. Traveling outside the bounds of her cloistered existence, Guinevere was thrust into public school for the first time, a stranger in a strange world with homemade clothes, clueless to social codes. Now, in the World she'd been raised to believe was evil, she faced challenges and horrors she couldn't have imagined.

Drawing from the diaries that she kept throughout her youth, Guinevere Turner's memoir is an intimate and heart-wrenching chronicle of a childhood touched with extraordinary beauty and unfathomable ugliness, the ache of yearning to return to a lost home--and the slow realization of how harmful that place really was.]]> 336 Guinevere Turner 0593237595 Danimal 0 to-read 3.73 2023
author: Guinevere Turner
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59314703
On her return home, Sewanee discovers one of the world’s most beloved romance novelists wanted her to perform her last book—with Brock McNight, the industry’s hottest, most secretive voice. Sewanee doesn’t buy what romance novels are selling—not after her own dreams were tragically cut short—and she stopped narrating them years ago. But her admiration of the late author, and the opportunity to get her grandmother more help, makes her decision for her.

As Sewanee begins work on the book, resurrecting her old romance pseudonym, she and Brock forge a real connection, hidden behind the comfort of anonymity. Soon, she is dreaming again, but secrets are revealed, and the realities of life come crashing down around her once more.

If she can learn to risk everything for desires she has long buried, she will discover a world of intimacy and acceptance she never believed would be hers.

From the author of My Oxford Year, Julia Whelan’s uplifting novel tells the story of a former actress turned successful audiobook narrator—who has lost sight of her dreams after a tragic accident—and her journey of self-discovery, love, and acceptance when she agrees to narrate one last romance novel.]]> 432 Julia Whelan 0063095564 Danimal 2 couldn-t-finish 3.99 2022
author: Julia Whelan
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2023/12/14
shelves: couldn-t-finish
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]]> 62039160 A hilarious slice of twentysomething life in the twenty-first century

Welcome to the Girl Juice House, home of only the hottest gang in town. Benji Nate’s stylish and rambunctious sense of humor lovingly takes digs at the young and tragically hip–reserved and introspective Nana, comically hypersexual Bunny, fledgling U-tuber Tula, and Designated Mom� Sadie–as they navigate life, love, and the pursuit of a good time.

Girl Juice flaunts the gloriously messy and hilariously self-indulgent day-to-day hijinks of four young women doing the most. Watch them bicker over making rent and come up with creative solutions for getting there! Cringe as they attend an adult prom! Split your sides as they try their hand at camping! Cower as they confront their mommy issues, and cheer as they battle inner demons that feed off attention-seeking behavior!

Nate’s colorful attention to detail and gift balancing for graphic hyperbole with subtle comedy are a deep, much-needed breath of fresh air. With front-facing cameras ever at the ready, Girl Juice is a snappy reminder that the time of your life is always just a text away.]]> 176 Benji Nate 1770466630 Danimal 2 3.93 2023
author: Benji Nate
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 2
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date added: 2023/12/14
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]]> 56620813 From National Book Award Finalist Joshua Ferris comes a “murderously funny� novel about a modern American family and one man’s attempt to come to understand the many lives of his father. (Janet Maslin, New York Times)

Someone is telling the story of the life of Charlie Barnes, and it doesn't appear to be going well. Too often divorced, discontent with life's compromises and in a house he hates, this lifelong schemer and eternal romantic would like out of his present circumstances and into the American dream. But when the twin calamities of the Great Recession and a cancer scare come along to compound his troubles, his dreams dwindle further, and an infinite past full of forking paths quickly tapers to a black dot.

Then, against all odds, something goes right for a change: Charlie is granted a second act. With help from his storyteller son, he surveys the facts of his life and finds his true calling where he least expects it—in a sacrifice that redounds with selflessness and love—at last becoming the man his son always knew he could be.

A Calling for Charlie Barnes is a profound and tender portrait of a man whose desperate need to be loved is his downfall, and a brutally funny account of how that love is ultimately earned.]]> 352 Joshua Ferris 0316333530 Danimal 2 couldn-t-finish 3.71 2021
author: Joshua Ferris
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2023/12/14
shelves: couldn-t-finish
review:

]]> 60865419
But what happened next to all those musical dreamers?

Some of the bands, like Primal Scream, went on to achieve global stardom; others, such as Half Man Half Biscuit and the Wedding Present, cultivated lifelong fanbases that still sustain their careers thirty-five years later. Then there were the rest, who ultimately imploded in a riot of paisley shirts, bad drugs and general indifference from the record-buying public.

Now, for the first time, music journalist Nige Tassell tracks down the class of C86 and recounts their stories, both tragic and uplifting.

Yet, while the pursuit of long-lost musicians can often manifest as earnest hagiography, Tassell's unique, light-hearted approach makes this a very human story of ambition, hope, varying degrees of talent and what happens after you give up on pop - or, more precisely, after pop gives up on you. It's a world populated by bike-shop owners, architecture professors, dance-music producers, record-store proprietors, birdwatchers, solicitors, caricaturists and even a possible Olympic sailor - and let's not forget the musician-turned-actor gainfully employed as Jeremy Irons' body double...

More than simply the tale of the tape, Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids? is an exploration of C86's wide-reaching and often surprising legacy.]]> 408 Nige Tassell 1788705580 Danimal 2 4.08 2022
author: Nige Tassell
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2023/08/14
date added: 2023/12/14
shelves:
review:
This one is for ... hmm. I've always thought there was a book to be written about what happened to all the indie rock non-stars of the 90s and 00s and maybe 80s too. Well, this book isn't it. Just some random details about what the bands did back then and what the musicians have done since. Not much digging into what the musicians are like as people or whatever. Disappointing.
]]> 101404407
In Saigon in 1963, two young American wives form a wary alliance. Tricia is a starry-eyed newlywed, married to a rising oil engineer “on loan� to US Navy Intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a talented hostess and determined altruist, on a mission to relieve the “wretchedness� she sees all around her.

When Tricia miscarries, Charlene sweeps her into a cabal of well-dressed do-gooder American wives. Armed with baskets filled with candy and toys, they descend on hospitals, orphanages, and a leper colony on the coast, determined to relieve suffering, no matter the cost.

Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter reaches out to Tricia, now widowed and living in Washington. As the two relive their shared experience in Saigon, they are forced to come to terms with the ways their own lives have been shaped and stunted by Charlene’s pursuit of “inconsequential good.�

With a narrative impact that recalls Graham Greene’s The Quiet American , Alice McDermott confronts the unresolved mysteries and ironies of America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.]]> 324 Alice McDermott 0374610487 Danimal 0 to-read 3.69 2023
author: Alice McDermott
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 65215410 The most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year.

Since his death ten years ago, Lou Reed’s living presence has only grown. The great rock-poet presided over the marriage of Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde, and left American culture transfigured. In Lou The King of New York , Will Hermes offers the definitive narrative of Reed’s life and legacy, dramatizing his long, brilliant, and contentious dialogue with fans, critics, fellow artists, and assorted habitués of the demimonde. We witness Reed’s complex partnerships with David Bowie, Andy Warhol, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson; track the deadpan wit, street-smart edge, and poetic flights that defined his craft as a singer and songwriter with the Velvet Underground and beyond; and explore the artistic ambition and gift for self-sabotage he took from his mentor Delmore Schwartz.

As Hermes follows Reed from Lower East Side cold-water flats to the landmark status he later achieved, he also tells the story of New York City as a cultural capital. The first biographer to draw on the New York Public Library’s much-publicized Reed archive, Hermes employs the library collections, the release of previously unheard recordings, and a wealth of recent interviews to give us a new Lou Reed―a pioneer in living and writing about nonbinary sexuality and gender identity, a committed artist who pursued beauty and noise with equal fervor, and a turbulent and sometimes truculent man whose emotional imprint endures.]]> 529 Will Hermes 0374193398 Danimal 0 to-read 4.21 2023
author: Will Hermes
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 153444174 No matter how wrong relationships can be, there’s nothing quite like getting them right.

Every guy’s been a creep at one point or another. That’s just the way it is. Or at least, that’s what Cleo tells herself once she finds out her boyfriend might not be the man she thought he was. Is it possible to keep loving someone you’re not sure you can trust? More to the point, should you? Once the fabric of Cleo’s relationship rips at the seams, the life she had built with him―abroad and away from those closest to her―unravels right before her eyes. Yet, letting it fall to pieces as she walks away is only half the story.

So Long Sad Love swaps out the wobbly transition of weaving a new existence into being post-heartbreak for the surprising effortlessness and simplicity of a life already rebuilt. Cleo not only rediscovers her identity as an artist but uncovers her capacity to find love where she has always been most at home: with other women.

Mirion Malle dares to tell a story with a happier ending in a stunning, full-color follow-up to the multi-award nominated This is How I Disappear. Translated by Governor General Literary Award nominee Aleshia Jensen, So Long Sad Love unabashedly skips to the good part and shines a light on just how rewarding following your bliss can be.]]> 212 Mirion Malle 1770466975 Danimal 0 to-read 3.95 2022
author: Mirion Malle
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 65650219 Ěý
Posnanski writes of major moments that created legends, and of forgotten moments almost lost to time. It's Willie Mays’s catch, Babe Ruth’s called shot, and Kirk Gibson’s limping home run; the slickest steals; the biggest bombs; and the most triumphant no-hitters. But these are also moments raw with the humanity of the game, the unheralded heroes, the mesmerizing mistakes drenched in pine tar, and every story, from the immortal to the obscure, is told from a unique perspective. Whether of a real fan who witnessed it, or the pitcher who gave up the home run, the umpire, the coach, the opposing player—these are fresh takes on moments so powerful they almost feel like myth.
Ěý
Posnanski’s previous book, The Baseball 100 , portrayed the heroes and pioneers of the sport, and now, with his trademark wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and acute observations, he gets at the real heart of the game. From nineteenth-century pitchers� duels to breaking the sport’s color line in the �40s, all the way to the greatest trick play of the last decade and the slide home that became a meme, Posnanski’s illuminating take allows us to rediscover the sport we love—and thought we knew.
Ěý
Why We Love Baseball is an epic that ends too soon, a one-of-a-kind love letter to the sport that has us thrilled, torn, inspired, and always wanting more.]]> 377 Joe Posnanski 0593472675 Danimal 0 to-read 4.55 2023
author: Joe Posnanski
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 7354
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why E. Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
(back cover)]]> 337 Annie Proulx 0743225422 Danimal 3 3.88 1993
author: Annie Proulx
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/08/03
shelves:
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]]> 58756420 From the New York Times bestselling author of One Last Stop and Red, White & Royal Blue comes a debut YA romantic comedy about chasing down what you want, only to find what you need...

Chloe Green is so close to winning. After her moms moved her from SoCal to Alabama for high school, she’s spent the past four years dodging gossipy classmates and a puritanical administration at Willowgrove Christian Academy. The thing that’s kept her going: winning valedictorian. Her only rival: prom queen Shara Wheeler, the principal’s perfect progeny.

But a month before graduation, Shara kisses Chloe and vanishes.

On a furious hunt for answers, Chloe discovers she’s not the only one Shara kissed. There’s also Smith, Shara’s longtime quarterback sweetheart, and Rory, Shara’s bad boy neighbor with a crush. The three have nothing in common except Shara and the annoyingly cryptic notes she left behind, but together they must untangle Shara’s trail of clues and find her. It’ll be worth it, if Chloe can drag Shara back before graduation to beat her fair-and-square.

Thrown into an unlikely alliance, chasing a ghost through parties, break-ins, puzzles, and secrets revealed on monogrammed stationery, Chloe starts to suspect there might be more to this small town than she thought. And maybe—probably not, but maybe—more to Shara, too.

Fierce, funny, and frank, Casey McQuiston's I Kissed Shara Wheeler is about breaking the rules, getting messy, and finding love in unexpected places.]]> 356 Casey McQuiston 1250244455 Danimal 3 3.87 2022
author: Casey McQuiston
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/27
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves:
review:
I'm not really the target audience for this book: I'm not a young adult nor LGBTQ. But I'm glad the book exists and I'm sure it'll be wonderful to read if you are both of those things. I found it fun mostly, altho the twists were pretty obvious (but maybe if I was a YA then I wouldn't have read so many books and wouldn't have seen them coming?).
]]> 60320390
Manhattan’s East Village, 1993. Dive bars, DIY music venues, shady weirdos, and hard drugs are plentiful. Crime is high but rent is low, luring hopeful, creative kids from sleepy suburbs around the country.

One of these is Jack S., a young New Jersey rock musician. Just a few days before his band’s biggest gig, their lead singer goes missing with Jack’s prized bass, presumably to hock it to feed his junk habit. Jack’s search for his buddy uncovers a sinister entanglement of crimes tied to local real estate barons looking to remake New York City—and who might also be connected to the recent death of Jack’s punk rock mentor. Along the way, Jack encounters a cast of colorful characters, including a bewitching, quick-witted scenester who favors dressing in a nurse’s outfit, a monstrous hired killer with a devotion to both figure skating and edged weapons, a deranged if prophetic postwar novelist, and a tough-talking cop who fancies himself a retro-cool icon of the homicide squad but is harboring a surprising secret.

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a page-turning suspense novel that also serves as a love letter to a bygone era of New York City where young artists could still afford to chase their dreams.]]> 210 Sam Lipsyte 1501146122 Danimal 2 3.20 2022
author: Sam Lipsyte
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves:
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]]> 62628727 A comedy writer thinks she’s sworn off love, until a dreamily handsome pop star flips the script on all her assumptions. Romantic Comedy is a hilarious, observant and deeply tender novel from New York Times–bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld.

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

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

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

With her keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age.]]> 309 Curtis Sittenfeld 0399590943 Danimal 4
Way better than the other Sittenfeld books I'd tried. ]]> 3.60 2023
author: Curtis Sittenfeld
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/21
date added: 2023/06/21
shelves:
review:
I ripped through this in a week. Fun fun fun. I'm a sucker for romantic comedies and this one is one of the best I've read in ages. The first half of the book, with its blatant Sat Night Live aping, zings along because of the structure of the full work week of one episode. Things slow down, and maybe the male love interest sometimes comes off as a fantasy more than a real person (I kept waiting for the twist to be revealed that she had dreamt the whole thing), but it's still a sweet love story with the woman fully ensconced as lead.

Way better than the other Sittenfeld books I'd tried.
]]> 61079149 367 Miki Berenyi 1788705556 Danimal 0 to-read 4.42
author: Miki Berenyi
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.42
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57368842
Tenement Kid is Bobby Gillespie's story up to the recording and release of the album that has been credited with 'starting the 90's', Screamadelica.

Born into a working class Glaswegian family in the summer of 1961, Bobby's memoirs begin in the district of Springburn, soon to be evacuated in Edward Heath's brutal slum clearances.

Leaving school at 16 and going to work as a printers' apprentice, Bobby's rock n roll epiphany arrives like a bolt of lightning shining from Phil Lynott's mirrored pickguard at his first gig at the Apollo in Glasgow. Filled with 'the holy spirit of rock n roll' his destiny is sealed with the arrival of the Sex Pistols and punk rock which to Bobby, represents an iconoclastic vision of class rebellion and would ultimately lead to him becoming an artist initially in the Jesus and Mary Chain then in Primal Scream.

Structured in four parts, Tenement Kid builds like a breakbeat crescendo to the final quarter of the book, the Summer of Love, Boys Own parties, and the fateful meeting with Andrew Weatherall in an East Sussex field. As the '80s bleed into the '90s and a new kind of electronic soul music starts to pulse through the nation's consciousness, Primal Scream become the most innovative British band of the new decade, representing a new psychedelic vanguard taking shape at Creation Records.

Ending with the release of Screamadelica and the tour that followed in the autumn, Tenement Kid is a book filled with the joy and wonder of a rock n roll apostle who would radically reshape the future sounds of fin de siecle British pop. Published thirty years after the release of their masterpiece, Bobby Gillespie's memoir cuts a righteous path through a decade lost to Thatcherism and saved by acid house.]]> 412 Bobby Gillespie 1474622062 Danimal 0 to-read 3.93 2021
author: Bobby Gillespie
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 63239997 400 Matthew Goody 1737382989 Danimal 0 to-read 4.55
author: Matthew Goody
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.55
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61053829
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.]]> 438 Rebecca Makkai 0593490142 Danimal 3
This is a well-written but ultimately not so compelling novel that's about maybe too many things. Racism, sexism, sexual assault, how the nerds in high school grow into artists in their later years, how the assholes in high school sometimes have bad things going on in their lives too, how marriages fall apart, the complexities of me too and cancelling, generational gaps, new england private school education, some more stuff, whew that's a lot.]]> 3.57 2023
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/14
date added: 2023/05/14
shelves:
review:
Probably more of a 3.5 but until they allow that rating.

This is a well-written but ultimately not so compelling novel that's about maybe too many things. Racism, sexism, sexual assault, how the nerds in high school grow into artists in their later years, how the assholes in high school sometimes have bad things going on in their lives too, how marriages fall apart, the complexities of me too and cancelling, generational gaps, new england private school education, some more stuff, whew that's a lot.
]]> 59069071 Celebrated cartoonist Kate Beaton vividly presents the untold story of Canada.

Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant fame, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. After university, Beaton heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Beaton will be far more than she anticipates.

Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. She encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. Her wounds may never heal.

Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full-length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.]]> 430 Kate Beaton 1770462899 Danimal 4 4.41 2022
author: Kate Beaton
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/27
date added: 2023/04/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 45304101 A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed, indelible piece of literature; it was selected as one of New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Buzzfeed Book of the Year, a Skimm Reads pick, and a pick for the New York Public Library's Best Books of the year.]]> 421 Rebecca Makkai 073522353X Danimal 0 to-read 4.26 2018
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58678518
If sex is a truth-teller, Eve--a young, queer woman in Brooklyn--is looking for answers. On an evening when she is feeling particularly impulsive, she posts some nude photos of herself online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia, the charismatic Nathan--and soon the three begin a relationship that disturbs Eve as much as it delights her. As each act of the affair unfolds, Eve is left to ask: to whom is she responsible? And to what extent do our desires determine who we are?

In the way that only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. As incisive as it is exhilarating, this novel asks us to face our ideas about desire and power: what sex means to us, the forces that shape it, and how we find--or lose--ourselves in intimacy. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, it might be the most thought-provoking book you read all year.]]> 240 Lillian Fishman 0593243765 Danimal 4
But a tough novel to end and it doesn't really stick the ending. Otherwise it would've been 5 stars.]]> 3.08 2022
author: Lillian Fishman
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.08
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/21
date added: 2023/03/01
shelves:
review:
One of the best novels I've read in a while in the category of semi-twisted sexual relationships. It's not that they're into weird things; in fact the sex itself doesn't seem all that freaky. It's more that the main character, who identifies as a lesbian, fully gives herself up to a guy in a way that's very intense and riveting. Plus he's married AND having an affair with his co-worker, who the main character also wants to be involved with. Riveting!

But a tough novel to end and it doesn't really stick the ending. Otherwise it would've been 5 stars.
]]> 60052398
Women have been kicking against the pricks of music patriarchy since Sister Rosetta Tharpe first played the guitar riffs that built rock-n-roll. The explosion of punk sent shockwaves of revolution to every girl who dreamed of being on stage. Punk godmothers Suzy Quatro, The Runaways, Patti Smith, Poison Ivy, Tina Weymouth, Debbie Harry, The Go-Gos, and Fanny’s Millington sisters provided the template for thousands of girls and women throughout the United States to write and record their songs.
Hit Girls is the story local and regional bands whose legacy would be otherwise lost. Despite the modern narrative labeled women as anomalies in rock music, the truth is: women played important roles in punk and its related genres in every city, in every scene, all over the United States. The women and bands profiled by Jen B. share their experiences of sexism and racism as well as their joy and successes from their days on stage as they changed what it meant to be in a band. These pioneering women were more than novelty acts or pretty faces--they were fully contributing members and leaders of mixed-gender and all-female bands long before the call for “girls to the front.�
The women of Hit Girls are now rightfully exalted to cult status where their collective achievement is recognized and inspiring to new generations of women rockers. Included are interviews with: Texacala Jones, Stoney Rivera, Mish Bondaj, Alice Bag, Nikki Corvette, Penelope Houston, and many more formidable and infamous women who made their voices heard over the screaming guitars.
Hit Girls includes over 100 rare and never-before seen images. Author Jen B. includes a comprehensive playlist of all the artists. Foreword by punk journalist, Ginger Coyote.

Jen B. Larson is a writer, musician, and public art schoolteacher living in Chicago. She holds a B.A. in English literature and creative writing as well as an M.Ed. in special education. Her bands, Swimsuit Addition, beastii, and Jen and the Dots, have performed and recorded extensively over the last decade.]]> 240 Jen B Larson 1627311238 Danimal 0 to-read 4.13 2023
author: Jen B Larson
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]> 336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Danimal 0 to-read 3.69 2023
author: Jen Beagin
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50078178 Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as alternative, including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities.

In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.]]> 384 Grace Elizabeth Hale 1469654873 Danimal 0 to-read 3.65 2020
author: Grace Elizabeth Hale
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Danimal 0 to-read 4.17 1992
author: Donna Tartt
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60594917 200 Megan Kelso 1683966708 Danimal 2 3.47 2022
author: Megan Kelso
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2023/02/01
date added: 2023/02/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 36373648 338 Rachel Kushner 1476756554 Danimal 0 to-read 3.41 2018
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 37791748 187 Constance Debré 2234084296 Danimal 0 to-read 3.23 2018
author: Constance Debré
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29229956
When Isabelle Poole meets Dr. Preston Grind, she’s fresh out of high school, pregnant with her art teacher's baby, and totally on her own. Izzy knows she can be a good mother but without any money or relatives to help, she’s left searching.Dr. Grind, an awkwardly charming child psychologist, has spent his life studying family, even after tragedy struck his own.Ěý Now, with the help of an eccentric billionaire, he has the chance to create a “perfect little world”—to study what would happen when ten children are raised collectively, without knowing who their biological parents are.Ěý He calls it The Infinite Family Project and he wants Izzy and her son to join.

This attempt at a utopian ideal starts off promising, but soon the gentle equilibrium among the families unspoken resentments between the couples begin to fester; the project's funding becomes tenuous; and Izzy’s growing feelings for Dr. Grind make her question her participation in this strange experiment in the first place.Written with the same compassion and charm that won over legions of readers withĚýThe Family Fang, Kevin Wilson shows us with grace and humor that the best families are the ones we make for ourselves.]]> 0 Kevin Wilson 0062450352 Danimal 0 to-read 3.66 2017
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 10149142
Their children called it mischief.

Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist’s work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents� madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents� strange world.

When the lives they’ve built come crashing down, brother and sister have nowhere to go but home, where they discover that Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance -� their magnum opus -� whether the kids agree to participate or not. Soon, ambition breeds conflict, bringing the Fangs to face the difficult decision about what’s ultimately more important: their family or their art.]]> 320 Kevin Wilson 0061579033 Danimal 0 to-read 3.62 2011
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56978048 The beloved author of bestsellersĚýWomen Talking,ĚýA Complicated Kindness, andĚýAll My Puny SorrowsĚýreturns with a funny, smart, headlong rush of a novel full of wit, flawless writing, and a tribute to perseverance and love in an unusual family.
Ěý
Fight NightĚýis told in the unforgettable voice of Swiv, a nine-year-old living in Toronto with her pregnant mother, who is raising Swiv while caring for her own elderly, frail, yet extraordinarily lively mother. When Swiv is expelled from school, Grandma takes on the role of teacher and gives her the task of writing to Swiv's absent father about life in the household during the last trimester of the pregnancy. In turn, Swiv gives Grandma an assignment: to write a letter to "Gord," her unborn grandchild (and Swiv's soon-to-be brother or sister). "You’re a small thing," Grandma writes to Gord, "and you must learn to fight."

As Swiv records her thoughts and observations,ĚýFight NightĚýunspools the pain, love, laughter, and above all, will to live a good life across three generations of women in a close-knit family. But it is Swiv’s exasperating, wise and irrepressible Grandma who is at the heart of this novel: someone who knows intimately what it costs to survive in this world, yet has found a way—painfully, joyously, ferociously—to love and fight to the end, on her own terms.]]> 255 Miriam Toews 1635578175 Danimal 0 to-read 4.02 2021
author: Miriam Toews
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 37534380 "Read this invigorating graphic narrative, then—quickly, before the spell breaks!�play one of Monk's records." —Saul Williams

She is Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a free-spirited baroness of the Rothschild family. He is Thelonious Sphere Monk, a musical genius fighting against the whims of his troubled mind. Their enduring friendship begins in 1954 and ends only with Monk’s death in 1982.

Set against the backdrop of New York during the heyday of jazz, Monk! explores the rare alchemy between two brilliant beings separated by an ocean of social status, race, and culture, but united by an infinite love of music. This breathtaking graphic novel by Youssef Daoudi beautifully captures the life of the “the high priest of bop� in spontaneous, evocative pen and ink that seems to make visible jazz itself.]]> 352 Youssef Daoudi 1626724342 Danimal 2 4.09
author: Youssef Daoudi
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.09
book published:
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2023/01/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 56597885 356 Sally Rooney 0374602603 Danimal 3
The narration - what would you call it, third person disassociated? - is soooo distancing. And the description of everyday things that we take for granted, like checking your email, social networks, dating profiles, is so odd, like it was written by an alien trying to describe human behavior just takes you out of the plot. And these email interludes between the characters in which they go on at length about their thoughts on ancient civilizations and such just feel like filler.

Plus this time I had a really hard time remembering which character was which of the two leads. Maybe just a little description of them would've differentiated them? Or more knowledge of them?

All these caveats aside I did like the story. It's just that I found it a bit of a frustrating slog to get through, unlike her other books, which zipped along so speedily. ]]> 3.53 2021
author: Sally Rooney
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/30
date added: 2023/01/01
shelves:
review:
I love Sally Rooney. Love her characters, love her dialogue, love how thorny her plots can be. BUT in this third novel she makes some really odd choices - and they don't do her any favors.

The narration - what would you call it, third person disassociated? - is soooo distancing. And the description of everyday things that we take for granted, like checking your email, social networks, dating profiles, is so odd, like it was written by an alien trying to describe human behavior just takes you out of the plot. And these email interludes between the characters in which they go on at length about their thoughts on ancient civilizations and such just feel like filler.

Plus this time I had a really hard time remembering which character was which of the two leads. Maybe just a little description of them would've differentiated them? Or more knowledge of them?

All these caveats aside I did like the story. It's just that I found it a bit of a frustrating slog to get through, unlike her other books, which zipped along so speedily.
]]> 57007423 509 Michael Imperioli 0063090023 Danimal 0 to-read 4.19 2021
author: Michael Imperioli
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34051011
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.]]> 496 Min Jin Lee Danimal 0 couldn-t-finish 4.35 2017
author: Min Jin Lee
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/28
date added: 2022/12/28
shelves: couldn-t-finish
review:

]]> 57846324 A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely debut novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students—a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own...

“When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.�

And so we are introduced to our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose charismatic husband at the same small liberal arts college is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extra-marital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir, a celebrated, married young novelist who’s just arrived on campus, their tinder box world comes dangerously close to exploding.

With this bold, edgy, and uncommonly assured debut, author Julia May Jonas takes us into charged territory, where the boundaries of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. Propulsive, darkly funny, and wildly entertaining, Vladimir perfectly captures the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the nuances and the grey area between power and desire.]]> 238 Julia May Jonas 1982187638 Danimal 5
One thing I like to do when I finish a book is look at the first line of the description on the dust jacket and see just how off it is. "An incandescent debut about marriage and motherhood, art and love." I would def agree that it's about a (failing) marriage and how long marriages falter. A little about motherhood but more that she is a mother than it's about their bond, altho there are some great insightful things said about parenthood. Art? A little. But LOVE? No. Lust, for sure. Not love at all.

It's also about aging and feeling invisible and about the changing mores of sex and consent, both in collegiate life and general life. About power and men behaving badly and women maybe also and did I say LUST LUST LUST? Middle aged lust, that ornery, prickly pear.

I think this book ultimately succeeds because it doesn't fall into any easy endings. But I can't get into that, since it would spoil how entertaining a read it is.

Don't miss out!]]> 3.41 2022
author: Julia May Jonas
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/28
date added: 2022/12/28
shelves:
review:
This is the best book I've read in a long time.

One thing I like to do when I finish a book is look at the first line of the description on the dust jacket and see just how off it is. "An incandescent debut about marriage and motherhood, art and love." I would def agree that it's about a (failing) marriage and how long marriages falter. A little about motherhood but more that she is a mother than it's about their bond, altho there are some great insightful things said about parenthood. Art? A little. But LOVE? No. Lust, for sure. Not love at all.

It's also about aging and feeling invisible and about the changing mores of sex and consent, both in collegiate life and general life. About power and men behaving badly and women maybe also and did I say LUST LUST LUST? Middle aged lust, that ornery, prickly pear.

I think this book ultimately succeeds because it doesn't fall into any easy endings. But I can't get into that, since it would spoil how entertaining a read it is.

Don't miss out!
]]> 57693171
Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1%, but she can't seem to find her own...until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets...

Twenty-seven years ago, their mother, Blanca, a Young Lord-turned-radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives.

Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico's history, Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife and the very notion of the American dream--all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.]]> 369 Xóchitl González 1250786177 Danimal 0 to-read 3.95 2022
author: Xóchitl González
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Danimal 0 to-read 4.12 2022
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60415700
Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge—aspiring writer, indifferent student, offbeat loner—is determined to make it through yet another sad summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist who has just moved into his grandmother’s unhappy house and who is as lonely and awkward as Frankie is. Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, and when the two jointly make an unsigned poster, shot through with an enigmatic phrase, it becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

The posters begin appearing everywhere, and people wonder who is behind them. Satanists, kidnappers—the rumors won’t stop, and soon the mystery has dangerous repercussions that spread far beyond the town. The art that brought Frankie and Zeke together now threatens to tear them apart.

Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge—famous author, mom to a wonderful daughter, wife to a loving husband—gets a call that threatens to upend everything: a journalist named Mazzy Brower is writing a story about the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Might Frances know something about that? And will what she knows destroy the life she’s so carefully built?

A bold coming-of-age story, written with Kevin Wilson’s trademark wit and blazing prose, Now Is Not The Time to Panic is a nuanced exploration of young love, identity, and the power of art. It’s also about the secrets that haunt us—and, ultimately, what the truth will set free.]]> 246 Kevin Wilson 0062913506 Danimal 0 to-read 3.68 2022
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 929602
Robert AldrichĚýĚýGeorge CukorĚýĚýAllan DwanĚýĚýHoward HawksĚýĚýAlfred HitchcockĚýĚýChuck JonesĚýĚýFritz LangĚýĚýJoseph H. LewisĚýĚýSidney LumetĚýĚýLeo McCarteyĚýĚýOtto PremingerĚýĚýDon SiegelĚýĚýJosef von SternbergĚýĚýFrank TashlinĚýĚýEdgar G. UlmerĚýĚýRaoul Walsh]]> 864 Peter Bogdanovich 0345404572 Danimal 0 to-read 4.36 1997
author: Peter Bogdanovich
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55506526 The real story of Hollywood as told by such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra, Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Harold Lloyd, and nearly four hundred others, assembled from the American Film Institute’s treasure trove of interviews, reveals a fresh history of the American movie industry from its beginnings to today.Ěý

From the archives of the American Film Institute comes a unique picture of what it was like to work in Hollywood from its beginnings to its present day. Gleaned from nearly three thousand interviews, involving four hundred voices from the industry, The Oral History, lets a reader “listen inâ€� on candid remarks from the biggest names in front of the camera—Bette Davis, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Harold Lloyd—to the biggest behind it—Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Jordan Peele, as well as the lesser known individuals that shaped what was heard and seen on musicians, costumers, art directors, cinematographers, writers, sound men, editors, make-up artists, and even script timers, messengers, and publicists. The result is like a conversation among the gods and goddesses of lively, funny, insightful, historically accurate and, for the first time, authentically honest in its portrait of Hollywood. It’s the insider’s story.Ěý

ĚýLegendary film scholar Jeanine Basinger and New York Times bestselling author Sam Wasson, both acclaimed storytellers in their own right, have undertaken the monumental task of digesting these tens of thousands of hours of talk and weaving it into a definitive portrait of workaday Hollywood.ĚýĚýĚý]]> 759 Jeanine Basinger 0063056968 Danimal 0 to-read 4.05 2022
author: Jeanine Basinger
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57468678 A page-turning adventure featuring a clever 11-year-old girl who must, against all odds, protect her family and town during the height of the communist "red scare."

In the aftermath of the Korean War, Peggy's small hometown is rife with anti-Communist hysteria. But Peggy has bigger problems: She's struggling to recover from polio. Taunted by her classmates, Peggy just wants to be left alone, but then she stumbles across a mysterious object that gives her the power to fly. Unscrupulous operatives from the American and Soviet governments seek the object to overturn the tense political stalemate, and Peggy finds herself smack in the middle of the Cold War arms race.]]> 240 Liam Francis Walsh 1338167081 Danimal 4 3.64 2022
author: Liam Francis Walsh
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/29
date added: 2022/11/29
shelves:
review:
Gorgeously rendered tale of spies and commies and aliens in the 50s. Maybe not the most original story but such a feast for the eyes, esp if you're a Tintin fan.
]]> 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

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

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

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Danimal 0 currently-reading 4.00 2022
author: Hua Hsu
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/11/25
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 58437521 From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own—featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing� memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters� who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,� those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House.

Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.� Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.]]> 352 Jennifer Egan 1476716765 Danimal 4 3.61 2022
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/24
date added: 2022/11/24
shelves:
review:
This book is so up my alley, maybe even more than the Goon Squad. I love books that span generations and cover a wide swath of people who seem disconnected but then over time are revealed to all be very much connected. The only advice I'd give is to read this book when you can read it quickly, so that you can recall all the connections that each of the people as with the others.
]]> 58350424 A Taiwanese American woman’s coming-of-consciousness ignites eye-opening revelations and chaos on a college campus in this outrageously hilarious and startlingly tender debut novel.

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

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

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

For readers of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, this uproarious and bighearted satire is a blistering send-up of privilege and power in America, and a profound reckoning of individual complicity and unspoken rage. In this electrifying debut novel from a provocative new voice, Elaine Hsieh Chou asks who gets to tell our stories—and how the story changes when we finally tell it ourselves.]]> 403 Elaine Hsieh Chou 0593298357 Danimal 2 3.83 2022
author: Elaine Hsieh Chou
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2022/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 57505823
Greg Ginn started SST Records in the sleepy beach town of Hermosa Beach, CA, to supply ham radio enthusiasts with tuners and transmitters. But when Ginn wanted to launch his band, Black Flag, no one was willing to take them on. Determined to bring his music to the masses, Ginn turned SST into a record label. On the back of Black Flag’s relentless touring, guerilla marketing, and refusal to back down, SST became the sound of the underground.

InĚý Corporate Rock Sucks, music journalist Jim Ruland relays the unvarnished story of SST Records, from its remarkable rise in notoriety to its infamous downfall. With records byĚýBlack Flag,ĚýMinutemen, HĂĽsker DĂĽ , Bad Brains, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, and scores of obscure yet influential bands, SST was the most popular indie label by the mid-80s--until a tsunami of legal jeopardy, financial peril, and dysfunctional management brought the empire tumbling down. Throughout this investigative deep-dive, Ruland leads readers through SST’s tumultuous history and epic catalog.

Featuring never-before-seen interviews with the label's former employees, as well as musicians, managers, producers, photographers, video directors, and label heads,Ěý Corporate Rock SucksĚý presents a definitive narrative history of the â€�80s punk and alternative rock scenes, and shows how the music industry was changed forever.]]> Jim Ruland Danimal 1 couldn-t-finish 3.96
author: Jim Ruland
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.96
book published:
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2022/11/23
shelves: couldn-t-finish
review:
This totally reads like someone didn't have access to the artists so he just strung together quotes from other sources. Which is what happened. I mean, if I was a super-fan of SST and Black Flag, I probably still would've liked it. But I'm not. And there's just not enough of the artists here to make it interesting.
]]> 56969413 A fictional and complex portrait of bestselling author Patricia Highsmith caught up in the longing that would inspire her queer classic, The Price of Salt

Flung Out of Space is both a love letter to the essential lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, and an examination of its notorious author, Patricia Highsmith. Veteran comics creators Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer have teamed up to tell this story through Highsmith’s eyes—reimagining the events that inspired her to write the story that would become a foundational piece of queer literature.

Flung Out of Space opens with Pat begrudgingly writing low-brow comics. A drinker, a smoker, and a hater of life, Pat knows she can do better. Her brain churns with images of the great novel she could and should be writing—what will eventually be Strangers on a Train� which would later be adapted into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.
Ěý
At the same time, Pat, a lesbian consumed with self-loathing, is in and out of conversion therapy, leaving a trail of sexual conquests and broken hearts in her wake. However, one of those very affairs and a chance encounter in a department store give Pat the idea for her soon-to-be beloved tale of homosexual love that was the first of its kind—it gave the lesbian protagonists a happy ending.
Ěý
This is not just the story behind a classic queer book, but of a queer artist who was deeply flawed. It’s a comic about what it was like to write comics in the 1950s, but also about what it means to be a writer at any time in history, struggling to find your voice.
ĚýĚýĚýĚý
Author Grace Ellis contextualizes Patricia Highsmith as both an unintentional queer icon and a figure whose problematic views and noted anti-Semitism have cemented her controversial legacy. Highsmith’s life imitated her art with results as devastating as the plot twists that brought her fame and fortune.
Ěý]]> 208 Grace Ellis 141974433X Danimal 0 to-read 4.11 2022
author: Grace Ellis
name: Danimal
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/11/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57693683
Time Zone J is Julie Doucet’s first inked comic since she famously quit in the nineties after an exhausting career in an industry that, at the time, made little room for women.

The year is 1989 and twenty-three-year-old Doucet is flying to France to meet with a soldier. He’s a man she only knows through their mail correspondence, a common enough reality of the zine era, when comics were mailed from cartoonist to reader and close relationships were formed. Time is not on their side―the soldier is just on furlough for a few days―but the two make the most of their visit and discuss future plans, maybe even Christmas in Doucet’s city, Montreal.

Based on diary entries from the whirlwind romance, the passion and high emotions of youth―before you know the limits of love, before you know the difference between love and lust―seep through the pages. In contrast to the tryst, Doucet draws herself today, at fifty-five.

After years of being in a crowd of men, Doucet compulsively returns to drawing, creating an alternate universe that foregrounds women. The pages of Time Zone J overflow with images pulled from past and present, faces and people that have inspired Doucet across more than three decades of creative work.]]> 144 Julie Doucet 1770464980 Danimal 0 to-read 3.32
author: Julie Doucet
name: Danimal
average rating: 3.32
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/11/22
shelves: to-read
review:

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