en-US Fri, 04 Apr 2025 16:46:58 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 382 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 Sarah 0 to-read 4.68 2025
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

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

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]> 400 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Sarah 0 to-read 4.35 2025
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 11994903

With compassion and insight, author Richard Wagamese traces through his fictional characters the decline of a culture and a cultural way. For Saul, taken forcibly from the land and his family when he’s sent to residential school, salvation comes for a while through his incredible gifts as a hockey player. But in the harsh realities ofÌý1960s Canada, he battles obdurate racism and the spirit-destroying effects of cultural alienation and displacement.ÌýIndian HorseÌýunfolds against the bleak loveliness of northern Ontario, all rock, marsh, bog and cedar. Wagamese writes with a spare beauty, penetrating the heart of a remarkable OjibwayÌýman.]]> 221 Richard Wagamese 1553654021 Sarah 4 4.40 2012
author: Richard Wagamese
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 1101657 333 Guy Vanderhaeghe 077108692X Sarah 0 currently-reading 3.66 1996
author: Guy Vanderhaeghe
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 7161153 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.

Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.]]> 282 Kazuo Ishiguro 0571258093 Sarah 0 to-read 3.91 2005
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919�2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Sarah 0 to-read 3.81 1951
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 5297
In this celebrated work Wilde forged a devastating portrait of the effects of evil and debauchery on a young aesthete in late-19th-century England. Combining elements of the Gothic horror novel and decadent French fiction, the book centers on a striking premise: As Dorian Gray sinks into a life of crime and gross sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait grows day by day into a hideous record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the world. For over a century, this mesmerizing tale of horror and suspense has enjoyed wide popularity. It ranks as one of Wilde's most important creations and among the classic achievements of its kind.]]> 272 Oscar Wilde Sarah 5 4.13 1890
author: Oscar Wilde
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1890
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 42270835 Author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.

Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.

The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead Sarah 0 to-read 4.25 2019
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 10864623 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, features a new Introduction by Jason Epstein, the book’s original editor, who provides an intimate perspective on Jacobs herself and unique insights into the creation and lasting influence of this classic.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning. . . . [It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book’s arguments.� Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jane Jacobs’s tour de force is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It remains sensible, knowledgeable, readable, and indispensable.]]> 598 Jane Jacobs 0679644334 Sarah 0 to-read 4.34 1961
author: Jane Jacobs
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218569826 Underland delivers a revelatory book that transforms how we look at the natural world—and life itself.

Hailed as “a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler� (Holly Morris, New York Times), Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reporting, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyous exploration into an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, which flows through his own years and days. Powered by Macfarlane’s dazzling prose and lit throughout by other voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.]]> 384 Robert Macfarlane 0393242137 Sarah 0 to-read 4.54 2025
author: Robert Macfarlane
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51135393
Stories of gods and monsters are the mainstay of epic poetry and Greek tragedy, from Homer to Virgil to from Aeschylus to Sophocles and Euripides. And still, today, a wealth of novels, plays and films draw their inspiration from stories first told almost three thousand years ago. But modern tellers of Greek myth have usually been men, and have routinely shown little interest in telling women’s stories.

Now, in Pandora’s Jar, Natalie Haynes � broadcaster, writer and passionate classicist � redresses this imbalance. Taking Greek creation myths as her starting point and then retelling the four great mythic sagas: the Trojan War, the Royal House of Thebes, Jason and the Argonauts, Heracles, she puts the female characters on equal footing with their menfolk. The result is a vivid and powerful account of the deeds � and misdeeds - of Hera, Aphrodite, Athene and Circe. And away from the goddesses of Mount Olympus it is Helen, Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Antigone and Medea who sing from these pages, not Paris, Agamemnon, Orestes or Jason.]]> 320 Natalie Haynes 1509873112 Sarah 5 4.24 2020
author: Natalie Haynes
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 72579
An up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories?

Captivating and disturbing, Alias Grace showcases best-selling, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood at the peak of her powers.]]> 468 Margaret Atwood 0385475713 Sarah 5 4.08 1996
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/20
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves:
review:

]]> 51019 Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, and artist, and woman—but above all she must seek release from her haunting memories. Disturbing, hilarious, and compassionate, Cat's Eye is a breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knots of her life.]]> 462 Margaret Atwood 0385491026 Sarah 0 to-read 3.94 1988
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 Sarah 4 4.46 2022
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves:
review:

]]> 193778974 400 Vander Tavares 1772840696 Sarah 0 currently-reading 4.00
author: Vander Tavares
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 51183428 Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,� a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.

Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself.]]> 816 Honorée Fanonne Jeffers 006294293X Sarah 0 to-read 4.51 2021
author: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220341391 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525426051 Sarah 0 to-read 4.63 2025
author: John Green
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214152206 From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars, a page-turning literary adventure that introduces readers to the women writers who inspired Jane Austen—and investigates why their books have disappeared from our shelves.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.

But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice� came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.]]> 464 Rebecca Romney 1982190248 Sarah 0 to-read 4.47 2025
author: Rebecca Romney
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 8891329 Frank R. Stockton Sarah 5 4.14
author: Frank R. Stockton
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2012/01/20
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 49628 A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles of genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian lore of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profund as it is playful. Now in his new novel, David Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.

Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .
Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.
But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

]]> 509 David Mitchell 0375507256 Sarah 0 to-read 4.02 2004
author: David Mitchell
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 33413128
People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.]]> 432 Fredrik Backman Sarah 0 to-read 4.27 2016
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52024701 From the celebrated, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and War and Peace a lavish, masterfully rendered volume of stories by one of the most influential short fiction writers of all time.

Chekhov's genius left an indelible impact on every literary form in which he wrote, but none more so than short fiction. Now, renowned translators and longtime house authors Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky give us their peerless renderings of fifty-two Chekhov stories--a full deck! These stories, which span the full arc of his career, reveal the extraordinary variety and unexpectedness of his work, from the farcically comic to the darkly complex, showing that there is no one type of "Chekhov story." They are populated by a remarkable range of characters who come from all parts of Russia, all walks of life, and who, taken together, have democratized the short story. Included here are a number of never-before-translated stories, including "Reading" and "An Educated Blockhead." Here is a collection that promises profound delight.

Contains:
Joy--
Fat and Skinny--
At the Post Office--
Reading--
The Cook Gets Married--
In a Foreign Land--
Corporal Whompov--
Grief--
The Exclamation Point--
An Educated Blockhead--
A Slip-Up--
Anguish--
A Commotion--
The Witch--
A Little Joke--
Agafya--
Spring--
A Nightmare--
Grisha--
Ladies--
Romance with a Double Bass--
The Chorus Girl--
The First-Class Passenger--
Difficult People--
On the Road--
The Beggar--
Enemies--
The Letter--
Volodya--
Luck--
The Siren--
The Shepherd's Pipe--
Costly Lessons--
The Kiss--
Boys--
Kashtanka--
The Name-Day Party--
A Breakdown--
The Bet--
The Princess--
After the Theater--
History of a Business Enterprise--
Neighbors--
Fear--
Big Volodya and Little Volodya--
The Teacher of Literature--
In a Country House--
The Pecheneg--
In the Cart--
About Love--
Ionych--
The New Dacha--]]> 528 Anton Chekhov 0525520813 Sarah 0 to-read 4.28 1883
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1883
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 75568983 Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.
Ìý
Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence-a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?]]> 228 Daniel Keyes Sarah 4 4.44 1966
author: Daniel Keyes
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 23291
Joyce's first major work, written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.

An alternate cover of this ISBN can be found here.]]> 368 James Joyce Sarah 4 3.81 1914
author: James Joyce
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1914
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 38116170 Alternate Cover Edition for 9780142437278.

Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to “pass� as a white woman. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, and is simultaneously allured and repelled by Clare’s risky decision to engage in racial masquerade for personal and societal gain. After frequenting African American-centric gatherings together in Harlem, Clare’s interest in Irene turns into a homoerotic longing for Irene’s black identity that she abandoned and can never embrace again, and she is forced to grapple with her decision to pass for white in a way that is both tragic and telling. This edition features a new introduction by Emily Bernard and notes by Thadious M. Davis.]]> 160 Nella Larsen Sarah 0 3.99 1929
author: Nella Larsen
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1929
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 43868109 The highly anticipated portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing.

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis.

Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.]]> 535 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385545681 Sarah 5 4.54 2021
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 63880836 Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.

Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself.]]> 464 Anne Berest Sarah 0 to-read 4.31 2021
author: Anne Berest
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Sarah 0 to-read 4.17 1992
author: Donna Tartt
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

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

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Sarah 0 to-read 4.03 2023
author: Paul Lynch
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22245552 New York Times Bestseller

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned in the United States. On the eve of this centenary, journalist Johann Hari set off on an epic three-year, thirty-thousand-mile journey into the war on drugs. What he found is that more and more people all over the world have begun to recognize three startling truths: Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. And the drug war has very different motives to the ones we have seen on our TV screens for so long.

In Chasing the Scream, Hari reveals his discoveries entirely through the stories of people across the world whose lives have been transformed by this war. They range from a transgender crack dealer in Brooklyn searching for her mother, to a teenage hit-man in Mexico searching for a way out. It begins with Hari's discovery that at the birth of the drug war, Billie Holiday was stalked and killed by the man who launched this crusade--and it ends with the story of a brave doctor who has led his country to decriminalize every drug, from cannabis to crack, with remarkable results.

Chasing the Scream lays bare what we really have been chasing in our century of drug war--in our hunger for drugs, and in our attempt to destroy them. This book will challenge and change how you think about one of the most controversial--and consequential--questions of our time.]]> 400 Johann Hari 1620408902 Sarah 0 to-read 4.50 2015
author: Johann Hari
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13530981
Alice Munro's peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out.

While most of these stories take place in Munro's home territory - the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron - the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact." A girl who can't sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard.]]> 336 Alice Munro 0771064861 Sarah 0 to-read 3.75 2011
author: Alice Munro
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211004087 Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez reveals her experience as the U.S. born daughter of immigrants and what happened when, at fifteen, her parents were forced back to Mexico in this galvanizing yet tender memoir.

Born to Mexican immigrants south of the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, Elizabeth had the world at her fingertips as she entered her freshman year of high school as the number one student. But suddenly, Elizabeth's own country took away the most important right a child has: a right to have a family.

As her parents� visas expired, they were forced to return to Mexico, leaving Elizabeth responsible for her younger brother, as well as her education. Determined to break the cycle of being “a statistic,� she knew that even though her parents couldn’t stay, there was no way she could let go of the opportunities the U.S. could provide.

Armed with only her passport and sheer teenage determination, Elizabeth became what her school would eventually describe as an unaccompanied, homeless youth, one of thousands of underage victims affected by family separation due to broken immigration laws. For fans of Educated by Tara Westover and The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande, My Side of the River explores separation, generational trauma, and the toll of the American dream. It’s also, at its core, a love story between a brother and a sister who, no matter the cost, is determined to make the pursuit of his own dreams easier than it was for her.]]> 272 Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez 1250817420 Sarah 0 to-read 3.90 2024
author: Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52843028
A refugee of the Great War, Poirot has settled in England near Styles Court, the country estate of his wealthy benefactor, the elderly Emily Inglethorp. When Emily is poisoned and the authorities are baffled, Poirot puts his prodigious sleuthing skills to work. Suspects are plentiful, including the victim’s much younger husband, her resentful stepsons, her longtime hired companion, a young family friend working as a nurse, and a London specialist on poisons who just happens to be visiting the nearby village.

All of them have secrets they are desperate to keep, but none can outwit Poirot as he navigates the ingenious red herrings and plot twists that contribute to Agatha Christie's well-deserved reputation as the queen of mystery.]]> 174 Agatha Christie 1734452595 Sarah 2 4.06 1920
author: Agatha Christie
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1920
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 27183609 In this interdisciplinary collection, scholars from a variety of academic backgrounds, including art history, heritage, museums studies and architectural history, explore a broad range of case studies stretching across the globe. The volume opens up debate about the epistemological and historiographical significance of a variety of different images and representations of the Art Museum, including the transformation or adaptation of the image of the art museum across periods and cultures. In this context, this volume aims to develop a new theoretical framework while proposing new methodological tools and resources for the analysis of museological representations on a global scale.]]> 382 Melania Savino 3110338874 Sarah 0 to-read 0.0 2017
author: Melania Savino
name: Sarah
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50405391 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Working as an intern for a New York fashion magazine in the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood is on the brink of her future. Yet she is also on the edge of a darkness that makes her world increasingly unreal. Esther's vision of the world shimmers and shifts: day-to-day living in the sultry city, her crazed men-friends, the hot dinner dances...

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, is partially based on Plath's own life. It has been celebrated for its darkly funny and razor-sharp portrait of 1950's society and has sold millions of copies worldwide.]]> 234 Sylvia Plath 0571081789 Sarah 2 3.99 1963
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1963
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Sarah 5 4.14 2023
author: David Grann
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 35187182 312 Amy Liptrot 0393355594 Sarah 0 to-read 3.95 2015
author: Amy Liptrot
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29496196
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen such as J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, the “Phantom Terror,� roamed—many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four, the relatively new FBI took over. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide cases but the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including an American Indian agents in the bureau. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. Based on years of research and startling new evidence, the book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly compelling, but also emotionally devastating.]]> 338 David Grann 0385534248 Sarah 0 to-read 4.20 2017
author: David Grann
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Sarah 0 to-read 4.14 2021
author: Claire Keegan
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 8136909 This volume includes new translations, full explanatory notes, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary, as well as an introduction by eminent Chekhov scholar Richard Gilman.

Ivanov --
The seagull --
Uncle Vanya --
Three sisters --
The cherry orchard.]]> 389 Anton Chekov Sarah 0 to-read 4.02 1905
author: Anton Chekov
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1905
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25773742 This is an alternate Cover Edition for ISBN10: 0857861832/ ISBN13: 9780857861832.

The Living Mountain is a lyrical testament in praise of the Cairngorms. It is a work deeply rooted in Nan Shepherd's knowledge of the natural world, and a poetic and philosophical meditation on our longing for high and holy places. Drawing on different perspectives of the mountain environment, Shepherd makes the familiar strange and the strange awe-inspiring. Her sensitivity and powers of observation put her into the front rank of nature writing.]]> 157 Nan Shepherd Sarah 3 4.29 1977
author: Nan Shepherd
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1977
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Sarah 3 4.37 2021
author: John Green
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/02/15
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 34066798 The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers—Now a Paramount+ with Showtime series starring Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Rostov

From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.]]> 462 Amor Towles Sarah 2 4.29 2016
author: Amor Towles
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 52452144 Using the bothy as the reference point Geoff Allan guides the reader on a mix of day walks and multi-day adventures to his favourite bothies highlighting the incredible wildlife, geography, history and culture that you will find along your walk.
Each walk contains an informative description of the route and bothy, a map highlighting the points of interest along the route and detailed route descriptions.
Supported by beautiful photographs of the bothy, route and points of interest along the way.]]> 256 Geoff Allan 1910636193 Sarah 0 to-read 4.50 2020
author: Geoff Allan
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 45032 488 Jane Austen Sarah 4 3.86 1814
author: Jane Austen
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 4
read at: 2015/06/05
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 63945805
For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape.

The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.

Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie's calibre could achieve.]]> 136 Kathleen Jamie 1914502000 Sarah 3 4.17
author: Kathleen Jamie
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 588495
For this completely updated edition, Maurice Hindle has revised his introduction, list of further reading and notes, and added two appendices: Stoker's essay on censorship and his interview with Winston Churchill, both published in 1908. Christopher Frayling's preface discusses Stoker's significance and the influences that contributed to his creation of the Dracula myth.]]> 454 Bram Stoker 014143984X Sarah 3 3.83 1897
author: Bram Stoker
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1897
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 43862307 The Golden Thread weaves an illuminating story of human ingenuity. Design journalist Kassia St. Clair guides us through the technological advancements and cultural customs that would redefine human civilization—from the fabric that allowed mankind to achieve extraordinary things (traverse the oceans and shatter athletic records) and survive in unlikely places (outer space and the South Pole). She peoples her story with a motley cast of characters, including Xiling, the ancient Chinese empress credited with inventing silk, to Richard the Lionhearted and Bing Crosby. Offering insights into the economic and social dimensions of clothmaking—and countering the enduring, often demeaning, association of textiles as “merely women’s work��The Golden Thread offers an alternative guide to our past, present, and future.]]> 368 Kassia St. Clair 1631494805 Sarah 0 to-read 4.06 2018
author: Kassia St. Clair
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Sarah 0 to-read 4.52 2024
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205784352 An enormous bestseller in Greece, this is a spectacularly iconoclastic take on the story of Ancient Greece by a rising star in archaeology

Two strangers meet in a trapped elevator. One is an archaeologist, the other isn’t. A simple question, ‘What do you do?�, becomes the springboard for a dialogue that weaves a fascinating tale�

In How to Fit All of Ancient Greece in an Elevator, acclaimed archaeologist Theodore Papakostas takes the reader on a spectacularly iconoclastic and hugely engrossing journey through Ancient Greece, from its beginnings in prehistory to its end. Marvelling at the exalted moments in Ancient Greek history as well as the more mundane, Papakostas introduces the reader to countless fascinating stories about the cradle of western civilization � many of which upend received wisdom about the empire as well as about archaeology itself. Along the way, he settles questions such What did a Minoan princess pack for a trip to Egypt? How did a Mycenaean public servant kill time when he was bored? How did a raunchy dance lead to the birth of Democracy? Why did Heraclitus suggest that Homer should be slapped? Why are the Cyclades called the Cyclades?

A whistle-stop tour through three hundred years of Greek history, How to Fit All of Ancient Greece in an Elevator is an unforgettable love letter to the treasures we’ve inherited from the ancient world, as well as to those who have helped us unearth them.]]> 289 Theodore Papakostas 0008596085 Sarah 0 to-read 4.05 2021
author: Theodore Papakostas
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40163119
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.]]> 441 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521316 Sarah 5 4.47 2018
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/17
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 175516
"The Fall .. " recounts the terrible events that befall the last remaining members of the once-illustrious Usher clan before it is -- quite literally -- rent asunder. With amazing economy, Poe plunges the reader into a state of deliciously agonizing suspense. It's a must-read for fans of the golden era of horror writing. "The Fall .." is one of Poe's best known short stories - if not the best.

Librarian's note: this entry is for the short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher." Collections of short stories by the author, such as "The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales," can be found elsewhere on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ.]]> 36 Edgar Allan Poe 1594561796 Sarah 0 to-read 3.90 1839
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1839
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59879803 A new dark academic fantasy by the New York Times bestselling author of The Poppy War

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

Oxford, 1836.

The city of dreaming spires.

It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world.

And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows.

Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift.

Until it became a prison�

But can a student stand against an empire?

An incendiary new novel from award-winning author R.F. Kuang about the power of language, the violence of colonialism, and the sacrifices of resistance.]]> 546 R.F. Kuang 0008501815 Sarah 4 4.25 2022
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 32620332
Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the �80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story nears its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.]]> 389 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1501139231 Sarah 0 to-read 4.39 2017
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61089544
Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - an album that shaped Key's expectations of love - as her guide, she examines the unexpected life she has created for herself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed.

With profound candour and intimacy, Arrangements in Blue explores the painful feelings we are usually too ashamed to discuss: loneliness, envy, grief and failure. The result is a singular work - a beautifully-written and essential book about building a life on your own terms, which inspires us to live and love more honestly.]]> 240 Amy Key 1324091738 Sarah 4 3.79 2023
author: Amy Key
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 52045757 Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba � the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people � and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail� of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.]]> 144 Adania Shibli 191309717X Sarah 0 to-read 4.27 2017
author: Adania Shibli
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1789841 Archie Hind 1841580716 Sarah 0 to-read 3.63 1966
author: Archie Hind
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15861557
Robert Crawford dares to bring both cities to life between the covers of one book. His story of the fluctuating fortunes of each city is animated by the one-upping that has been entrenched since the eighteenth century, when Edinburgh lost parliamentary sovereignty and took on its proud wistfulness, while Glasgow came into its industrial promise and defiance. Using landmarks and individuals as gateways to their character and past, this tale of two cities mixes novelty and familiarity just as Scotland s capital and its largest city do. Crawford gives us Adam Smith and Walter Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment and the School of Art, but also tiny apartments, a poetry library, Spanish Civil War volunteers, and the nineteenth-century entrepreneur Maria Theresa Short. We see Glasgow s best-known street through the eyes of a Victorian child, and Edinburgh University as it appeared to Charles Darwin.

Crawford's lively account, drawing on a wealth of historical and literary sources, affirms what people from Glasgow and Edinburgh have long doubted that it is possible to love both cities at the same time."]]> 368 Robert Crawford 0674048881 Sarah 0 to-read 3.60 2013
author: Robert Crawford
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7558367 512 Andrew Graham-Dixon 0713996749 Sarah 0 to-read 4.11 2011
author: Andrew Graham-Dixon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 43822761 In this extraordinary and inspiring debut memoir, Jesse Thistle, once a high school dropout and now a rising Indigenous scholar, chronicles his life on the streets and how he overcame trauma and addiction to discover the truth about who he is.

If I can just make it to the next minute...then I might have a chance to live; I might have a chance to be something more than just a struggling crackhead.

From the Ashes is a remarkable memoir about hope and resilience, and a revelatory look into the life of a Métis-Cree man who refused to give up.

Abandoned by his parents as a toddler, Jesse Thistle briefly found himself in the foster-care system with his two brothers, cut off from all they had known. Eventually the children landed in the home of their paternal grandparents, whose tough-love attitudes quickly resulted in conflicts. Throughout it all, the ghost of Jesse’s drug-addicted father haunted the halls of the house and the memories of every family member. Struggling with all that had happened, Jesse succumbed to a self-destructive cycle of drug and alcohol addiction and petty crime, spending more than a decade on and off the streets, often homeless. Finally, he realized he would die unless he turned his life around.

In this heart-warming and heart-wrenching memoir, Jesse Thistle writes honestly and fearlessly about his painful past, the abuse he endured, and how he uncovered the truth about his parents. Through sheer perseverance and education—and newfound love—he found his way back into the circle of his Indigenous culture and family.

An eloquent exploration of the impact of prejudice and racism, From the Ashes is, in the end, about how love and support can help us find happiness despite the odds.]]> 368 Jesse Thistle 1982101210 Sarah 0 to-read 4.49 2019
author: Jesse Thistle
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15797509 266 Thomas King 0385674058 Sarah 4 4.25 2012
author: Thomas King
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 43890641 Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

A New York Times Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR.]]> 372 Maggie O'Farrell 1472223799 Sarah 3 4.16 2020
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 50885244 'The Handmaid's Tale is both a superlative exercise in science fiction and a profoundly felt moral story'
- ANGELA CARTER

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one option: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like all dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire � neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.

Brilliantly conceived and executed, this powerful evocation of twenty-first-century America gives full rein to Margaret Atwood's devastating irony, wit and astute perception.]]> 320 Margaret Atwood 0099740915 Sarah 4 4.15 1985
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 52495950
Cheesemonger Ned Palmer takes us on a delicious journey across Britain and Ireland and through time to uncover the histories of beloved old favourites like Cheddar and Wensleydale and fresh innovations like the Irish Cashel Blue or the rambunctious Renegade Monk. Along the way we learn the craft and culture of cheesemaking from the eccentric and engaging characters who have revived and reinvented farmhouse and artisan traditions. And we get to know the major cheese styles - the blues, washed rinds, semi-softs and, unique to the British Isles, the territorials - and discover how best to enjoy them, on a cheeseboard with a glass of Riesling, or as a Welsh rarebit alongside a pint of Pale Ale.

This is a cheesemonger's odyssey, a celebration of history, innovation and taste - and the book all cheese and history lovers will want to devour this Christmas.]]> 384 Ned Palmer 1788161181 Sarah 0 to-read 4.29
author: Ned Palmer
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7588 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a novel of sexual awakening, religious rebellion and the essential search for voice and meaning that every nascent artist must face in order to blossom fully into themselves.]]> 329 James Joyce 0142437344 Sarah 3 3.64 1916
author: James Joyce
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1916
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves:
review:

]]> 20338162
When we become adults, and the wide-eyed wonder of childhood has passed, we need to replace what was once magical with something much more meaningful.

Now is the time to put first things first, and seek silence, if only for a few precious minutes a day. Now, ever more intently, we are to watch and listen for God.

God With Us is a companion for those who want to experience Christmas as the early Christians once did, set in the larger context of Advent and Epiphany. Through daily meditations, scripture, prayer, illuminating history and fine art, we experience what saints have glimpsed through the ages - the wonder of God made flesh.]]> 185 Greg Pennoyer Sarah 4 4.14 2007
author: Greg Pennoyer
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/07/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 261745 144 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 0553247778 Sarah 0 to-read 3.80 1962
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29081233
Considered by many to be Henry James’s finest novel, The Portrait of a Lady is a subtle examination of Victorian society and power relations, providing a groundbreaking psychological study of its protagonist. This volume is based on the authoritative New York Edition, and includes the author’s seminal preface.]]> 580 Henry James 1847495753 Sarah 5 3.75 1881
author: Henry James
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1881
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/19
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 50623864
Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.]]> 448 Victoria E. Schwab 0765387565 Sarah 0 to-read 4.16 2020
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55338982
What makes “cults� so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . .

Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.� But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day.

Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,� revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish� everywhere.]]> 309 Amanda Montell 0062993151 Sarah 0 to-read 3.83 2021
author: Amanda Montell
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6493208
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored� ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia � a land of wooden quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo � to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality� until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family � past and present � is inextricably connected to the history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.]]> 370 Rebecca Skloot 1400052173 Sarah 0 to-read 4.12 2010
author: Rebecca Skloot
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53121631 Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time—from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come�Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.

Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.]]> 496 Robert Macfarlane 0393358097 Sarah 3 4.23 2019
author: Robert Macfarlane
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/21
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 78433 The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience.

It opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.

For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The Blind Assassin proves once again that Atwood is one of the most talented, daring, and exciting writers of our time. Like The Handmaid's Tale, it is destined to become a classic.]]> 637 Margaret Atwood Sarah 0 to-read 3.96 2000
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 72355 Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter - a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of Bella, but his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for Baxter's creation.

The hilarious tale of love and scandal that ensues would be "the whole story" in the hands of a lesser author (which in fact it is, for this account is actually written by Dr. McCandless). For Gray, though, this is only half the story, after which Bella (a.k.a. Victoria McCandless) has her own say in the matter. Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, Poor Things is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking duel between the desires of men and the independence of women, from one of Scotland's most accomplished authors.]]> 318 Alasdair Gray 0747562288 Sarah 5 3.93 1992
author: Alasdair Gray
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/08
date added: 2024/05/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 2728527
“Treat yourself to this book, please - I can’t recommend it highly enough.� (Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love)

“I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.�

January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb....

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends - and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island - boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all. Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society’s members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.

Written with warmth and humor as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word in all its guises and of finding connection in the most surprising ways.

Praise for The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

“A jewel... Poignant and keenly observed, Guernsey is a small masterpiece about love, war, and the immeasurable sustenance to be found in good books and good friends.� (People)

“A book-lover’s delight, an implicit and sometimes explicit paean to all things literary.� (Chicago Sun-Times)

“A sparkling epistolary novel radiating wit, lightly worn erudition and written with great assurance and aplomb.� (The Sunday Times [London])

“Cooked perfectly à point: subtle and elegant in flavour, yet emotionally satisfying to the finish.� (The Times [London])]]> 277 Mary Ann Shaffer 0385340990 Sarah 5 4.13 2008
author: Mary Ann Shaffer
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2014/08/18
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 58416952 At the elite Catenan Academy, a young fugitive uncovers layered mysteries and world-changing secrets in this new fantasy series by internationally bestselling author of The Licanius Trilogy, James Islington.

AUDI. VIDE. TACE.

The Catenan Republic � the Hierarchy � may rule the world now, but they do not know everything.

I tell them my name is Vis Telimus. I tell them I was orphaned after a tragic accident three years ago, and that good fortune alone has led to my acceptance into their most prestigious school. I tell them that once I graduate, I will gladly join the rest of civilised society in allowing my strength, my drive and my focus � what they call Will � to be leeched away and added to the power of those above me, as millions already do. As all must eventually do.

I tell them that I belong, and they believe me.

But the truth is that I have been sent to the Academy to find answers. To solve a murder. To search for an ancient weapon. To uncover secrets that may tear the Republic apart.

And that I will never, ever cede my Will to the empire that executed my family.

To survive, though, I will still have to rise through the Academy’s ranks. I will have to smile, and make friends, and pretend to be one of them and win. Because if I cannot, then those who want to control me, who know my real name, will no longer have any use for me.

And if the Hierarchy finds out who I truly am, they will kill me.]]> 639 James Islington 1982141190 Sarah 0 to-read 4.61 2023
author: James Islington
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 86942438
Queen Clytemnestra's world shatters when Agamemnon, a rival to the throne of Mycenae, storms her palace, destroys her family and claims not only the throne but Clytemnestra herself. Tormented by her loss, she vows to do all she can to protect the children born from her unhappy marriage to Agamemnon. But when her husband casts his ruthless gaze towards the wealthy citadel of Troy, his ambitions threaten to once more destroy the family Clytemnestra loves.

From one of Greek mythology's most reviled characters - a woman who challenged the absolute power of men - comes this fiery tale of power, family rivalry and a mother's burning love.]]> 300 Susan C. Wilson 1911107593 Sarah 0 to-read 4.02
author: Susan C. Wilson
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 63946906 An enlightening linguistic journey through a thousand years of feminist language--and what we can learn from the vivid vocabulary English once had for women's bodies, experiences, and sexuality

So many of the words we use to articulate the experiences women share feel awkward or alien. Medical terms are scrupulously accurate but antiseptic. Slang and obscenities have shock value, yet they perpetuate taboos. Where are the plain, honest words for the experiences that women encounter in their daily lives?

Mother Tongue is a historical investigation of feminist language and thought, from the dawn of Old English to the present day. Dr. Jenni Nuttall guides readers through the evolution of words we have used to describe female bodies, menstruation, women's sexuality, the consequences of male violence, childbirth, women's paid and unpaid work, and gender. Along the way, she challenges our modern language's ability to insightfully articulate women's shared experiences by examining the long-forgotten words once used in English for female sexual and reproductive organs. Nuttall also tells the story of words like womb and breast, whose meanings have changed over time, as well as how anatomical words such as hysteria and hysterical came to have such loaded legacies.

Inspired by today's heated debates about words like womxn and menstruators--and also by more personal conversations between her and her teenage daughter--Nuttall describes the profound transformation of the English language. In the process, she unearths some surprisingly progressive thinking that challenges our assumptions about the past--and, in some cases, puts our twenty-first-century society to shame.]]> 292 Jenni Nuttall 0593299574 Sarah 0 to-read 3.80 2023
author: Jenni Nuttall
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 82471 427 Nicholas Monsarrat 0304358444 Sarah 3 4.05 1974
author: Nicholas Monsarrat
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1974
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/12
date added: 2024/03/12
shelves:
review:

]]> 1360472 176 Stephen Crane 0895771551 Sarah 0 to-read 3.32 1895
author: Stephen Crane
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.32
book published: 1895
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57545 One Palestine, Complete explores the tumultuous period before the creation of the state of Israel. This was the time of the British Mandate, when Britain's promise to both Jews and Arabs that they would inherit the land, set in motion the conflict that haunts the region to this day.

Drawing on untapped archival materials, Tom Segev reconstructs an era (1917 to 1948) of limitless possibilities and tragic missteps. He introduces an array unforgettable characters, tracks the steady advance of Jews and Arabs toward confrontation, and puts forth a radical new argument: that the British, far from being pro-Arab, consistently favored the Zionist position, out of the mistaken--and anti-Semitic--belief that Jews turned the wheels of history. Rich in historical detail, sensitive to all perspectives, One Palestine, Complete brilliantly depicts the decline of an empire, the birth of one nation, and the tragedy of another.]]> 640 Tom Segev 0805065873 Sarah 0 to-read 4.03 1999
author: Tom Segev
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 41812831
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.� Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.]]> 336 Rashid Khalidi 1627798552 Sarah 0 to-read 4.50 2020
author: Rashid Khalidi
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 41057294
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.]]> 273 Sally Rooney 1984822179 Sarah 0 to-read 3.81 2018
author: Sally Rooney
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 32075861
Moving between Essex and London, myth and modernity, Cora Seaborne's spirited search for the Essex Serpent encourages all around her to test their allegiance to faith or reason in an age of rapid scientific advancement. At the same time, the novel explores the boundaries of love and friendship and the allegiances that we have to one another. The depth of feeling that the inhabitants of Aldwinter share are matched by their city counterparts as they strive to find the courage to express and understand their deepest desires, and strongest fears.]]> 422 Sarah Perry 0062666371 Sarah 0 to-read 3.49 2016
author: Sarah Perry
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52501213
Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections.

The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.]]> 320 Dan Hicks 0745341764 Sarah 0 to-read 3.95 2020
author: Dan Hicks
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56644978 A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm and how they can be reimagined.

In an age of protest, culture and museums have come under fire. Protests against museum funding (like the Metropolitan Museum accepting Sackler family money) and boards (such as the Whitney appointing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders)—to say nothing of demonstrations over exhibitions and artworks—have roiled cultural institutions across the world, from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the Akron Art Museum. Meanwhile never have there been more calls for museums to work for social change.

In this book, Raicovich shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding capitalist values. And she suggests how museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.]]> 224 Laura Raicovich 1839760508 Sarah 0 to-read 4.02
author: Laura Raicovich
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57344490 144 Mike Murawski 1538108968 Sarah 0 to-read 4.04
author: Mike Murawski
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53487148 This is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s. They have waited long enough for their turn . . .

This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of them all . . .

In the middle of the night, a woman wakes to find her beloved city engulfed in flames. Ten seemingly endless years of conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans are over. Troy has fallen.

From the Trojan women whose fates now lie in the hands of the Greeks, to the Amazon princess who fought Achilles on their behalf, to Penelope awaiting the return of Odysseus, to the three goddesses whose feud started it all, these are the stories of the women whose lives, loves, and rivalries were forever altered by this long and tragic war.

A woman’s epic, powerfully imbued with new life, A Thousand Ships puts the women, girls and goddesses at the center of the Western world’s great tale ever told.]]> 368 Natalie Haynes 0063065398 Sarah 4 4.05 2019
author: Natalie Haynes
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/01/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 126918693 Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez reveals her experience as the U.S. born daughter of immigrants and what happened when, at fifteen, her parents were forced back to Mexico in this galvanizing yet tender memoir.

Born to Mexican immigrants south of the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, Elizabeth had the world at her fingertips as she entered her freshman year of high school as the number one student. But suddenly, Elizabeth's own country took away the most important right a child has: a right to have a family.

As her parents� visas expired, they were forced to return to Mexico, leaving Elizabeth responsible for her younger brother, as well as her education. Determined to break the cycle of being “a statistic,� she knew that even though her parents couldn’t stay, there was no way she could let go of the opportunities the U.S. could provide.

Armed with only her passport and sheer teenage determination, Elizabeth became what her school would eventually describe as an unaccompanied, homeless youth, one of thousands of underage victims affected by family separation due to broken immigration laws. For fans of Educated by Tara Westover and The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande, My Side of the River explores separation, generational trauma, and the toll of the American dream. It’s also, at its core, a love story between a brother and a sister who, no matter the cost, is determined to make the pursuit of his own dreams easier than it was for her.]]> 272 Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez 1250277957 Sarah 0 to-read 3.75 2024
author: Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34498400 224 Nuala Morse 1138207675 Sarah 0 to-read 4.00
author: Nuala Morse
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 762994
New up-to-date second edition available April 2015: Exhibit An Interpretive Approach, Second Edition ]]> 270 Beverly Serrell 0761991069 Sarah 0 to-read 3.99 1996
author: Beverly Serrell
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25759565 262 Franklin D. Vagnone 1629581704 Sarah 0 to-read 4.03 2015
author: Franklin D. Vagnone
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 35074096
This stunning book features classical artwork inspired by the myths, as well as learned notes from the author. Each adventure is infused with Fry's distinctive wit, voice, and writing style. Connoisseurs of the Greek myths will appreciate this fresh-yet-reverential interpretation, while newcomers will feel welcome. Retellings brim with humor and emotion and offer rich cultural context

Celebrating the thrills, grandeur, and unabashed fun of the Greek myths, Mythos breathes life into ancient tales—from Pandora's box to Prometheus's fire.

This gorgeous volume invites you to explore a captivating world with the brilliant storyteller Stephen Fry as your guide.]]> 416 Stephen Fry 0718188721 Sarah 0 to-read 4.27 2017
author: Stephen Fry
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51901147
The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined -- every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute... and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.]]> 541 Suzanne Collins Sarah 0 to-read 3.99 2020
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1108784 416 Gail Anderson 0759101701 Sarah 0 to-read 3.69 2004
author: Gail Anderson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 30688264 196 Nina Simon 0692701494 Sarah 0 to-read 4.06 2016
author: Nina Simon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7827696 388 Nina Simon 0615346502 Sarah 0 to-read 4.19 2010
author: Nina Simon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34524469 248 Aksel Ersoy 1447330293 Sarah 0 to-read 0.0
author: Aksel Ersoy
name: Sarah
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 30031735 636 Kayte McSweeney 1910144789 Sarah 0 to-read 3.50
author: Kayte McSweeney
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 23363882 how traditional the venue, from initial idea to final installation.

An introduction explores curatorial work from its origins in the seventeenth century onward and outlines the various roles of the curator today. Twelve chapters then trace the various stages of the exhibition process in clear, informative language and using helpful diagrams and tables, from developing the concept to writing contracts and loan requests; putting together budgets and schedules; producing exhibition catalogues and interpretation materials; designing gallery spaces; working with artists, lenders, and art handlers; organizing private views; and documenting and evaluating a show.

With advice and tips from a cast of international museum directors and curators―including Daniel Birnbaum (Moderna Museet, Stockholm); Aric Chen (M+,
Hong Kong); Elizabeth Macgregor (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney); Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery, London); Gao Peng (Today Art Museum, Beijing); Jennifer Russell (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); and Nicholas Serota (Tate, London)―this volume is a crucial guide for anyone involved in, or studying, the dynamic field of curation. 1 line drawing]]> 334 Adrian George 0500239282 Sarah 0 to-read 4.21 2015
author: Adrian George
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>