en-US Sat, 12 Apr 2025 09:24:52 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 208433116 The first novel from Izumi Suzuki to be published in English: a candid, intimate exploration of passion, music and transgression.

Hope I'm in for a good time, I thought. Even if it's just for tonight.

Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenties. Through a series of disarmingly frank vignettes, author Izumi Suzuki presents an unforgettable portrait of a young woman encountering missteps and miscommunication, good music and unreliable men, powerful drugs and disorientating meds. Izumi usually keeps her relationships short but complicated, until she meets Jun.

Set My Heart on Fire is a visceral novel about mistaken relationships and the convolutions of desire, about regret and acceptance. Pulsing through the narration is the protagonist's love of music, a vital soundtrack spanning the Zombies, T. Rex and the Rolling Stones as well as underground Japanese psychedelic-rock bands such as the Tigers and the Tempters.]]> 192 Izumi Suzuki 180429330X Parker 0 to-read 3.38 1983
author: Izumi Suzuki
name: Parker
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52892857 Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.

���𲹻徱�Բ� The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, Black women’s literature as world literature. In writing us into the world—bravely, unapologetically, and honestly—Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay.�� —Tayari Jones

��The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art.�� —Kiese Laymon]]> 287 Alice Walker 0143135694 Parker 4 ----
"But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt."

This book has to have one of the most touching final lines in any book I've read. It's the kind of ending that left me speechless, needing a few moments of silence to sort through my emotions.

The Color Purple is many things: a disturbing portrait of generational abuse, a devastating interrogation of racial inequalities, and a heartwarming exploration into the power of queer and familial love. Guiding it all is Ceile's deeply spiritual journey into freedom. Her connection with her sister, Nettie, is beautifully portrayed, and it had me in tears multiple times.

The only thing that keeps me from rating this book five stars is its structure. While I understand the choice for epistolary style, I did find the story a bit stunted at points, especially toward the middle. ]]> 4.40 1982
author: Alice Walker
name: Parker
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: sad-town, poc-authors, poc-protagonists, salt-inducing-stories, oh-boy-this-got-dark, multiple-povs, lgbtqa-themes, female-protagonists, female-authors, contains-cute-relationships, beauty-of-friendship
review:
4.5
----
"But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt."

This book has to have one of the most touching final lines in any book I've read. It's the kind of ending that left me speechless, needing a few moments of silence to sort through my emotions.

The Color Purple is many things: a disturbing portrait of generational abuse, a devastating interrogation of racial inequalities, and a heartwarming exploration into the power of queer and familial love. Guiding it all is Ceile's deeply spiritual journey into freedom. Her connection with her sister, Nettie, is beautifully portrayed, and it had me in tears multiple times.

The only thing that keeps me from rating this book five stars is its structure. While I understand the choice for epistolary style, I did find the story a bit stunted at points, especially toward the middle.
]]> 25090113
"Elegy for Alto", the final poem in 'Path of Thunder', is today widely read as the poet's "last testament" embodying a prophecy of his own death as a sacrificial lamb for human freedom:

Earth, unbind me; let me be the prodigal; let this be
the ram’s ultimate prayer to the tether . . .

AN OLD STAR departs, leaves us here on the shore
Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching;
The new star appears, foreshadows its going
Before a going and coming that goes on forever. . . .



]]> 82 Christopher Okigbo 1592216153 Parker 3
As for my actual review of this poetry collection, I'm left stilted. While his work is thematically powerful, with well-constructed symbols, I found myself far from the emotions Okigbo tries to evoke. A lot of his messaging went over my head (except the rather excellent "Poems Prophesying War" section). However, that might be a "me" problem more than anything. Perhaps I need to sit and absorb his work more closely, like the owner before me.]]> 4.40
author: Christopher Okigbo
name: Parker
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: male-authors, male-protagonists, poc-authors, poc-protagonists, sad-town, poetry-and-in-verse-novels
review:
Got a used copy for $1 at one of the Boston Public Library's used book sales. My copy was full of dutiful annotations from its former owner. It's always a joy to find a book marked so lovingly, with analytical comments and original poems. To the poet who abandoned their work, I hope you're doing well. :)

As for my actual review of this poetry collection, I'm left stilted. While his work is thematically powerful, with well-constructed symbols, I found myself far from the emotions Okigbo tries to evoke. A lot of his messaging went over my head (except the rather excellent "Poems Prophesying War" section). However, that might be a "me" problem more than anything. Perhaps I need to sit and absorb his work more closely, like the owner before me.
]]> 452717 48 Hans Christian Andersen 0679887571 Parker 3 4.11 1836
author: Hans Christian Andersen
name: Parker
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1836
rating: 3
read at: 2013/01/01
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: classics, creative-concepts, female-protagonists, male-authors, oh-boy-this-got-dark
review:

]]> 41219 A beautiful hardback edition of the Booker Prize-winning novel. A romance, a literary quest, a modern classic.

A pair of young scholars investigate the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time. Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story.]]> 555 A.S. Byatt 0679735909 Parker 0 to-read 3.89 1991
author: A.S. Byatt
name: Parker
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220160382
It's a nerve-wracking ordeal for Sivon, who, given her uncanny ability to win every chess match, already suspects her soul isn’t normal. Turns out, she was right to worry. Sivon’s results stun not only her, but the entire world, making her the object of public scrutiny and anonymous threats.

Saddled with an infuriating and off-limits bodyguard, Sivon is thrust into a high-stakes game where souls are pawns and rules don’t exist. As deaths mount, Sivon must decipher friend from foe while protecting her heart against impossible odds. One wrong move could destroy the future lives of everyone Sivon loves, and she can’t let that happen, even if they’ll never love her back.]]> 496 Rebecca Danzenbaker 1665963700 Parker 0 to-read 4.26 2025
author: Rebecca Danzenbaker
name: Parker
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 200554204
Beth Pickering is on the verge of finally capturing the rare deathwhistler bird when Professor Devon Lockley swoops in, capturing both her bird and her imagination like a villain. Albeit a handsome and charming villain, but that's beside the point. As someone highly educated in the ruthless discipline of ornithology, Beth knows trouble when she sees it, and she is determined to keep her distance from Devon.

For his part, Devon has never been more smitten than when he first set eyes on Professor Beth Pickering. She's so pretty, so polite, so capable of bringing down a fiery, deadly bird using only her wits. In other words, an angel. Devon understands he must not get close to her, however, since they're professional rivals.

When a competition to become Birder of the Year by capturing an endangered caladrius bird is announced, Beth and Devon are forced to team up to have any chance of winning. Now keeping their distance becomes a question of one bed or two. But they must take the risk, because fowl play is afoot, and they can't trust anyone else—for all may be fair in love and war, but this is ornithology.]]> 378 India Holton 0593547292 Parker 3 ----
Despite my concerning addiction to depressing novels, it's refreshing to have a lighthearted read occasionally. The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love certainly does the trick. With a cozy Victorian setting, creative fantasy creatures, and a colorful cast of human characters, this book is breezy and fun. I was incredibly charmed by Holton's world and funny writing.

However, I think this book's consistently chipper tone overstays its welcome. I found myself bored in the latter half of the story, as the third act really drags. Plus, I'm not overly fond of the "rake" male love interest and virginal sweet girl trope common in these kinds of stories (...looking at you, Bridgerton). It's gotten old for me.

Still, this is a relaxing romp, nevertheless! Might even check out the sequel in case I'm ever in need of an easy read.]]> 3.99 2024
author: India Holton
name: Parker
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: fiction-addiction-club, contains-cute-relationships, creative-concepts, eye-catching-covers, female-authors, female-protagonists, male-protagonists, multiple-povs, the-fun-stuff
review:
3.5
----
Despite my concerning addiction to depressing novels, it's refreshing to have a lighthearted read occasionally. The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love certainly does the trick. With a cozy Victorian setting, creative fantasy creatures, and a colorful cast of human characters, this book is breezy and fun. I was incredibly charmed by Holton's world and funny writing.

However, I think this book's consistently chipper tone overstays its welcome. I found myself bored in the latter half of the story, as the third act really drags. Plus, I'm not overly fond of the "rake" male love interest and virginal sweet girl trope common in these kinds of stories (...looking at you, Bridgerton). It's gotten old for me.

Still, this is a relaxing romp, nevertheless! Might even check out the sequel in case I'm ever in need of an easy read.
]]> 22589931 The God of Small Things is an award-winning landmark that started for its author an esteemed career of fiction and political commentary that continues unabated.]]> 333 Arundhati Roy 0812979656 Parker 0 to-read 4.02 1997
author: Arundhati Roy
name: Parker
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 129340650 As for queens, they are either hated or forgotten. She already knows which option suits her best . . .

Mother. Monarch. Murderer. Magnificent.

You are born to a king, but marry a tyrant. You stand helplessly as he sacrifices your child to placate the gods. You watch him wage war on a foreign shore and comfort yourself with violent thoughts of your own.

You play the part, fooling enemies who deny you justice. Slowly, you plot.

You are Clytemnestra.

But when the husband who owns you returns in triumph, what then?

Acceptance or vengeance - infamy follows both. So you bide your time and wait, until you might force the gods' hands and take revenge. Until you rise. For you understood something that the others don't. If power isn't given to you, you have to take it for yourself.

A blazing novel set in the world of Ancient Greece and told through the eyes of its greatest heroine, this is a thrilling tale of power and prophecies, of hatred, love, and of an unforgettable Queen who fiercely dealt out death to those who wronged her.
]]> 512 Costanza Casati 1728279372 Parker 4 -----
"For a long time, she has known there are two different kinds of war. There are the battles where heroes dance and fight, with their glistening armor and precious swords, and there are those fought between walls, which are made of stabs and whispers."

Clytemnestra is a bold retelling of the life of one of Greek mythology's most infamous figures: the queen of Mycenae. Here, Casati has woven an intricate epic with gorgeous prose and an emotionally rich story. Following Clytemnestra from her childhood in Sparta, to her dark days as the wife of Agamemnon, you witness the trials and triumphs of a broken, yet resolute woman. You feel the full force of rage, sorrow, and discontent, but grow to understand her unflinching quest for vengeance. All of her familial, romantic, and platonic relationships are richly layered, incredibly satisfying to see built and unraveled.

I admire Casati's choice to forgo the traditional fantasy approach common in modern mythological retellings. This book is miscategorized and should be marketed more as historical fiction. There are no gods or heroes in this story, just people in search of respect, honor, and power, willing to do whatever it takes to cement their legacy. And for a woman of this era, Clytemnestra puts it best: "For queens, they are either hated or forgotten. She already knows which option suits her better. Let her be hated forever.��

My only issue with the novel is that Casati is overambitious with the scale. She's done her research and wants to show that off, but I find that the novel is stuffed with too many characters and storylines. Yes, it's great to see Odysseys or Helen or Paris and any of the iconic Greek characters, but some of those relationships/storylines are abandoned to make room for others. A minor critique, but I adored this novel nonetheless.]]> 4.28 2023
author: Costanza Casati
name: Parker
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: creative-concepts, contains-cute-relationships, eye-catching-covers, female-authors, female-protagonists, lgbtqa-themes, multiple-povs, oh-boy-this-got-dark, sad-town, salt-inducing-stories
review:
4.5
-----
"For a long time, she has known there are two different kinds of war. There are the battles where heroes dance and fight, with their glistening armor and precious swords, and there are those fought between walls, which are made of stabs and whispers."

Clytemnestra is a bold retelling of the life of one of Greek mythology's most infamous figures: the queen of Mycenae. Here, Casati has woven an intricate epic with gorgeous prose and an emotionally rich story. Following Clytemnestra from her childhood in Sparta, to her dark days as the wife of Agamemnon, you witness the trials and triumphs of a broken, yet resolute woman. You feel the full force of rage, sorrow, and discontent, but grow to understand her unflinching quest for vengeance. All of her familial, romantic, and platonic relationships are richly layered, incredibly satisfying to see built and unraveled.

I admire Casati's choice to forgo the traditional fantasy approach common in modern mythological retellings. This book is miscategorized and should be marketed more as historical fiction. There are no gods or heroes in this story, just people in search of respect, honor, and power, willing to do whatever it takes to cement their legacy. And for a woman of this era, Clytemnestra puts it best: "For queens, they are either hated or forgotten. She already knows which option suits her better. Let her be hated forever.��

My only issue with the novel is that Casati is overambitious with the scale. She's done her research and wants to show that off, but I find that the novel is stuffed with too many characters and storylines. Yes, it's great to see Odysseys or Helen or Paris and any of the iconic Greek characters, but some of those relationships/storylines are abandoned to make room for others. A minor critique, but I adored this novel nonetheless.
]]> 212364050 Zora Neale Hurston's unpublished novel revealing the historical Herod the Great—not the demon the Bible makes him out to be but a religious and philosophical man who lived a life of adventure.

In the 1950s, after the publication of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston set out to write a novel that would set the record straight about one of history's most maligned figures. If Hurston's Moses challenges the Old Testament version of the ancient Hebrew leader by suggesting that Moses was actually an Egyptian, Hurston's Herod challenges the New Testament version of the tyrant who supposedly ordered the deaths of many children in order to save the Christ-child, as recorded in the book of Matthew, by suggesting that he was actually a forerunner of Christ.

From the peaks of triumph to the depths of human misery, the historical Herod "seemed to have been singled out by some deity and especially endowed to attract the zigzag lightning of fate." The intimate friend of both Marc Antony and Julius Caesar, Herod lived in times of war and expansion, where political assassinations and bribery were commonplace as the old world gave way to the new. Breaking his legacy out of a single paragraph in the Bible and into the vivid, breathing world he lived in, Hurston's unfinished manuscript brings a full person with an adventurous life into view for the first time.

Scholar and literary critic Deborah Plant brings this bold, spirited novel to readers for the first time with a new introduction and editorial additions that demonstrate Hurston's point about how reimagining figures from the past addresses the troubles we experience today.]]> 368 Zora Neale Hurston 0063161001 Parker 0 to-read 3.33 2025
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Parker
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 221866459 Birthed in shadow. Forged in fire.

A Splintered Kingdom

An ancient grudge has kept humans and the magical races of Arcanis at odds for centuries. The Arcane Crucible, a legendary series of trials that occurs every 25 years, offers a chance for peace.

A Haunted Warrior

Elyria Lightbreaker, once a celebrated fae war hero, is a shadow of her former self. Drowning in grief after losing the man she loved to the previous Crucible, now she must rise to stop his sister from falling to the same fate.

A Vengeful Knight

Hardened by loss and fueled by hate, Cedric Thorne’s lifelong goal to conquer the Crucible on humanity’s behalf is finally within reach. The only problem? Getting through the trials alive means working with Elyria—the very fae he blames for his parents�� deaths.

An Unwinnable Challenge

With alliances fragile as spun glass and betrayal lurking at every turn, Elyria and Cedric must navigate deadly trials that test their strength, spirit, and magic�� as well as their increasingly complex feelings for each other.
��
This is the Arcane Crucible.]]> 466 Gretchen Powell Fox 0988468921 Parker 0 to-read 4.52
author: Gretchen Powell Fox
name: Parker
average rating: 4.52
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 221972190 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 560 R.F. Kuang 0063455242 Parker 0 to-read 0.0 2025
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Parker
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 63249718 New York Times bestselling author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic comes a fabulous meld of Mexican horror movies and Nazi occultism: a dark thriller about the curse that haunts a legendary lost film--and awakens one woman's hidden powers.

Montserrat has always been overlooked. She’s a talented sound editor, but she’s left out of the boys�� club running the film industry in ��90s Mexico City. And she’s all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she’s been in love with him since childhood.

Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives—even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.

Now the director wants Montserrat and Tristán to help him shoot the missing scene and lift the curse . . . but Montserrat soon notices a dark presence following her, and Tristán begins seeing the ghost of his ex-girlfriend.

As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán may find that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies.]]> 323 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0593355369 Parker 0 to-read 3.56 2023
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Parker
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220458657 Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches��: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.

In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.

Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.]]> 368 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0593874323 Parker 0 to-read 4.37 2025
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Parker
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 181109993 For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend.

London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever��

Maggie, a once-hopeful artist turned waitress, is pregnant and preparing to move back to her hometown with her boyfriend and father-to-be Ed, leaving the city she loves and the life she imagined for herself.

Ed, coasting through life as a barely competent bike courier, is ready for a new start with Maggie and their baby, if only to finally leave behind his secret past of hooking up with strange men in train station bathrooms—and his secret past with Maggie’s best friend, Phil.

Phil, who sleepwalks through his office job and lives for the weekends, is on the brink of achieving his first real relationship with his roommate Keith. The two live in an illegal warehouse commune with other quirky creatives and idealists—the site of the party to end all parties.

As the temperature continues to climb, Maggie, Ed, and Phil will have to confront their shared pasts, current desires, and limits of their future lives together before the weekend is over.

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Parker 0 to-read 3.77 2024
author: Oisín McKenna
name: Parker
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 42200387
Repleto de imágenes poéticas, contundentes y muy físicas, este carácter tan palpable del texto no es gratuito en una novela que nos habla del cuerpo, del sexo, del yo; una obra aguda y directa que reivindica la libertad femenina en el placer y en la soledad.

Eva Baltasar inicia con "Permafrost" un tríptico de protagonistas femeninas que quiere explorar distintas etapas en la vida de las mujeres.]]> 144 Eva Baltasar 8439735146 Parker 0 to-read 3.81 2018
author: Eva Baltasar
name: Parker
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210678433
Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.

In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.]]> 160 Dahlia de la Cerda 1761385992 Parker 0 to-read 4.12 2019
author: Dahlia de la Cerda
name: Parker
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216247464 Geography professors in a failed marriage of convenience inconveniently reconnect for an emergency mission in this swoony historical-fantasy rom-com.

Professor Elodie Tarrant is an expert in magic disasters. Nothing fazes her--except her own personal disaster, that is: Professor Gabriel Tarrant, the grumpy, unfriendly man she married for convenience a year ago, whom she secretly loves.

Gabriel is also an expert in magic disasters. And nothing fazes him either--except the walking, talking tornado that is his wife. They've been estranged since shortly after their wedding day, but that hasn't stopped him from stoically pining for her.

When magic erupts in a small Welsh village, threatening catastrophe for the rest of England, Elodie and Gabriel are accidentally both assigned to the case. With the fate of the country in their hands, they must come together as a team in the face of perilous conditions like explosions, domesticated goats, and only one bed. But this is easier said than done. After all, there's no navigational guide for the geography of the heart.]]> 368 India Holton 0593641477 Parker 0 to-read 4.17 2025
author: India Holton
name: Parker
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220817728 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s Space Shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.]]> 352 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0593158717 Parker 0 to-read 4.45 2025
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Parker
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217245557 In this spellbinding historical novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea and The Wind Knows My Name, a young writer journeys to South America to uncover the truth about her father—and herself.

In San Francisco 1866, an Irish nun, left pregnant and abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia Del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman.

To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of sixteen, she begins to publish pulp fiction under a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds can't contain her sense of adventure any longer, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at the San Francisco Examiner to hire her. There she is paired with another talented reporter, Eric Whelan.

As she proves herself, her restlessness returns, until an opportunity arises to cover a brewing civil war in Chile. She seizes it, along with Eric, and while there, begins to uncover the truth about her father and the country that represents her roots. But as the war escalates, Emilia finds herself in danger and at a crossroads, questioning both her identity and her destiny.

A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, My Name is Emilia del Valle introduces a character who will never let hold of your heart.]]> 304 Isabel Allende 059397509X Parker 0 to-read 4.07 2025
author: Isabel Allende
name: Parker
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210204151
When kings fall, queens rise.

Nothing about Semiramis's upbringing could have foretold her legacy or the power she would come to wield. A female ruler, once an orphan raised on the outskirts of an empire - certainly no one in Ancient Assyria would bend to her command willingly. Semiramis was a woman who knew if she wanted power, she would have to claim it.

There are whispers of her fame in Mesopotamian myth- Semiramis was a queen, an ambitious warrior, a commander whose reputation reaches the majestic proportions of Alexander the Great. Historical record, on the other hand, falls eerily quiet.

In her second novel, Costanza Casati brilliantly weaves myth and ancient history together to give Semiramis a voice, charting her captivating ascent to a throne no one promised her. The world Casati expertly builds is rich with dazzling detail and will transport her readers to the heat of the Assyrian Empire and a world long gone.]]> 448 Costanza Casati 1464228213 Parker 0 to-read 4.07 2024
author: Costanza Casati
name: Parker
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214333691 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.]]> 400 Suzanne Collins 1546171479 Parker 4 ----
"'You can't count on things happening tomorrow just because they happened in the past. It's faulty logic.'

'Is it?' I say. 'Because it's kind of how people plan out their lives.'

'And that's part of our trouble. Thinking things are inevitable. Not believing that change is possible.'"

One of my most anticipated reads of the year. Happy to report that Collins can break my heart like no other.


Haymitch, you will always be my #1. ]]> 4.71 2025
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Parker
average rating: 4.71
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: sad-town, salt-inducing-stories, oh-boy-this-got-dark, male-protagonists, female-protagonists, creative-concepts, childhood
review:
4.5
----
"'You can't count on things happening tomorrow just because they happened in the past. It's faulty logic.'

'Is it?' I say. 'Because it's kind of how people plan out their lives.'

'And that's part of our trouble. Thinking things are inevitable. Not believing that change is possible.'"

One of my most anticipated reads of the year. Happy to report that Collins can break my heart like no other.


Haymitch, you will always be my #1.
]]> 211004124 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes the story of three siblings who, upon the death of their father, are forced to reckon with their long-festering rivalries, dangerous abilities, and the crushing weight of all their unrealized adolescent potential.

Where there’s a will, there’s a war.

Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.

Or at least, so they like to think.

Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You're welcome! If only her father's fortune wasn't her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud.

Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he's losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.

Eilidh, once the world's most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth—by confirming she'd been his favorite all along.

On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins—but which Wren will come out on top?]]> 512 Olivie Blake 1250883407 Parker 0 to-read 3.93 2025
author: Olivie Blake
name: Parker
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214537759 “Where are you, Mom?�� So began Amy’s quest to solve a mystery trapped in the deep recesses of her own memory—a journey that would take her into the burgeoning field of psychedelic therapy, to the limits of the judicial system, and ultimately, home to the Texas panhandle, where her story began.

In her search for the truth, to understand and begin to recover from buried childhood trauma, Griffin interrogates the pursuit of perfectionism, control, and maintaining appearances that drives so many women, asking, when, in our path from girlhood to womanhood, did we learn to look outside ourselves for validation? What kind of freedom is possible if we accept the whole story and embrace who we really are? With hope, heart, and relentless honesty, she points a way forward for all of us, revealing the power of radical truth-telling to deepen our connections—with others and ourselves.]]> 288 Amy Griffin 0593731204 Parker 0 to-read 4.27 2025
author: Amy Griffin
name: Parker
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210395729 The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue meets This is How You Lose The Time War in this fantastical love story that defies death as two souls reincarnate through the centuries.

They've loved each other in a thousand lifetimes. They've killed each other in every one.

Evelyn remembers all her past lives. She also remembers that in every single one, she’s been murdered before her eighteenth birthday by Arden, a supernatural being whose soul―and survival―is tethered to hers.

The problem is that she’s quite fond of the life she’s in now, and her little sister needs her for bone marrow transplants in order to stay alive. If Evelyn wants to save her sister, she’ll have to:

1. Find the centuries-old devil who hunts her through each life―before they find her first.
2. Figure out why she’s being hunted and finally break their curse.
3. Try not to fall in love.]]> 352 Laura Steven 1250333881 Parker 0 to-read 3.80 2025
author: Laura Steven
name: Parker
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214565614 A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.]]> 448 Stephen Graham Jones 1668075083 Parker 0 to-read 4.28 2025
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Parker
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55606512
Zachary Ezra Rawlins is searching for his door, though he does not know it. He follows a silent siren song, an inexplicable knowledge that he is meant for another place. When he discovers a mysterious book in the stacks of his campus library he begins to read, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, lost cities, and nameless acolytes. Suddenly a turn of the page brings Zachary to a story from his own childhood impossibly written in this book that is older than he is.

A bee, a key, and a sword emblazoned on the book lead Zachary to two people who will change the course of his life: Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired painter, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances. These strangers guide Zachary through masquerade party dances and whispered back room stories to the headquarters of a secret society where doorknobs hang from ribbons, and finally through a door conjured from paint to the place he has always yearned for. Amid twisting tunnels filled with books, gilded ballrooms, and wine-dark shores Zachary falls into an intoxicating world soaked in romance and mystery. But a battle is raging over the fate of this place and though there are those who would willingly sacrifice everything to protect it, there are just as many intent on its destruction. As Zachary, Mirabel, and Dorian venture deeper into the space and its histories and myths, searching for answers and each other, a timeless love story unspools, casting a spell of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a Starless Sea.]]> 499 Erin Morgenstern Parker 2

The Starless Sea reads like my dreams after taking an edible. Same nonsensical storyline, great vibes. But great vibes do not equal a compelling story. The pacing is stunted, the characters dull, and the romantic storyline unmoving. It feels like Morgenstern put together a bunch of aesthetic mood boards on Pinterest and wrote a book based on that.

This is the first novel I've read in a while that I feel genuinely bad about not liking, since so many people seem to love it. I'm getting FOMO, you could say. Sorry, but my experience reading this was terrible. I struggled to get through the pages because I was so confused the entire time. It's hard to connect with anything when you don't even know what's happening half the time. I'm just happy I finished it.]]> 3.92 2019
author: Erin Morgenstern
name: Parker
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: fiction-addiction-club, ebook, creative-concepts, contains-cute-relationships, lgbtqa-themes, male-protagonists, multiple-povs, female-protagonists, poc-protagonists, female-authors
review:
Erin Morgenstern writing this book:


The Starless Sea reads like my dreams after taking an edible. Same nonsensical storyline, great vibes. But great vibes do not equal a compelling story. The pacing is stunted, the characters dull, and the romantic storyline unmoving. It feels like Morgenstern put together a bunch of aesthetic mood boards on Pinterest and wrote a book based on that.

This is the first novel I've read in a while that I feel genuinely bad about not liking, since so many people seem to love it. I'm getting FOMO, you could say. Sorry, but my experience reading this was terrible. I struggled to get through the pages because I was so confused the entire time. It's hard to connect with anything when you don't even know what's happening half the time. I'm just happy I finished it.
]]> 991197
Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming—both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.

Edgy, searingly observant, and candid, often heartbreaking but threaded throughout with raw humor and hard-earned wisdom��Persepolis is a stunning work from one of the most highly regarded, singularly talented graphic artists at work today.]]> 341 Marjane Satrapi 0375714839 Parker 5 “It's fear that makes us lose our conscience. It's also what transforms us into cowards.��

A heartfelt tale about coming of age during wartime. This graphic memoir is as earnestly moving as it is humorous. Satrapi is an engaging, honest writer with a bold voice. She's unwilling to shy away from complex, uncomfortable scenes and emotions (which don't always paint her in a positive light) and I admire that. Just an excellent read all around. Highly recommend it to anyone!]]> 4.38 2007
author: Marjane Satrapi
name: Parker
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: salt-inducing-stories, sad-town, poc-protagonists, poc-authors, oh-boy-this-got-dark, female-protagonists, female-authors
review:
“It's fear that makes us lose our conscience. It's also what transforms us into cowards.��

A heartfelt tale about coming of age during wartime. This graphic memoir is as earnestly moving as it is humorous. Satrapi is an engaging, honest writer with a bold voice. She's unwilling to shy away from complex, uncomfortable scenes and emotions (which don't always paint her in a positive light) and I admire that. Just an excellent read all around. Highly recommend it to anyone!
]]> 28503788
Mia Alvar's stunning debut gives us a vivid, insightful picture of the Filipino diaspora: exiles and emigrants and wanderers uprooting their families to begin new lives in the Middle East and America--and, sometimes, turning back. One man smuggles drugs from his pharmacy in New York to Manila for his ailing father, only to discover an alarming truth about his mother. A woman living in Bahrain faces a challenge that compels her to question her marriage. A college student in Manila struggling to write fiction knows that her brother, who has gone abroad to make money, is the one living a life that stories are made of. The novella-length title story follows the unexpected fates of a journalist and a nurse during the 1970s labor strikes in Manila. Exploring the universal experience of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined,��In the Country��speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home.

The kontrabida
The miracle worker
Legends of the white lady
Shadow families
The Virgin of Monte Ramon
Esmeralda
Old girl
A contract overseas
In the country]]> 347 Mia Alvar 0804171491 Parker 4 "But for one brief moment, in the rain and mud, I saw a world where everyone was struggling in the body he or she'd been given. That world and struggle seemed bearable to me, and even beautiful."

What a gorgeous collection of short stories! My personal favorites are "Legends of the White Lady," "The Virgin of Monte Ramon," and "Esmeralda." I read some of Alvar's writing in an Asian-American literature class a few years ago, and her haunting style has stuck with me since. Happy I checked out more of her work! Her characters in these brief pieces are more endearing than others I've read about in full-length novels. That's a rare feat indeed. ]]> 4.10 2015
author: Mia Alvar
name: Parker
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: undergraduate, ebook, beauty-of-friendship, contains-cute-relationships, female-authors, female-protagonists, male-protagonists, multiple-povs, oh-boy-this-got-dark, poc-authors, poc-protagonists, sad-town, salt-inducing-stories, short-story-collections
review:
"But for one brief moment, in the rain and mud, I saw a world where everyone was struggling in the body he or she'd been given. That world and struggle seemed bearable to me, and even beautiful."

What a gorgeous collection of short stories! My personal favorites are "Legends of the White Lady," "The Virgin of Monte Ramon," and "Esmeralda." I read some of Alvar's writing in an Asian-American literature class a few years ago, and her haunting style has stuck with me since. Happy I checked out more of her work! Her characters in these brief pieces are more endearing than others I've read about in full-length novels. That's a rare feat indeed.
]]> 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 Parker 0 to-read 4.35 2022
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Parker
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211096516 EVERY ACT OF TRANSLATION REQUIRES SACRIFICE

Welcome to Bletchley Park�� with dragons.

London, 1923. Dragons soar through the skies and protests erupt on the streets, but Vivian Featherswallow isn’t worried. She’s going to follow the rules, get an internship studying dragon languages, and make sure her little sister never has to risk growing up Third Class. By midnight, Viv has started a civil war.

With her parents arrested and her sister missing, all the safety Viv has worked for is collapsing around her. So when a lifeline is offered in the form of a mysterious ‘job��, she grabs it. Arriving at Bletchley Park, Viv discovers that she has been recruited as a codebreaker helping the war effort �� if she succeeds, she and her family can all go home again. If she doesn’t, they’ll all die.

At first Viv believes that her challenge, of discovering the secrets of a hidden dragon language, is doable. But the more she learns, the more she realises that the bubble she’s grown up in isn’t as safe as she thought, and eventually Viv must What war is she really fighting?

An epic, sweeping fantasy with an incredible Dark Academia setting, a clandestine, slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance, and an unputdownable story, filled with twists and turns, betrayals and secret identities, A Language of Dragons is the unmissable debut of 2025, from an extraordinary new voice.]]> 432 S.F. Williamson 0063353849 Parker 0 to-read 3.84 2025
author: S.F. Williamson
name: Parker
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 101146050 A subversive historical novel set during the French Revolution, inspired by a young peasant boy turned showman, said to have been tormented and driven to murder by an all-consuming appetite.

1798, France. Nuns move along the dark corridors of a Versailles hospital where the young Sister Perpetué has been tasked with sitting with the patient who must always be watched. The man, gaunt, with his sallow skin and distended belly, is dying: they say he ate a golden fork, and that it’s killing him from the inside. But that’s not all—he is rumored to have done monstrous things in his attempts to sate an insatiable appetite�� an appetite they say tortures him still.

Born in an impoverished village to a widowed young mother, Tarare was once overflowing with quiet affection: for the Baby Jesus and the many Saints, for his mother, for the plants and little creatures in the woods and fields around their house. He spends his days alone, observing the delicate charms of the countryside. But his world is not a gentle one—and soon, life as he knew it is violently upended. Tarare is pitched down a chaotic path through revolutionary France, left to the mercy of strangers, and increasingly, bottomlessly, ravenous.

This exhilarating, disquieting novel paints a richly imagined life for The Great Tarare, The Glutton of Lyon in 18th-century France: a world of desire, hunger and poverty; hope, chaos and survival. As in her cult hit The Manningtree Witches, Blakemore showcases her stunning lyricism and deep compassion for characters pushed to the edge of society in The Glutton, her most unputdownable work yet.]]> 320 A.K. Blakemore 1668030624 Parker 0 to-read 3.77 2023
author: A.K. Blakemore
name: Parker
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62621927 ��
This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. “Åmot�� is the Chamoru word for “medicine,�� commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo’åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process.
��
Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.
��]]> 148 Craig Santos Pérez 1632431181 Parker 5 "read maps
closely navigate
beyond the violent divisions
of national & maritime borders
beyond the scarred
latitudes & longitudes
of empire
arrive at this cartography
of our most expansive legends
& deepest routes"
-----------------------
Unrelentingly powerful poetry. As a diasporic CHamoru, I am often discontented by my disconnection to the language and culture of my ancestors. How can we navigate our family and people's legacy while the oppression of U.S. empire persists? Work like Pérez's is healing and his lyrical storytelling crosses the oceans of space and time to bring me closer to Guam. Each mention of spam sparks a vision of my nana and mother, words haunting me like taotao’mona.]]> 4.33
author: Craig Santos Pérez
name: Parker
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: poetry-and-in-verse-novels, poc-protagonists, poc-authors, oh-boy-this-got-dark, multigenerational, male-authors, male-protagonists, sad-town, salt-inducing-stories
review:
"read maps
closely navigate
beyond the violent divisions
of national & maritime borders
beyond the scarred
latitudes & longitudes
of empire
arrive at this cartography
of our most expansive legends
& deepest routes"
-----------------------
Unrelentingly powerful poetry. As a diasporic CHamoru, I am often discontented by my disconnection to the language and culture of my ancestors. How can we navigate our family and people's legacy while the oppression of U.S. empire persists? Work like Pérez's is healing and his lyrical storytelling crosses the oceans of space and time to bring me closer to Guam. Each mention of spam sparks a vision of my nana and mother, words haunting me like taotao’mona.
]]> 43712240 131 Lehua M. Taitano 1625492839 Parker 0 to-read 4.67
author: Lehua M. Taitano
name: Parker
average rating: 4.67
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 19349535
"The journey through A BELL MADE OF STONES shifts us from empathetic observers to experiential participants. We are forced to engage with the unsettling disconnection and stress of locating a coherent voice and a culturally legible identity/identities in the fragments of loss and daily misrecognitions created by distance, diaspora and resistance to performing so-called hetero-normativity. Evoked instead of told, the poetry evolves into an installation that is beyond words, bearing witness to the stigma of enunciating through disconnected discourses. There is a surprisingly elegant, dignified aesthetic to the collapsed, repressed text that bares the raw marks of scarcely audible attempts at making meaning. While we are invited to find the lament left on the page, left with the palpable sense of what is missing and/or mistranslated. What is left to savor are the sparse, poignant leftovers—stringing together separate stories of mother, sisters, lover and other. But more than anything, we are left with the sense that the fragments are more (and less) than (and may never add up to) the sum of their parts."—Karlo Mila

"A BELL MADE OF STONES is a synaesthestic kaleidoscope—where we listen to 'sheen' and 'husk' and 'rope,' where the canoe can sing, and where what seems solid might 'settle as through a sieve.' Taitano's poems—her 'stampings'—pile-up lyrical language into gorgeous collisions of type. Yet, as 'visual evidence of the echo,' the poems also gesture to what is not there, such as 'the surfacing and submergence of islands of sound' made by a typewriter. As poet-guide, Taitano shows her reader how the map of her every day contains assumptions and aspersions cast by others, reminding us that she is 'with and without explanation.' These are poems where a hyphen can be both a 'perforation' and a 'stitch.' Be patient. Wait out assumptions. Ready oneself for revelation."—Kaia Sand

"Lehua Taitano's A BELL MADE OF STONES formulates in its 'tethered tautly' poems the truth of her birth and the necessity of her aesthetic address. Rich with protest, these poems map the 'story of [your] blood.' These are 'heroic feats' that endure with clairvoyant strength and keep asking if there is 'anything truer than truth.' These poems keep replying, going beyond 'the bareness of lament.' This is a fierce and brilliant collection of poems—chock-full of issued utterances, elliptical enjambments, cross-outs, and elision—all of which persevere in constructing an apt orchestration between the tongue's experiment and typewriter's keys. —Prageeta Sharma]]> 104 Lehua M. Taitano 0989186113 Parker 0 to-read 4.78 2013
author: Lehua M. Taitano
name: Parker
average rating: 4.78
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 2629628 This is an alternate cover edition for 9781594483295

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.]]> 335 Junot Díaz Parker 4 "For the first time in her life began to remember her dreams. It was a luxury she'd never dared indulge in, and in the beginning they seemed as powerful as storms."

A powerful multigenerational story that cradles the heart then stabs it with full force. Definitely a difficult but worthwhile read. Stylistically inventive prose and a compelling non-linear storyline. Learned a lot about the Dominican Republic's history from this. Had to take my time to sit with the heavy weight of the narrative.]]> 3.84 2007
author: Junot Díaz
name: Parker
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: female-protagonists, male-authors, male-protagonists, multigenerational, multiple-povs, oh-boy-this-got-dark, poc-authors, poc-protagonists, sad-town, salt-inducing-stories
review:
"For the first time in her life began to remember her dreams. It was a luxury she'd never dared indulge in, and in the beginning they seemed as powerful as storms."

A powerful multigenerational story that cradles the heart then stabs it with full force. Definitely a difficult but worthwhile read. Stylistically inventive prose and a compelling non-linear storyline. Learned a lot about the Dominican Republic's history from this. Had to take my time to sit with the heavy weight of the narrative.
]]> 395220
“Zami is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.”—Off Our Backs

“Among the elements that make the book so good are its personal honesty and lack of pretentiousness, characteristics that shine through the writing bespeaking the evolution of a strong and remarkable character.”—The New York Times]]> 256 Audre Lorde Parker 0 to-read 4.39 1982
author: Audre Lorde
name: Parker
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212808316 Brimming with magic and romance, a young fairy queen must form an unlikely alliance or risk an unspeakable danger destroying all she holds dear in this standalone YA novel from New York Times bestselling author Allison Saft.

It’s been centuries since a warm-season fairy in Pixie Hollow has crossed into the Winter Woods, and while most fear the legends of monsters lurking in the frozen lands, Clarion, can’t help being intrigued by Winter’s stoic beauty. But under the watchful eyes of the current monarch and the court's seasonal ministers, Clarion has little time to dwell on daydreams while the days to her coronation dwindle away.

That is, until reports of a monster crossing from Winter into Spring make their way to the palace. Clarion sees defeating this threat as an opportunity to prove that she is worthy of her new role. But instead of finding a monster at the edge of Winter, she finds Milori, a young guardian of the Winter Woods. Together, they form an unlikely bond as they race to save their lands.

But as their alliance warms to something more, they will discover there is a reason a warm-season fairy and a winter fairy must not be together. And the cost could be just as deadly as the monsters that prowl the Winter Woods.

Discover the origin of the sweeping, star-crossed romance between the queen of Pixie Hollow and the lord of the Winter Woods.]]> 400 Allison Saft 1368098452 Parker 0 to-read 4.27 2025
author: Allison Saft
name: Parker
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 10836810 A stunning story of love, sexual obsession, treachery, and tragedy, about an artist and her most famous muse in Paris between the World Wars.

Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka.

Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished—and coveted—works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide.

Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, The Last Nude is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret, and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance.]]> 320 Ellis Avery 1594488134 Parker 0 to-read 3.89 2012
author: Ellis Avery
name: Parker
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212806636 A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this epic saga of love, faith, and defiance from the bestselling author of Sam.

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.

Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.

Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.]]> 368 Allegra Goodman 0593730089 Parker 0 to-read 4.01 2025
author: Allegra Goodman
name: Parker
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217006044 In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize, a master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global change.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.

]]> 296 Abdulrazak Gurnah 0593852605 Parker 0 to-read 3.97 2025
author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
name: Parker
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62334528 Lisa Jewell returns with a scintillating new psychological thriller about a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast.

Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.

A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.

Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.

But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.

Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?]]> 384 Lisa Jewell 1982179023 Parker 3 cuckoo bananas 4.00 2023
author: Lisa Jewell
name: Parker
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: fiction-addiction-club, ebook, female-authors, female-protagonists, multiple-povs, oh-boy-this-got-dark, salt-inducing-stories
review:
cuckoo bananas
]]> 61374793
Now trapped inside Jessica’s body, with access to Jessica’s most private journals and secrets, Jenna soon discovers that being the top student at the elite, highly competitive Havenwood Private Academy isn’t quite what she imagined. Worse, as everyone—including her own parents—start having trouble remembering who Jenna Chen is, or if she ever even existed, Jenna must decide if playing the role of the perfect daughter and student is worth losing her true self forever.]]> 320 Ann Liang 133552312X Parker 0 to-read 4.09 2025
author: Ann Liang
name: Parker
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209801563
On a White Night in 2019, prima ballerina Natalia Leonova returns to St. Petersburg two years after a devastating accident stalled her career. Once the most celebrated dancer of her generation, she now turns to pills and alcohol to numb the pain of her past.

She is unmoored in her old city as the ghosts of her former life begin to resurface: her loving but difficult mother, her absentee father, and the two gifted dancers who led to her downfall.

One of those dancers, Alexander, is the love of her life, who transformed both Natalia and her art. The other is Dmitri, a dark and treacherous genius. When the latter offers her a chance to return to the stage in her signature role, Natalia must decide whether she can again face the people responsible for both her soaring highs and darkest hours.

Painting a vivid portrait of the Russian ballet world, where cutthroat ambition, ever-shifting politics, and sublime artistry collide, City of Night Birds unveils the making of a dancer with both profound intimacy and breathtaking scope. Mysterious and alluring, passionate and virtuosic, Juhea Kim’s second novel is an affecting meditation on love, forgiveness, and the making of an artist in a turbulent world.]]> 320 Juhea Kim 0063394758 Parker 0 to-read 3.56 2024
author: Juhea Kim
name: Parker
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18306732
This edition also includes ‘A Fragment�� by Lord Byron and ‘The Vampyre: A Tale�� by John Polidori, as well as an introduction and notes. Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.]]> 352 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 0141393394 Parker 5 "Alas! Why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings.' If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us."

It's silly, but I've been yearning for years after this Penguin Clothbound Classic edition of Frankenstein. With great fortune, it has finally found its way to my hands, and is now a most beloved possession.

There's a lot to unpack about Mary Shelley's masterwork. I could dissect every beautiful line I annotated, but I'm taken by one concept in particular. The creature is constructed by a man who thinks himself above the laws of nature. Yet, Frankenstein is disgusted by his offspring, casting him out and deeming him horrific. Thus, the creature is rejected by the force that gave him life. How do we persist when our gods abandon us? How do we understand and justify our existence? It's an incredibly tragic narrative, exploring complex facets of humanity, with debates that have stood the test of time.]]> 4.07 1818
author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
name: Parker
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1818
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/30
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: classics, eye-catching-covers, female-authors, male-protagonists, multiple-povs, oh-boy-this-got-dark, sad-town, salt-inducing-stories, favorites
review:
"Alas! Why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings.' If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us."

It's silly, but I've been yearning for years after this Penguin Clothbound Classic edition of Frankenstein. With great fortune, it has finally found its way to my hands, and is now a most beloved possession.

There's a lot to unpack about Mary Shelley's masterwork. I could dissect every beautiful line I annotated, but I'm taken by one concept in particular. The creature is constructed by a man who thinks himself above the laws of nature. Yet, Frankenstein is disgusted by his offspring, casting him out and deeming him horrific. Thus, the creature is rejected by the force that gave him life. How do we persist when our gods abandon us? How do we understand and justify our existence? It's an incredibly tragic narrative, exploring complex facets of humanity, with debates that have stood the test of time.
]]> 17143 Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.]]> 256 James Baldwin 0141185910 Parker 0 to-read 4.06 1953
author: James Baldwin
name: Parker
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54785548 Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism

In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They stormed the FDA and NIH in Washington, DC, and started needle exchange programs in New York; they took over Grand Central Terminal and fought to change the legal definition of AIDS to include women; they transformed the American insurance industry, weaponized art and advertising to push their agenda, and battled--and beat--The New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry. Their activism, in its complex and intersectional power, transformed the lives of people with AIDS and the bigoted society that had abandoned them.

Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today's activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration--and long-overdue reassessment--of the coalition's inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining, with her characteristic rigor and bite, how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world.]]> 736 Sarah Schulman 0374185131 Parker 0 to-read 4.54 2021
author: Sarah Schulman
name: Parker
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211742041 The Cruel Prince meets The Selection in this captivating duology opener brimming with heart-pounding romance, vicious competition, and beautiful, cruel fae, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Witch Haven, Sasha Peyton Smith.

Every citizen of England is granted one bargain from their immortal fae queen.

High society girls are expected to bargain for qualities that will win them suitors: a rare talent for piano in exchange for one’s happiest childhood memory. A perfect smile for one’s ability to taste.

But Ivy Benton’s debut season arrives with a shocking twist: a competition to secure the heart of the Queen’s fae son, Prince Bram. A prize that could save Ivy’s family from ruin�� and free her sister from the bargain that destroyed her.

Yet every glittering fae deal has a rotting heart—and at the center of this contest is a dark plot that could destroy everything Ivy knows.

Sweepingly romantic and deceptively enchanting, this alternate history romantasy will enthrall readers of Holly Black, Stephanie Garber, and Adalyn Grace.]]> 400 Sasha Peyton Smith 0063372525 Parker 0 to-read 3.98 2025
author: Sasha Peyton Smith
name: Parker
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 916856 234 Winifred Watson 190315510X Parker 4 “How lovely!' she thought sentimentally. 'Is there anything more beautiful? Woman to woman. And they say we don't trust each other!��

miss pettigrew is brat. enough said.

well...

There's a lot to talk about, actually. I've been eyeing works from Persephone Books for quite some time. They take up a whole shelf at one of my favorite Boston bookstores (Beacon Hill Books & Cafe). I can't think of a more appropriate title to start with. Persephone publishes books written by women whose work went underappreciated during their lifetimes. Appropriately, the plot of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day also follows a woman given a second lease on life.

This book is a delight, from start to finish. Sure, it's pure fluff and fun, but we all need that sometimes. I, for one, have been craving it desperately. What I truly adore about this novel is the loving support women give to one another throughout it. That's what I like to see! Girl, it's so confusing to be a girl (girl, girl, girl, girl).

brat summer will never end. it is eternal. ]]> 3.98 1938
author: Winifred Watson
name: Parker
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1938
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: beauty-of-friendship, female-protagonists, female-authors, the-fun-stuff
review:
“How lovely!' she thought sentimentally. 'Is there anything more beautiful? Woman to woman. And they say we don't trust each other!��

miss pettigrew is brat. enough said.

well...

There's a lot to talk about, actually. I've been eyeing works from Persephone Books for quite some time. They take up a whole shelf at one of my favorite Boston bookstores (Beacon Hill Books & Cafe). I can't think of a more appropriate title to start with. Persephone publishes books written by women whose work went underappreciated during their lifetimes. Appropriately, the plot of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day also follows a woman given a second lease on life.

This book is a delight, from start to finish. Sure, it's pure fluff and fun, but we all need that sometimes. I, for one, have been craving it desperately. What I truly adore about this novel is the loving support women give to one another throughout it. That's what I like to see! Girl, it's so confusing to be a girl (girl, girl, girl, girl).

brat summer will never end. it is eternal.
]]> 205436018 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama.

A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend's house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 256 Han Kang 0593595459 Parker 0 to-read 3.87 2021
author: Han Kang
name: Parker
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54110592 Anime master Hayao Miyazaki’s favorite childhood book, in English for the first time.

First published in 1937, Genzaburō Yoshino’s How Do You Live? has long been acknowledged in Japan as a crossover classic for young readers. Academy Award–winning animator Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle) has called it his favorite childhood book and announced plans to emerge from retirement to make it the basis of a final film.

How Do You Live? is narrated in two voices. The first belongs to Copper, fifteen, who after the death of his father must confront inevitable and enormous change, including his own betrayal of his best friend. In between episodes of Copper’s emerging story, his uncle writes to him in a journal, sharing knowledge and offering advice on life’s big questions as Copper begins to encounter them. Over the course of the story, Copper, like his namesake Copernicus, looks to the stars, and uses his discoveries about the heavens, earth, and human nature to answer the question of how he will live.

This first-ever English-language translation of a Japanese classic about finding one’s place in a world both infinitely large and unimaginably small is perfect for readers of philosophical fiction like The Alchemist and The Little Prince, as well as Miyazaki fans eager to understand one of his most important influences.]]> 288 Genzaburo Yoshino 1616209771 Parker 0 to-read 4.00 1937
author: Genzaburo Yoshino
name: Parker
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1937
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199173002 A delightful queer Victorian love story, featuring a boldly brash trans hero, the beguiling botanist who captures his heart, and a buoyant bicycle race by the British seaside - from the author of The Duke Undone.

Former painter and unreformed rake Kit Griffith is forging a new life in Cornwall, choosing freedom over an identity that didn't fit. He knew that leaving his Sisterhood of women artists might mean forfeiting artistic community forever. He didn't realize he would lose his ability to paint altogether. Luckily, he has other talents. Why not devote himself to selling bicycles and trysting with the holidaymakers?

Enter Muriel Pendrake, the feisty New-York-bound botanist who has come to St. Ives to commission Kit for illustrations of British seaweeds. Kit shouldn't accept Muriel's offer, but he must enlist her help to prove to an all-male cycling club that women can ride as well as men. And she won't agree unless he gives her what she wants. Maybe that's exactly the challenge he needs.

As Kit and Muriel spend their days cycling together, their desire begins to burn with the heat of the summer sun. But are they pedaling toward something impossible? The past is bound to catch up to them, and at the season's end, their paths will diverge. With only their hearts as guides, Kit and Muriel must decide if they're willing to race into the unknown for the adventure of a lifetime.]]> 368 Joanna Lowell 0593549724 Parker 0 to-read 4.07 2024
author: Joanna Lowell
name: Parker
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61838467 Perfect for fans of Nina LaCour, This is Me Trying is a profound and tender YA contemporary novel exploring grief, love, and guilt from author Racquel Marie.

Growing up, Bryce, Beatriz, and Santiago were inseparable. But when Santiago moved away before high school, their friendship crumbled. Three years later, Bryce is gone, Beatriz is known as the dead boy’s girlfriend, and Santiago is back.

The last thing Beatriz wants is to reunite with Santiago, who left all her messages unanswered while she drowned alone in grief over Bryce’s death by suicide. Even if she wasn’t angry, Santiago’s attempts to make amends are jeopardizing her plan to keep the world at arm’s length―equal parts protection and punishment―and she swore to never let anyone try that again.

Santiago is surprised to find the once happy-go-lucky Bea is now the gothic town loner, though he’s unsurprised she wants nothing to do with him. But he can’t fix what he broke between them while still hiding what led him to cut her off in the first place, and it’s harder to run from his past when he isn’t states away anymore.

Inevitably drawn back together by circumstance and history, Beatriz and Santiago navigate grief, love, mental illness, forgiveness, and what it means to try to build a future after unfathomable loss.]]> Racquel Marie Parker 0 to-read 4.13 2024
author: Racquel Marie
name: Parker
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56251712 After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season.

Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history.

With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.]]> 417 N.K. Jemisin Parker 0 to-read, unread-owned 4.14 2010
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Parker
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read, unread-owned
review:

]]> 217163697 #1��New York Times��bestselling author Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a stranger’s life twenty-five years later.

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier. There’s Joar, who never backs down from a fight; quiet and bookish Ted who is mourning his father; Ali, the daughter of a man who never stays in one place for long; and finally, there’s the artist, a boy who hoards sleeping pills and shuns attention, but who possesses an extraordinary gift that might be his ticket to a better life. These four lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be put into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. As she struggles to decide what to do with this bequest, she embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn the story of how the painting came to be. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more she feels compelled to unleash her own artistic spirit, but happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this fresh testament to the transformative power of friendship and art.]]> 448 Fredrik Backman 1982112824 Parker 0 to-read 4.59 2025
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Parker
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
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 Parker 0 to-read 4.27 2016
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Parker
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60656395 The Exorcist meets Lord of the Flies, by way of Midnight Mass, in Boys in the Valley, a brilliant coming-of-age tale from award-winning author Philip Fracassi.

“A sublimely chilling story.�� ��Library Journal, STARRED review

St. Vincent's Orphanage for Boys.

Turn of the century, in a remote valley in Pennsylvania.

Here, under the watchful eyes of several priests, thirty boys work, learn, and worship. Peter Barlow, orphaned as a child by a gruesome murder, has made a new life here. As he approaches adulthood, he has friends, a future...a family.

Then, late one stormy night, a group of men arrive at their door, one of whom is badly wounded, occult symbols carved into his flesh. His death releases an ancient evil that spreads like sickness, infecting St. Vincent's and the children within. Soon, boys begin acting differently, forming groups. Taking sides.

Others turn up dead.

Now Peter and those dear to him must choose sides of their own, each of them knowing their lives �� and perhaps their eternal souls �� are at risk.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 335 Philip Fracassi 1250879043 Parker 5 “It is his love for the boy that weakens him. But that’s what love is, ultimately. A form of blessed weakness.��

I rarely read horror, and have very few reading friends who do. I likely wouldn't have stumbled on Boys in the Valley if it weren't for by one of my favorite Youtube channels. So credit where credit is due, Friendly Space Ninja never steers me wrong!

This was one hell of a book. Based on the premise, I expected bloodcurdling horror sequences, and the novel delivered on that. Possessed children are always terrifying, especially when paired with a dreary orphanage during a winter storm.

However, what I didn't expect was how emotionally invested I'd be in the characters. From Peter's religious struggle between Earthly and eternal love, Father Andrew's tender mentorship, and Brother Johnson's disturbingly criminal mind, Fracassi's characters are well-rounded, complex human beings. Add some beautifully crafted relationships on top of that, and you've got all the makings of a story that will make Parker bawl her eyes out. The ending did me in, man. In fact, I spent most of the latter half of this book looking like this:


I am spent. This is a fantastic horror with a strong emotional core. An unsettling tale, but ultimately heartwarming. Evil prays on the minds of the haunted, but we can always fight to protect the light inside us.]]> 4.19 2023
author: Philip Fracassi
name: Parker
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: salt-inducing-stories, sad-town, oh-boy-this-got-dark, multiple-povs, male-authors, male-protagonists, ebook, beauty-of-friendship, creative-concepts
review:
“It is his love for the boy that weakens him. But that’s what love is, ultimately. A form of blessed weakness.��

I rarely read horror, and have very few reading friends who do. I likely wouldn't have stumbled on Boys in the Valley if it weren't for by one of my favorite Youtube channels. So credit where credit is due, Friendly Space Ninja never steers me wrong!

This was one hell of a book. Based on the premise, I expected bloodcurdling horror sequences, and the novel delivered on that. Possessed children are always terrifying, especially when paired with a dreary orphanage during a winter storm.

However, what I didn't expect was how emotionally invested I'd be in the characters. From Peter's religious struggle between Earthly and eternal love, Father Andrew's tender mentorship, and Brother Johnson's disturbingly criminal mind, Fracassi's characters are well-rounded, complex human beings. Add some beautifully crafted relationships on top of that, and you've got all the makings of a story that will make Parker bawl her eyes out. The ending did me in, man. In fact, I spent most of the latter half of this book looking like this:


I am spent. This is a fantastic horror with a strong emotional core. An unsettling tale, but ultimately heartwarming. Evil prays on the minds of the haunted, but we can always fight to protect the light inside us.
]]> 48677123 A thrilling departure: A short, piercing, deeply moving new novel from the acclaimed author of I Am, I Am, I Am, about the death of Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son Hamnet--a name interchangeable with Hamlet in fifteenth-century Britain--and the years leading up to the production of his great play.

England, 1580. A young Latin tutor--penniless, bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman: a wild creature who walks her family's estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when his beloved young son succumbs to bubonic plague.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down novel from one of our most gifted writers.]]> 310 Maggie O'Farrell 0525657606 Parker 0 to-read, unread-owned 4.18 2020
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Parker
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read, unread-owned
review:

]]> 61937038
The remote island of Masquapaug has not seen a dragon in many generations—until fifteen-year-old Anequs finds a dragon’s egg and bonds with its hatchling. Her people are delighted, for all remember the tales of the days when dragons lived among them and danced away the storms of autumn, enabling the people to thrive. To them, Anequs is revered as Nampeshiweisit—a person in a unique relationship with a dragon.

Unfortunately for Anequs, the Anglish conquerors of her land have different opinions. They have a very specific idea of how a dragon should be raised, and who should be doing the raising—and Anequs does not meet any of their requirements. Only with great reluctance do they allow Anequs to enroll in a proper Anglish dragon school on the mainland. If she cannot succeed there, her dragon will be killed.

For a girl with no formal schooling, a non-Anglish upbringing, and a very different understanding of the history of her land, challenges abound—both socially and academically. But Anequs is smart, determined, and resolved to learn what she needs to help her dragon, even if it means teaching herself. The one thing she refuses to do, however, is become the meek Anglish miss that everyone expects.

Anequs and her dragon may be coming of age, but they’re also coming to power, and that brings an important realization: the world needs changing—and they might just be the ones to do it.]]> 511 Moniquill Blackgoose 0593498283 Parker 0 to-read 4.11 2023
author: Moniquill Blackgoose
name: Parker
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 65212802
When Sophia Galich was twelve, she starred in her older sister Layla’s amateur horror movie Vermillion, which recorded raw footage of her very real reactions to scenes her sister concocted in their old Californian house on the coast―Cashore House.

In the years after the film’s release, Sophia’s relationship with her sister became more strained, while her memories of the now-infamous house fueled her nightmares. Vermillion amassed an army of fanatical fans who speculated about the film’s hidden messages, and it was rumored that Layla made a pact with the devil―her soul in exchange for fame and arcane knowledge. Sophia dismissed this as gossip…until Layla disappeared.

Now, Sophia must study the trail of clues Layla has left behind, returning to the very place where it all began. As she gets closer and closer to Cashore House’s haunted heart, she must once again confront the ghosts of her childhood. But the house won’t reveal its secrets without a fight.]]> 368 Katya de Becerra 1645679632 Parker 0 to-read 3.63 2023
author: Katya de Becerra
name: Parker
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 16475459
At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender,

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.]]> 176 Jeanette Winterson 0802135161 Parker 2 ------
Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way."

Unfortunately, I couldn't get into Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. It's an important book in the queer literary canon, but my emotions were largely stunted reading this. I find the novel's structure too disjointed for my taste. Jeanette's relationship conflicts, whether that be with her mother, love interests, or religion itself, offer compelling hooks, but lack the thorough exploration I crave in stories like this. Might have to revisit this when I'm in a different mood.

I will say though, any book that references Christina Rossetti's "The Goblin Market" gets extra points. So props to that! ]]> 3.72 1985
author: Jeanette Winterson
name: Parker
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1985
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: eye-catching-covers, female-protagonists, female-authors, lgbtqa-themes, salt-inducing-stories, true-stories, the-fun-stuff
review:
2.5
------
Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way."

Unfortunately, I couldn't get into Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. It's an important book in the queer literary canon, but my emotions were largely stunted reading this. I find the novel's structure too disjointed for my taste. Jeanette's relationship conflicts, whether that be with her mother, love interests, or religion itself, offer compelling hooks, but lack the thorough exploration I crave in stories like this. Might have to revisit this when I'm in a different mood.

I will say though, any book that references Christina Rossetti's "The Goblin Market" gets extra points. So props to that!
]]> 59807975
An exiled auspex who sold her soul to save her brother's life is offered one last job before serving an eternity in hell. When she turns it down, her client sweetens the pot by offering up the one payment she can't resist―the chance to have a future where she grows old with the woman she loves.

To succeed, she is given three days to track down the White City Vampire, Chicago's most notorious serial killer. If she fails, only hell and heartbreak await.]]> 136 C.L. Polk 1250849454 Parker 0 to-read 3.80 2022
author: C.L. Polk
name: Parker
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
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 Parker 5 “It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything."

A confrontation of subtle evil. Small Things Like These is about as close to perfection as possible. Through Furlong, an excellent, endearing character, we explore the costs of complicity, and what it takes to act against it. Keegan's prose never falters, and I'm moved by how attaching her narrative is for so short a page count.]]> 4.14 2021
author: Claire Keegan
name: Parker
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: sad-town, oh-boy-this-got-dark, male-protagonists, female-authors, favorites
review:
“It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything."

A confrontation of subtle evil. Small Things Like These is about as close to perfection as possible. Through Furlong, an excellent, endearing character, we explore the costs of complicity, and what it takes to act against it. Keegan's prose never falters, and I'm moved by how attaching her narrative is for so short a page count.
]]> 123195171 Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individual topics: Can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting?

In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication’s “Work Friend�� columnist, Gay reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights. Opinions is a collection of her best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years. Covering a wide range of topics—politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more—with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay’s devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.]]> 320 Roxane Gay 0063341468 Parker 4
And that marks the end of my 2024 books! My top five from this year were:
- James by Percival Everett
- The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
- Here After by Amy Lin
- Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
- Anxious People by Frederick Backman

Honorable mentions to The Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti, and the Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures collection.]]> 4.01 2023
author: Roxane Gay
name: Parker
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves:
review:
Incredibly pleased to have wrapped up my reading year with this collection of essays/articles from Roxane Gay. Her wit, honesty, and empathy are on full display. My favorite section is “Minding Other People’s Business,�� since Gay is such a respectful, yet introspective interviewer.

And that marks the end of my 2024 books! My top five from this year were:
- James by Percival Everett
- The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
- Here After by Amy Lin
- Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
- Anxious People by Frederick Backman

Honorable mentions to The Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti, and the Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures collection.
]]> 8366402 The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weeklytrips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,�� a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,�� Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories�� of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.]]> 338 Téa Obreht 0385343833 Parker 0 to-read 3.41 2011
author: Téa Obreht
name: Parker
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22444789
Delicious Foods tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. In Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, and in the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose not only infuses their desperate circumstances with grace and humor, but also wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom.]]> 371 James Hannaham 0316284947 Parker 0 to-read 3.80 2015
author: James Hannaham
name: Parker
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 32710957
As Fanny becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the conduct of her companions, she finds herself isolated and forced to face the conflict between her sense of integrity and social expectation.]]> 448 Jane Austen 1847495982 Parker 3 3.64 1814
author: Jane Austen
name: Parker
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1814
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/22
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: beauty-of-friendship, classics, summer-2024, female-protagonists, female-authors, salt-inducing-stories, the-fun-stuff
review:
I like Fanny. It’s a shame her children will be inbred.
]]> 11468377 Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.]]> 499 Daniel Kahneman 0374275637 Parker 0 to-read 4.17 2011
author: Daniel Kahneman
name: Parker
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199957778 The Politics of Collecting, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp’s canonization has more to do with his patron’s donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp’s work, and uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry’s collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic success and talent and calls for a new vision of art beyond the cultural institution.]]> 328 Eunsong Kim 1478026243 Parker 0 to-read, unread-owned 4.45
author: Eunsong Kim
name: Parker
average rating: 4.45
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read, unread-owned
review:

]]> 59571699 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis comes a new STEMinist rom-com in which a scientist is forced to work on a project with her nemesis—with explosive results.

Bee Königswasser lives by a simple code: What would Marie Curie do? If NASA offered her the lead on a neuroengineering project - a literal dream come true - Marie would accept without hesitation. Duh. But the mother of modern physics never had to co-lead with Levi Ward.

Sure, Levi is attractive in a tall, dark, and piercing-eyes kind of way. But Levi made his feelings toward Bee very clear in grad school - archenemies work best employed in their own galaxies far, far away.

But when her equipment starts to go missing and the staff ignore her, Bee could swear she sees Levi softening into an ally, backing her plays, seconding her ideas... devouring her with those eyes. The possibilities have all her neurons firing.

But when it comes time to actually make a move and put her heart on the line, there's only one question that matters: What will Bee Königswasser do?]]> 368 Ali Hazelwood 1408725789 Parker 3








I'm so lonely.]]> 3.88 2022
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Parker
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: beauty-of-friendship, female-authors, female-protagonists, lgbtqa-themes, the-fun-stuff
review:
Surprisingly, my favorite entry in Ali Hazelwood's MCU (Monster Cock Universe) starring Adam Driver as yet another ripped science bro.









I'm so lonely.
]]> 14201
Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician: the brilliant novice Jonathan Strange.

Young, handsome and daring, Strange is the very antithesis of Norrell. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men which overwhelms that between England and France. And their own obsessions and secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine.]]> 1006 Susanna Clarke Parker 0 to-read 3.84 2004
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Parker
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 20893314
Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts��A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 70s, to the crack wars in 80s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 90s. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic that will secure Marlon James�� place among the great literary talents of his generation.]]> 688 Marlon James 159448600X Parker 0 to-read 3.91 2014
author: Marlon James
name: Parker
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199798286
“Twice upon a time—for that is how some stories should continue…��

In this “dark fairy tale�� ( Kirkus Reviews ), Phoebe, an eight-year-old girl, lies comatose following a car accident—a body without a spirit. Ceres, her mother, can only sit by her bedside and read aloud the fairy stories Phoebe loves in the hope they might summon her back to this world.

But an old house on the hospital grounds, a property connected to a book written by a vanished author, is calling to Ceres. Something wants her to enter, to journey to a land colored by the memories of childhood, and the folklore beloved of her father—a land of witches and dryads, giants and mandrakes; a land where old enemies are watching and waiting��

The Land of Lost Things.]]> 368 John Connolly 166802229X Parker 3 ----
"We're not creatures of flesh and blood alone, no more than a book is just ink, paper, and card. We’re beings of tale and fable. We exist as narratives. This is how we understand the world, and this is how we must be understood."

The Land of Lost Things didn't blow me away like its predecessor, but I'm still left equally enchanted and disturbed by Connolly's mysterious world. Having an adult venture into Elsewhere is an interesting twist on the series' concept. Ceres and her central arc are the strongest beats of this novel. Her grief and dedication to her daughter Pheobe make for a noble, yet realistic protagonist. In Book 1, David is a child maturing in a dark and unrewarding world. In Book 2, Ceres is on a similar journey, but as an adult returning to her childhood for renewed hope.

Unfortunately, this novel is a lot messier than the original one. Whereas the first book succeeded in balancing its humorous tone with darker themes, The Land of Lost Things unevenly stumbles. There are also way too many characters introduced and then hushed away. The first book did that too, the structure just doesn't work as well during the second go-round. Did we really need The Crooked Man again? Why not just focus on the chillingly intriguing Fae instead? I loved the tales shared about them! They're a malicious enough force to threaten Ceres on their own.

While I enjoyed the parental relationship between the Woodsman and Ceres, it's not as developed as I'd like it to be. The same goes with David, who miraculously, shows up for a few scenes, barely does anything memorable, and then peaces out. Such a shame. Would have loved to have seen more conversations between him and Ceres, who is essentially a reader who ventured into his book.]]> 3.40 2023
author: John Connolly
name: Parker
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/04
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves: beauty-of-friendship, creative-concepts, eye-catching-covers, female-protagonists, male-authors, multiple-povs, oh-boy-this-got-dark, sad-town, the-fun-stuff
review:
3.5
----
"We're not creatures of flesh and blood alone, no more than a book is just ink, paper, and card. We’re beings of tale and fable. We exist as narratives. This is how we understand the world, and this is how we must be understood."

The Land of Lost Things didn't blow me away like its predecessor, but I'm still left equally enchanted and disturbed by Connolly's mysterious world. Having an adult venture into Elsewhere is an interesting twist on the series' concept. Ceres and her central arc are the strongest beats of this novel. Her grief and dedication to her daughter Pheobe make for a noble, yet realistic protagonist. In Book 1, David is a child maturing in a dark and unrewarding world. In Book 2, Ceres is on a similar journey, but as an adult returning to her childhood for renewed hope.

Unfortunately, this novel is a lot messier than the original one. Whereas the first book succeeded in balancing its humorous tone with darker themes, The Land of Lost Things unevenly stumbles. There are also way too many characters introduced and then hushed away. The first book did that too, the structure just doesn't work as well during the second go-round. Did we really need The Crooked Man again? Why not just focus on the chillingly intriguing Fae instead? I loved the tales shared about them! They're a malicious enough force to threaten Ceres on their own.

While I enjoyed the parental relationship between the Woodsman and Ceres, it's not as developed as I'd like it to be. The same goes with David, who miraculously, shows up for a few scenes, barely does anything memorable, and then peaces out. Such a shame. Would have loved to have seen more conversations between him and Ceres, who is essentially a reader who ventured into his book.
]]> 201751300 An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations

Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In The Bookshop, we see those stakes: what has been, and what might be lost.

Evan Friss’s history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including The Strand, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who appeared to sign books at Marshall Field’s in 1944.

The Bookshop is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life—and why we still need them.]]> 416 Evan Friss 0593299922 Parker 0 to-read 3.93 2024
author: Evan Friss
name: Parker
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Parker 0 to-read 4.11 2024
author: Alison Espach
name: Parker
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199700434 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide.

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 478 Liz Moore 0593418913 Parker 0 to-read 4.10 2024
author: Liz Moore
name: Parker
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 48902303 A funny, sexy, profound dramedy about two young people at a crossroads in their relationship and the limits of love.

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years -- good years -- but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.

But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.

Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love.]]> 320 Bryan Washington Parker 0 to-read 3.54 2020
author: Bryan Washington
name: Parker
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

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

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

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Parker 0 to-read 4.01 2022
author: Hua Hsu
name: Parker
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Parker 3 -------
"She lets out a trembling kind of laugh. Well, if there is a God, she says, I'm sure he loves you very much.

He lowers his eyes. Yeah, I can feel that sometimes, he says.

Like when I'm with you, I can. If you don't mind me saying that.

Her voice sounds strange to her, lighter or thinner than usual, when she replies: I don't mind, of course not. It's a nice thing to say."

I have complicated feelings about Intermezzo. It delivers exactly where I'd expect it to: in its angsty, slightly fucked romantic relationships. That's the bread and butter of a Sally Rooney book. Whether it's Margaret's hesitation with Ivan over their age gap, or Peter's internal battle between choosing Sylvia (familiar, safe love) or Naomi (new, thrilling love), the novel's complicated character dynamics are fascinating threads to follow.

Sally's artistic omission of quotation marks is especially powerful for Peter's POV. He's a man so lost in his own thoughts that his chapters blur the lines between what he wants to say versus what he allows himself to express. This creates an effective confusion between dialogue and internal monologue. This style choice alone is the most compelling part of the book.

Unfortunately, what lowers Intermezzo's rating for me is my emotional detachment from the characters. A vivid picture is painted of Ivan and Peter's grief, leading them down different paths of suffering, but I never connected with them as well as I did Connell or Marianne in Normal People, or Alice and Eileen in Beautiful World, Where Are You. This time around, I fear that Rooney's signature brooding narrative style wore me down. As some other reviews have suggested, this book's length works against the story's scale. It's incredibly dense, making for a difficult, sometimes painful read that frustrates rather than intrigues.

For one of my most anticipated reads this year, I'm left relatively unsatisfied, and that's a damn shame. I still believe Rooney is one of our finest contemporary authors, and I'm sure to check out whatever she has in store, but Intermezzo failed to attach me to its narrative.]]> 3.88 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Parker
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: fiction-addiction-club, female-authors, male-protagonists, multiple-povs, sad-town, salt-inducing-stories, eye-catching-covers
review:
3.5
-------
"She lets out a trembling kind of laugh. Well, if there is a God, she says, I'm sure he loves you very much.

He lowers his eyes. Yeah, I can feel that sometimes, he says.

Like when I'm with you, I can. If you don't mind me saying that.

Her voice sounds strange to her, lighter or thinner than usual, when she replies: I don't mind, of course not. It's a nice thing to say."

I have complicated feelings about Intermezzo. It delivers exactly where I'd expect it to: in its angsty, slightly fucked romantic relationships. That's the bread and butter of a Sally Rooney book. Whether it's Margaret's hesitation with Ivan over their age gap, or Peter's internal battle between choosing Sylvia (familiar, safe love) or Naomi (new, thrilling love), the novel's complicated character dynamics are fascinating threads to follow.

Sally's artistic omission of quotation marks is especially powerful for Peter's POV. He's a man so lost in his own thoughts that his chapters blur the lines between what he wants to say versus what he allows himself to express. This creates an effective confusion between dialogue and internal monologue. This style choice alone is the most compelling part of the book.

Unfortunately, what lowers Intermezzo's rating for me is my emotional detachment from the characters. A vivid picture is painted of Ivan and Peter's grief, leading them down different paths of suffering, but I never connected with them as well as I did Connell or Marianne in Normal People, or Alice and Eileen in Beautiful World, Where Are You. This time around, I fear that Rooney's signature brooding narrative style wore me down. As some other reviews have suggested, this book's length works against the story's scale. It's incredibly dense, making for a difficult, sometimes painful read that frustrates rather than intrigues.

For one of my most anticipated reads this year, I'm left relatively unsatisfied, and that's a damn shame. I still believe Rooney is one of our finest contemporary authors, and I'm sure to check out whatever she has in store, but Intermezzo failed to attach me to its narrative.
]]> 211081101
The only route through a storm-ravaged world, the Bridge Kingdom enriches itself and deprives its rivals, including Lara's homeland. So when she’s sent as a bride under the guise of peace, Lara is prepared to do whatever it takes to fracture its impenetrable defenses. And the defenses of its king.

Yet as she infiltrates her new home and gains a deeper understanding of the war to possess the bridge, Lara begins to question whether she’s the hero or the villain. And as her feelings for Aren transform from frosty hostility to fierce passion, Lara must choose which kingdom she’ll save�� and which kingdom she’ll destroy.

Passionate and violent, The Bridge Kingdom is a seductive fantasy perfect for fans of From Blood and Ash and A Court of Thorns and Roses.]]> 448 Danielle L. Jensen 0593975189 Parker 0 to-read 4.01 2018
author: Danielle L. Jensen
name: Parker
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 165940202
Bound in an unwanted marriage, Freya spends her days gutting fish, but dreams of becoming a warrior. And of putting an axe in her boorish husband’s back.

Freya’s dreams abruptly become reality when her husband betrays her to the region’s jarl, landing her in a fight to the death against his son, Bjorn. To survive, Freya is forced to reveal her deepest secret: She possesses a drop of a goddess’s blood, which makes her a shield maiden with magic capable of repelling any attack. It was foretold such a magic would unite the fractured nation of Skaland beneath the one who controls the shield maiden’s fate.

Believing he’s destined to rule Skaland as king, the fanatical jarl binds Freya with a blood oath and orders Bjorn to protect her from their enemies. Desperate to prove her strength, Freya must train to fight and learn to control her magic, all while facing perilous tests set by the gods. The greatest test of all, however, may be resisting her forbidden attraction to Bjorn. If Freya succumbs to her lust for the charming and fierce warrior, she risks not only her own destiny but the fate of all the people she swore to protect.]]> 419 Danielle L. Jensen 0593599837 Parker 0 to-read 3.91 2024
author: Danielle L. Jensen
name: Parker
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 202507554 moons.

They certainly did not expect them to fall.

As a valued Elding Blade of the rebellion group Fíur du Ath, Raeve’s job is to kill. To complete orders and never get caught. When a renowned bounty hunter is employed by The Crown to capture a member of the Ath, Raeve’s world is turned upside down. Blood spills, hearts break, and Raeve finds herself at the mercy of the Guild of Nobles—a group of dual-beaded elementals who intend to turn her into a political statement. Only death will set her free.

Crushed beneath a mourning weight, Kaan Vaegor took the head of a king and donned his melted crown. Now on a tireless quest to assuage the never-ebbing ache in his chest, his hunt for a moonshard lures him into the belly of Gore’s notorious prison where he stumbles upon something that rips apart his perception of reality. A shackled miracle with eyes full of rage and blood on her hands.

The echo of the past sings louder than the Creators themselves, and even Raeve can’t ignore the truths blaring at her from a warmer, happier time.
However.
There’s more to this song than meets the eye, and some truths ��
They’re too poisonous to swallow.

When the Moon Hatched is a fast-paced fantasy romance for fans of witty banter and strong, sassy protagonists. Beneath the cover is an immersive, vibrant world with mysterious creatures, a unique magic system, and a love that blazes through the ages. ]]> 718 Sarah A. Parker Parker 0 to-read 3.99 2024
author: Sarah A. Parker
name: Parker
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60714999 Human or vampire, the rules of survival are the same: never trust, never yield, and always �� always �� guard your heart.

The adopted human daughter of the Nightborn vampire king, Oraya carved her place in a world designed to kill her. Her only chance to become something more than prey is entering the Kejari: a legendary tournament held by the goddess of death herself.

But winning won’t be easy amongst the most vicious warriors from all three vampire houses. To survive, Oraya is forced to make an alliance with a mysterious rival.

Everything about Raihn is dangerous. He is a ruthless vampire, an efficient killer, an enemy to her father’s crown�� and her greatest competition. Yet, what terrifies Oraya most of all is that she finds herself oddly drawn to him.

But there’s no room for compassion in the Kejari. War for the House of Night brews, shattering everything that Oraya thought she knew about her home. And Raihn may understand her more than anyone �� but their blossoming attraction could be her downfall, in a kingdom where nothing is more deadly than love.

The Serpent and the Wings of Night is the first book in a new series of heart-wrenching romance, dark magic, and bloodthirsty intrigue, perfect for fans of From Blood and Ash and A Court of Thorns and Roses.]]> 504 Carissa Broadbent Parker 0 to-read 4.30 2022
author: Carissa Broadbent
name: Parker
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 406373 Faust reworks the late medieval myth of a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract with Mephistopheles. The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seeks to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last forever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephistopheles and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe’s great work, the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agreement, and soon Faust is living a rejuvenated life and winning the love of the beautiful Gretchen. But in this compelling tragedy of arrogance, unfulfilled desire, and self-delusion, Faust heads inexorably toward an infernal destruction.]]> 503 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0385031149 Parker 0 to-read 3.90 1808
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Parker
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1808
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 87580 272 James Hogg 0192835904 Parker 0 to-read 3.70 1824
author: James Hogg
name: Parker
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1824
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215020997 London, 1837.
Boston, 2019.

Three young women, their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories tangling like roots.

One grows high, and one grows deep, and one grows wild.

And all of them grow teeth.]]> 560 Victoria E. Schwab 1035064642 Parker 0 to-read 4.38 2025
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Parker
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55404546 Four famous siblings throw an epic party to celebrate the end of the summer. But over the course of twenty-four hours, their lives will change forever.

Malibu: August, 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together, the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over—especially as the offspring of the legendary singer, Mick Riva.

The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the center of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud—because it is long past time to confess something to the brother from whom he’s been inseparable since birth.

Jay, on the other hand, is counting the minutes until nightfall, when the girl he can’t stop thinking about promised she’ll be there.

And Kit has a couple secrets of her own—including a guest she invited without consulting anyone.

By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family’s generations will all come bubbling to the surface.

Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them... and what they will leave behind.]]> 369 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1524798657 Parker 4
Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Reid's novels are addicting, and oh so full of drama, like an elevated soap opera. Malibu Rising's greatest strength is its core focus on the four Riva siblings. Each is distinct, with unique goals and relationships with one another. Part 1 breaks your heart with flashbacks to their mother and father's story, while Part 2 sends you over the edge with the wildest beach party of all time. What a night, dude. I think the ending is a tad overdramatic, but damn if it wasn't cathartic. ]]> 4.02 2021
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Parker
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: beauty-of-friendship, contains-cute-relationships, female-authors, female-protagonists, male-protagonists, multiple-povs, salt-inducing-stories
review:
Goodnight to everyone except Mick Riva.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Reid's novels are addicting, and oh so full of drama, like an elevated soap opera. Malibu Rising's greatest strength is its core focus on the four Riva siblings. Each is distinct, with unique goals and relationships with one another. Part 1 breaks your heart with flashbacks to their mother and father's story, while Part 2 sends you over the edge with the wildest beach party of all time. What a night, dude. I think the ending is a tad overdramatic, but damn if it wasn't cathartic.
]]> 123136728 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Parker 0 to-read 3.56 2023
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Parker
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 Parker 0 to-read 4.05 2024
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Parker
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61022861 Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US

It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household--where everything is so well tended to--and this summer must soon come to an end.

A story of astonishing emotional depth now expanded and newly revised in a standalone edition, Foster showcases Claire Keegan's great talent and cements her reputation as one of our most important and prodigious storytellers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 080216014X Parker 4 Foster as her best work. I can certainly see why. Keegan's prose is precise, and the story's quiet tragedy leaves a devastating blow at the end. However, I do think I would have liked more time spent with these characters, just to build up the relationships and draw me closer into their world.

Also, wow, with this I've marked my 400th read book on ŷ������. Woohoo!]]> 4.38 2010
author: Claire Keegan
name: Parker
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: sad-town, salt-inducing-stories, female-protagonists, female-authors
review:
I've been meaning to check out Claire Keegan for a while now. Many friends have cited Foster as her best work. I can certainly see why. Keegan's prose is precise, and the story's quiet tragedy leaves a devastating blow at the end. However, I do think I would have liked more time spent with these characters, just to build up the relationships and draw me closer into their world.

Also, wow, with this I've marked my 400th read book on ŷ������. Woohoo!
]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Parker 5 “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night,�� I said. “I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.��

This is one of the best books I've read this year. James is a magnificent reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Percival Everett has transformed a story I cared little for into an emotionally affecting journey. It deviates from the original storyline in meaningful ways, having some genuinely jaw-dropping reveals that reshape your entire interpretation of Mark Twain's novel.

In an interview for , Everett described himself as being "in conversation with Twain," carrying a unique lens the original could not. To anyone who says literary reimaginings are unnecessary, I highly recommend checking out this book. The structure is compelling, the prose is impactful, and the satire is excellent. James is a world-class protagonist, a complex man that only a writer as inventive as Everett could reshape. ]]> 4.47 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Parker
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/09
date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: creative-concepts, favorites, male-protagonists, male-authors, oh-boy-this-got-dark, poc-authors, poc-protagonists, sad-town, salt-inducing-stories
review:
“I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night,�� I said. “I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.��

This is one of the best books I've read this year. James is a magnificent reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Percival Everett has transformed a story I cared little for into an emotionally affecting journey. It deviates from the original storyline in meaningful ways, having some genuinely jaw-dropping reveals that reshape your entire interpretation of Mark Twain's novel.

In an interview for , Everett described himself as being "in conversation with Twain," carrying a unique lens the original could not. To anyone who says literary reimaginings are unnecessary, I highly recommend checking out this book. The structure is compelling, the prose is impactful, and the satire is excellent. James is a world-class protagonist, a complex man that only a writer as inventive as Everett could reshape.
]]> 56347335
Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition of Goblin Market & Other Poems features a preface by novelist Elizabeth Macneal and original illustrations by Laurence Housman.

Here is Christina Rossetti’s first critically acclaimed collection of poetry. Published in 1862, as well as ‘Goblin Market�� it contains some of her most treasured work, such as ‘A Birthday��, ‘An Apple Gathering�� and ‘Remember��. It launched her career as the foremost female poet of her time and, more than a century later, modern readers are still seduced by its symbolism and sensual language.]]> 208 Christina Rossetti 1529065380 Parker 5 "Hark! that's the nightingale,
Telling the selfsame tale
Her song told when this ancient earth was young:
So echoes answered when her song was sung
In the first wooded vale.
We call it love and pain
The passion of her strain;
And yet we little understand or know:
Why should it not be rather joy that so Throbs in each throbbing vein?"
- Excerpt from "Twilight Calm"

Beginning in summer and continuing well into fall, I sought solace at a willow tree in Boston Common, reading the lines of Rossetti's work under the midday sun. I found this collection tucked away in the corner of a bookstore; the last copy, waiting for me. During emotional hide tides, I'm never more thankful for the peaceful power of poetry. It calms the soul. Rossetti's enchanting verses sweep me away to fantastical and practical settings alike. Her poems are full of love, particularly for nature and sisterhood. Rosetti's words have been an inspiration and an affirmation of the hope I must hold onto. In times such as these, I won't soon forget that. ]]> 4.09 1862
author: Christina Rossetti
name: Parker
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1862
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: classics, creative-concepts, eye-catching-covers, female-authors, female-protagonists, favorites, poetry-and-in-verse-novels
review:
"Hark! that's the nightingale,
Telling the selfsame tale
Her song told when this ancient earth was young:
So echoes answered when her song was sung
In the first wooded vale.
We call it love and pain
The passion of her strain;
And yet we little understand or know:
Why should it not be rather joy that so Throbs in each throbbing vein?"
- Excerpt from "Twilight Calm"

Beginning in summer and continuing well into fall, I sought solace at a willow tree in Boston Common, reading the lines of Rossetti's work under the midday sun. I found this collection tucked away in the corner of a bookstore; the last copy, waiting for me. During emotional hide tides, I'm never more thankful for the peaceful power of poetry. It calms the soul. Rossetti's enchanting verses sweep me away to fantastical and practical settings alike. Her poems are full of love, particularly for nature and sisterhood. Rosetti's words have been an inspiration and an affirmation of the hope I must hold onto. In times such as these, I won't soon forget that.
]]> 34466883
For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Two boys will discover the secret of its smoke, mazes, and mirrors; two friends who will soon know all too well the heavy cost of wishes…and the stuff of nightmares.

Few novels have endured in the heart and memory as has Ray Bradbury’s unparalleled literary masterpiece Something Wicked This Way Comes . Scary and suspenseful, it is a timeless classic in the American canon.]]> 337 Ray Bradbury 1501167715 Parker 4 "Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles & smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light."

A delightfully twisted carnival ride of a read. It's perfect for spooky season! The atmosphere in this book is unmatched. Who knew existential dread could read so beautifully? Bradbury's yearnful prose makes me nostalgic for years that have yet to pass.

Unfortunately, the characters are a mixed bag. Mr. Dark is a fantastic villain, well contrasted by the subtle strength of Mr. Calloway, the elder of our three protagonists. As for the boys, Jim and Will, I wasn't as compelled by their journeys. Although, kids in books tend to annoy the hell out of me, so take my words with a grain of salt.

Looking forward to reading more Bradbury! His writing style is strikingly similar to mine, which is quite funny considering I've barely read his body of work. I'm sure he'll be quite the inspiration moving forward. ]]> 3.85 1962
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Parker
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves: beauty-of-friendship, classics, male-authors, male-protagonists, multiple-povs, oh-boy-this-got-dark, salt-inducing-stories, ebook
review:
"Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles & smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light."

A delightfully twisted carnival ride of a read. It's perfect for spooky season! The atmosphere in this book is unmatched. Who knew existential dread could read so beautifully? Bradbury's yearnful prose makes me nostalgic for years that have yet to pass.

Unfortunately, the characters are a mixed bag. Mr. Dark is a fantastic villain, well contrasted by the subtle strength of Mr. Calloway, the elder of our three protagonists. As for the boys, Jim and Will, I wasn't as compelled by their journeys. Although, kids in books tend to annoy the hell out of me, so take my words with a grain of salt.

Looking forward to reading more Bradbury! His writing style is strikingly similar to mine, which is quite funny considering I've barely read his body of work. I'm sure he'll be quite the inspiration moving forward.
]]> 220858074 An epic novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program and the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.

In the summer of 1980, astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin begins training to be an astronaut at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilots Hank Redmond and John Griffin; mission specialist Lydia Danes; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer. As the new astronauts prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined and begins to question everything she believes about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.

Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.]]> 352 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1804941263 Parker 0 to-read 4.70 2025
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Parker
average rating: 4.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6280118
So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that?

And every year that follows?
--back cover]]> 435 David Nicholls 0340896965 Parker 0 to-read 3.86 2009
author: David Nicholls
name: Parker
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52189092 Alternate cover edition of ASIN: B07T3XJH4Z

Everyone in Fairview knows the story.

Pretty and popular high school senior Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed himself. It was all anyone could talk about. And five years later, Pip sees how the tragedy still haunts her town.

But she can’t shake the feeling that there was more to what happened that day. She knew Sal when she was a child, and he was always so kind to her. How could he possibly have been a killer?

Now a senior herself, Pip decides to reexamine the closed case for her final project, at first just to cast doubt on the original investigation. But soon she discovers a trail of dark secrets that might actually prove Sal innocent . . . and the line between past and present begins to blur. Someone in Fairview doesn’t want Pip digging around for answers, and now her own life might be in danger.

This is the story of an investigation turned obsession, full of twists and turns and with an ending you’ll never expect.]]> 400 Holly Jackson Parker 3
My roommate spoiled the big twist during a rant review two years ago, which I said didn't matter because I would never read the book. Lo and behold, here we are! Despite knowing the outcome of the mystery, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder remained a fun page-turner. I'm particularly drawn to Ravi's character, and the compelling inner conflict he hosts while trying to solve a crime that led to the death and defamation of his older brother. Honestly, I wish this book were in his POV.

The unfortunate detail of my review is that its loss of stars comes not from the quality of the story, but the piss poor "translation" of the original U.K. setting to an American one for the U.S. edition. Who thought that was a good idea? Not only does it cheapen the ethnic tension storyline about Ravi and the town community, but it just...doesn't work. American children don't talk with British slang. It's so offputting to read.

Another issue I find with this novel is its inconsistent tone. It feels too silly at times, then entirely serious the next. Perhaps that's due to the juvenile age of the characters, but it took me out of an otherwise gripping narrative. I also find many characters, especially Pip's friends, to just be useless filler.

Curious to see what book club thinks about this one!]]> 4.23 2019
author: Holly Jackson
name: Parker
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: fiction-addiction-club, contains-cute-relationships, eye-catching-covers, female-authors, female-protagonists, oh-boy-this-got-dark, salt-inducing-stories, ebook
review:

My roommate spoiled the big twist during a rant review two years ago, which I said didn't matter because I would never read the book. Lo and behold, here we are! Despite knowing the outcome of the mystery, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder remained a fun page-turner. I'm particularly drawn to Ravi's character, and the compelling inner conflict he hosts while trying to solve a crime that led to the death and defamation of his older brother. Honestly, I wish this book were in his POV.

The unfortunate detail of my review is that its loss of stars comes not from the quality of the story, but the piss poor "translation" of the original U.K. setting to an American one for the U.S. edition. Who thought that was a good idea? Not only does it cheapen the ethnic tension storyline about Ravi and the town community, but it just...doesn't work. American children don't talk with British slang. It's so offputting to read.

Another issue I find with this novel is its inconsistent tone. It feels too silly at times, then entirely serious the next. Perhaps that's due to the juvenile age of the characters, but it took me out of an otherwise gripping narrative. I also find many characters, especially Pip's friends, to just be useless filler.

Curious to see what book club thinks about this one!
]]> 394535 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 351 Cormac McCarthy Parker 0 unread-owned, to-read 4.18 1985
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Parker
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: unread-owned, to-read
review:

]]> 1201724 Winner of the Stoker Award and named one of the 100 Best Novels of 2006 by Publishers Weekly, Dark Harvest is a powerhouse thrill-ride with all the resonance of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."

Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, or Ol' Hacksaw Face, or Sawtooth Jack. Whatever the name, everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. How he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare. Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death.

Pete McCormick knows that killing the October Boy is his one chance to escape a dead-end future in this one-horse town. He's willing to risk everything, including his life, to be a winner for once. But before the night is over, Pete will look into the saw-toothed face of horror �� and discover the terrifying true secret of the October Boy…]]> 169 Norman Partridge 076531911X Parker 0 to-read 3.59 2006
author: Norman Partridge
name: Parker
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55835474
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. She had imagined - what was it she had imagined? Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.

Instead, quite suddenly, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. Sharper canines. Strange new patches of hair. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice...

With its clear eyes on contemporary womanhood and sharp take on structures of power, Nightbitch is an outrageously original, joyfully subversive read that will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. Addictive enough to be devoured in one sitting, this is an unforgettable novel from a blazing new talent.]]> 256 Rachel Yoder 0385546815 Parker 0 to-read 3.47 2021
author: Rachel Yoder
name: Parker
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53180064 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781951213145.

Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy's clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about.

Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both. But there is something within Dorothy that's different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself.

Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority.

A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers' A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world's most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.]]> 240 Chelsea G. Summers Parker 0 to-read 3.77 2019
author: Chelsea G. Summers
name: Parker
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
review:

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