en-US Fri, 31 Jan 2025 16:04:34 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 15778631 alternate cover for ISBN 0553562614

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about Infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous... you'll recognize it immediately.

Cover illustration by Bruce Jensen

]]> 470 Neal Stephenson Rayroy 4 4.05 1992
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2016/04/30
date added: 2025/01/31
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Rat Thing a Kouirer's best friend! Snow Crash is a modern epic, about a girl and her dog in a cyberpunk So-Cal.
]]> 8483195 Potter shows how relentless PR assaults play an insidious role in our political process anywhere that corporate profits are at stake-from climate change to defense policy. Deadly Spin tells us why-and how-we must fight back.]]> 278 Wendell Potter 1608192814 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.15 2010
author: Wendell Potter
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 203579244 370 C.J. Leede 1250857929 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.06 2024
author: C.J. Leede
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> 199349912 A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling, far from home, as she gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags

The Coin follows a Palestinian woman as she pursues a dream that generations of her family have failed at: to live and thrive in America. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys in New York, where her eccentric methods cross conventional boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags, the value of which "increases, year by year, regardless of poverty, of war, of famine." The juxtaposition of luxury and the abject engulfs her as she is able to con her way to bag after bag, preoccupied by the suffering she knows of the world.

Eventually, her body and mind go to war. America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her ideology. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her feelings of existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

Enthralling, sensory, and uncanny, The Coin explores materiality, nature and civilization, class, homelessness, sexuality, beauty—and how oppression and inherited trauma manifest in every area of our lives—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative and original, humorous and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.]]> 240 Yasmin Zaher 1646222105 Rayroy 3 3.50 2024
author: Yasmin Zaher
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

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

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Rayroy 4 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> 209336456 160 Nat Cassidy 1959565362 Rayroy 4 3.69 2024
author: Nat Cassidy
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/02
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]]> 36536257 Parable of the Sower is the odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of "Paints," people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old Black woman, sets off on foot, moving north along the dangerous coastal highways. She is a "sharer," one who suffers from a hereditary trait called "hyperempathy," which causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own.

Parable of the Sower is both a coming of age novel and a road novel, set in the near future, when the dying embers of our old civilization can either cool or be the catalyst for something new.]]> 332 Octavia E. Butler Rayroy 4 4.28 1993
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> 54408033 436 Christopher Buehlman Rayroy 0 currently-reading 4.24 2012
author: Christopher Buehlman
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 15803141
The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. At its center is Kushner’s brilliantly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination.]]> 383 Rachel Kushner 1439142009 Rayroy 5 3.51 2013
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/11/22
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]]> 194020321
After their mother passes, three estranged siblings reunite to sort out her estate. Beth, the oldest, never left home. She stayed with her mom, caring for her until the very end. Nicole, the middle child, has been kept at arm’s length due to her ongoing battle with a serious drug addiction. Michael, the youngest, lives out of state and hasn’t been back to their small Wisconsin town since their father ran out on them seven years before.

While going through their parent’s belongings, the siblings stumble upon a collection of home videos and decide to revisit those happier memories. However, the nostalgia is cut short when one of the VHS tapes reveals a night back in 1999 that none of them have any recollection of. On screen, their father appears covered in blood. What follows is a dead body and a pact between their parents to get rid of it, before the video abruptly ends.

Beth, Nicole, and Michael must now decide whether to leave the past in the past or uncover the dark secret their mother took to her grave.]]> 256 Jeneva Rose Rayroy 0 to-read 3.77 2024
author: Jeneva Rose
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.35 2024
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> 203956643 A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “one of Latin America’s most exciting authors�� (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.

Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.

Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”]]> 257 Mariana Enríquez 0593733258 Rayroy 0 currently-reading 3.80 2024
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/08
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 49090884
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.�� Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.]]> 209 Agustina Bazterrica 1982150920 Rayroy 4 3.76 2017
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves:
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]]> 6256687 195 Stewart O'Nan 031242891X Rayroy 5 3.96 1999
author: Stewart O'Nan
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2014/05/21
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves:
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]]> 57891 624 Koushun Takami 156931778X Rayroy 0 to-read 4.26 1999
author: Koushun Takami
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 103511768
We’ve all dated someone who took control of the relationship—you know, someone who makes you feel like you’re unhappy because you’re just not putting in the work, or it’s all in your head. But when you think about trying to meet new people, it feels terrifying. Like, have you looked at Tinder recently? It’s rough out there!

Your tough-love new best friend, award-winning journalist, policy attorney, and life-long socialist Malaika Jabali is here to we are all in a generations-long toxic relationship with Capitalism, and it is time to get the h*ll out of there and move ALONG.

She gives you everything you need to know about what a healthy relationship could actually look like, issue by issue—from healthcare and housing to the whole concept of American democracy—with our new Socialism. And no, Socialism isn’t the boring, grey, authoritarian, Cold-War-era monster that you’ve heard about.��

With accessible explanations and illustrations, often surprising graphs and stats, and some Drake memes, this book will show you that we NEED to build a world that’s safer, kinder, cleaner, healthier, and more equal. And that this isn’t a utopian dream �� it’s within our grasp, if we collectively decide to call out Capitalism for what it really is and wake up to a better future.
��
Fun, smart, and inspiring, It’s Not You It’s Capitalism is the hottest new relationship in your life!]]> 224 Malaika Jabali 1643752642 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.91 2023
author: Malaika Jabali
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 192631903 186 Paolo Iacovelli 1960988085 Rayroy 4 4.17
author: Paolo Iacovelli
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/21
date added: 2024/10/21
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]]> 208499319 264 Emmalea Russo 1648210643 Rayroy 4 3.65 2024
author: Emmalea Russo
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/12
date added: 2024/10/12
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]]> 17332218 From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance, Book Two of the Stormlight Archive, continues the immersive fantasy epic that The Way of Kings began.

Expected by his enemies to die the miserable death of a military slave, Kaladin survived to be given command of the royal bodyguards, a controversial first for a low-status "darkeyes." Now he must protect the king and Dalinar from every common peril as well as the distinctly uncommon threat of the Assassin, all while secretly struggling to master remarkable new powers that are somehow linked to his honorspren, Syl.

The Assassin, Szeth, is active again, murdering rulers all over the world of Roshar, using his baffling powers to thwart every bodyguard and elude all pursuers. Among his prime targets is Highprince Dalinar, widely considered the power behind the Alethi throne. His leading role in the war would seem reason enough, but the Assassin's master has much deeper motives.

Brilliant but troubled Shallan strives along a parallel path. Despite being broken in ways she refuses to acknowledge, she bears a terrible burden: to somehow prevent the return of the legendary Voidbringers and the civilization-ending Desolation that will follow. The secrets she needs can be found at the Shattered Plains, but just arriving there proves more difficult than she could have imagined.

Meanwhile, at the heart of the Shattered Plains, the Parshendi are making an epochal decision. Hard pressed by years of Alethi attacks, their numbers ever shrinking, they are convinced by their war leader, Eshonai, to risk everything on a desperate gamble with the very supernatural forces they once fled. The possible consequences for Parshendi and humans alike, indeed, for Roshar itself, are as dangerous as they are incalculable.]]> 1088 Brandon Sanderson 0765326361 Rayroy 0 currently-reading 4.76 2014
author: Brandon Sanderson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.76
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 202102065 No one expected the apocalypse would be broadcast via phone call. But in this chilling sequel to Fever House, anyone who managed to survive that doomsday call has a harrowing answer to the question, “Where were you when the Message came through?��

Five years after the event that drove most of the global population to madness, the world is overrun with the “fevered”—once-human, zombielike creatures drawn indiscriminately to violence and murder. In a campaign to restabilize the country, the massive corporation known as Terradyne Industries has merged with the U.S. government in a partnership of dubious motives, quarantining major American cities behind towering walls and corralling the afflicted there with the hope, they say, of developing a vaccine.

In Portland, where it all began, guilt-ridden detective John Bonner scours the city’s darkest corners for clues to humanity’s redemption. In New England, Katherine Moriarty mourns the devastating losses of her husband and son while in hiding from Terradyne. And across the ocean in France, a sixteen-year-old girl named Naomi Laurent discovers she has a disturbing and powerful gift—which may just be the key to the world’s salvation.

Equal parts gruesome and beautiful, The Devil by Name is a heart-stopping, breakneck saga of survival. As its characters�� paths inevitably collide across the ravaged landscape of a post-apocalyptic America, they are united by the desire to not just escape death but to carve out some way to live anew.

Everything starts and ends in the fever house.

]]> 400 Keith Rosson 0593595785 Rayroy 4 4.22 2024
author: Keith Rosson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/07
date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> 54740008
From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Joseph “Ziggy�� Johnson, has been the pulse of Detroit’s famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city’s African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he is also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he’s rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era, including Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstein, and Count Basie. Ziggy is also the founder and dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of Theater. But now the doyen of Black Bottom is ready to hang up his many dapper hats.����

As he lays dying in the black-owned-and-operated Kirkwood Hospital, Ziggy reflects on his life, the community that was the center of his world, and the remarkable people who helped shape it.

Inspired by the Catholic Saints Day Books, Ziggy curates his own list of Black Bottom’s venerable "52 Saints." Among them are a vulnerable Dinah Washington, a defiant Joe�� Louis, and a raucous Bricktop. Randall balances the stories of these larger-than-life "Saints" with local heroes who became household names, enthralling men and women whose unstoppable ambition, love of style, and faith in community made this black Midwestern neighborhood the rival of New York City’s Harlem.

Accompanying these “tributes�� are thoughtfully paired cocktails—special drinks that capture the essence of each of Ziggy’s saints—libations as strong and satisfying as Alice Randall’s wholly original view of a place and time unlike any other.]]> 362 Alice Randall 0062968653 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.10 2020
author: Alice Randall
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> 53463056 From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings, Book One of the Stormlight Archive begins an incredible new saga of epic proportion.

Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter.

It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for Shardblades. Wars were fought for them, and won by them.

One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable.

Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings. Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity.

Across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar's niece, Jasnah. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan's motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war.

The result of over ten years of planning, writing, and world-building, The Way of Kings is but the opening movement of the Stormlight Archive, a bold masterpiece in the making.

Speak again the ancient oaths:

Life before death.
Strength before weakness.
Journey before Destination.

and return to men the Shards they once bore.

The Knights Radiant must stand again.]]> 1137 Brandon Sanderson Rayroy 4 4.73 2010
author: Brandon Sanderson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.73
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/27
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
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]]> 201750876 343 Regina Porter 059324186X Rayroy 4 3.30 2024
author: Regina Porter
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
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]]> 201446034
Returning to her legendary short stories, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams offers a much-anticipated follow-up to Ninety-Nine Stories of God, which The New York Times Book Review called a “treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces.�� Concerning the Future of Souls balances the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, as Azrael—transporter of souls and the most troubled and thoughtful of the angels—confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death, and his friendship with the Devil.Over the course of these ninety-nine illuminations, a collection of connected and disparate beings—ranging from ordinary folk to grand, known figures, such as Jung, Nietzsche, Pythagoras, Bach, and Rilke; to mountains, oceans, dogs, birds, whales, horses, butterflies, a sixty-year-old tortoise, and a chimp named Washoe—experience the varying fate of the soul as each encounters the darkness of transcendence in this era of extinction. A brilliant crash course in philosophy, religion, literature, and culture, Concerning the Future of Souls is an absolution and an indictment, sorrowful and ecstatic. Williams will leave you wonderstruck, pondering the morality of being mortal.]]> 176 Joy Williams 1959030590 Rayroy 4 3.84 2024
author: Joy Williams
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
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]]> 9994765
Fana and the Life Brothers are rushing to distribute their healing “Living Blood�� throughout the world, hoping to eliminate most diseases before Fana is bound to marry Michel. Still, they cannot heal people faster than Michel can kill them. Due weaves a tangled web in this novel, including beloved characters from her bestselling Joplin’s Ghost, in a war of good against evil, making My Soul to Take a chilling and thrilling experience.]]> 432 Tananarive Due 1439176140 Rayroy 5 4.09 2011
author: Tananarive Due
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/30
date added: 2024/08/30
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]]> 37638044 It may be the Fourth of July weekend, but for retired soldiers Mercy Carr and Belgian Malinois Elvis, it’s just another walk in the remote Lye Brook Wilderness—until the former bomb-sniffing dog alerts to explosives and they find a squalling baby abandoned near a shallow grave filled with what appear to be human bones. U.S. Game Warden Troy Warner and his search-and rescue Newfoundland Susie Bear respond to Mercy’s 911 call, and the four must work together to track down a missing mother, solve a cold-case murder, and keep the citizens of Vermont safe on potentially the most incendiary Independence Day since the American Revolution.

A Borrowing of Bones is full of complex twists and real details about search-and-rescue dog training that Paula learned through the training of her own dog. With its canine sidekicks and rich, dramatic story, this debut will be a must-have for mystery fans.]]> 342 Paula Munier 1250153034 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.83 2018
author: Paula Munier
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 44643412
From the acclaimed author of Corregidora , The Healing follows Harlan Jane Eagleton as she travels to small towns, converting skeptics, restoring minds, and healing bodies. But before she found her calling, Harlan had been a minor rock star’s manager and, before that, a beautician. Harlan retraces her story to the beginning, when she once had a fling with the rock star’s ex-husband and found herself infatuated with an Afro-German horse dealer. Along the way she’s somehow lost her own husband, a medical anthropologist now traveling with a medicine woman across eastern Africa. Harlan draws us deeper into her world and the mystery at the heart of her the story of her first healing.

The Healing is a lyrical and at times humorous exploration of the struggle to let go of pain, anger, and even love. Slipping seamlessly back through Harlan’s memories in a language rich with the textured cadences of unfiltered dialogue, Gayl Jones weaves her story to its dramatic—and unexpected—beginning.]]> 304 Gayl Jones 0807080934 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.75 1998
author: Gayl Jones
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59229378
Texas Ranger Darren Mathews isn’t sure he’s been a good cop, but believes he’s got a shot at being a good man—if he manages to dodge the potential indictment hanging over his head and if he, from here on out, pledges allegiance to the truth. It’s a virtue the country appears to have wholly lost its grip on, but one Darren sees as his salvation. He is in the midst of remaking his life with the woman he loves, hoping for the peace of country living at his beloved farmhouse, when he is visited by someone who couldn’t hold the truth on her tongue if it was dipped in sugar, a woman who’s always been bent of tearing his life apart. His mother. Armed with a tall tale about a missing Black college student, Sera (whose white sorority sisters insist she isn’t missing at all). Darren must decide if his can trust his mother is telling the truth—and what her ulterior motive may be, and what if that motive has to do with a grand jury deciding his fate.

Darren gets his hooks into the investigation, along the way discovering things about Sera’s family and her hometown that are odd at best, vaguely sinister at worst. Hamstrung by local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers who likewise doubt the account of a missing girl, if Darren wants answers, he’ll need help from the person whom he swore to never trust again—his mother.

In this emotionally stirring conclusion to the singular Highway 59 series, set three years after the events of Heaven, My Home, Darren reckons with his life’s purpose as he’s forced to choose between his own peace and the higher call to do good.]]> 320 Attica Locke 1788163982 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.94 2024
author: Attica Locke
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 13456414
In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.]]> 110 Steven L. Peck 098374842X Rayroy 4 4.17 2011
author: Steven L. Peck
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
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]]> 25334922 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER �� A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship�� (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST �� MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST �� WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE ��

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 1447294823 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.28 2015
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199215100
Ferns grow knee-deep along the shoulder, laced with briars and unripe raspberries, so thick they could hide a bear. Could hide anything, really.

In 1980s Appalachia, life isn’t easy for Sheila. She endures relentless taunting and bullying at the hands of her classmates; she takes care of her great-aunt, the garden and home, and the rabbits; and forages for mushrooms in the forest, all while her mother works long, back-breaking shifts at the nearby state asylum. But it’s her peculiar little sister, Angie, who worries her the most. Angie is obsessed with nuclear war, Rambo, zombies, a Russian invasion of their community, and the ominous, tarot-like cards that she creates that somehow speak to her. As if all that weren’t enough, Sheila feels an unexplainable weight around her neck. Is it the ancient and strange mountain that they live on that casts its shadow on her, or something or someone else unknown? Unseen?

When a pair of female hikers are brutally murdered on the nearby Appalachian trail, Sheila and Angie find themselves inexorably drawn into the hunt for the killer. As the ever-present threat of violence looms larger, the mountain might be the only thing that can save them from the darkness consuming their home and their community.

Unsettling, propulsive, and chillingly atmospheric, Alisa Alering’s Smothermoss opens a hidden door into a world caught between rural gothic and fairytale, inviting the reader to renegotiate what is seen and unseen, what is real and what is haunted]]> 256 Alisa Alering 1959030582 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.47 2024
author: Alisa Alering
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 680336 144 Brad Watson 0393321207 Rayroy 4 3.96 1996
author: Brad Watson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/29
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 42863214 9780446675604

It's Carnival time, and the Carribean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. But to young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favourite costume to wear at the festival--until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgivable crime.

Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Here Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth--and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen's legendary powers can save her life...and set her free.]]> 329 Nalo Hopkinson Rayroy 5 4.11 2000
author: Nalo Hopkinson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/17
date added: 2024/07/27
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]]> 60460704
Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear.

The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women�� taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.

Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—or redeem it.]]> 275 Victor LaValle 052551208X Rayroy 5 3.68 2023
author: Victor LaValle
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/23
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves:
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]]> 66087060 A small-time criminal. A has-been rock star. A shadowy government agency. And a severed hand whose dark powers threaten to destroy them all.

When leg-breaker Hutch Holtz rolls up to a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, to collect overdue drug money, a severed hand is the last thing he expects to find stashed in the client’s refrigerator. Hutch quickly realizes that the hand induces uncontrollable madness: Anyone in its proximity is overcome with a boundless compulsion for violence. Within hours, catastrophic forces are set into motion: Dark-op government agents who have been desperately hunting for the hand are on Hutch’s tail, more of the city’s residents fall under its brutal influence, and suddenly all of Portland stands at the precipice of disaster. . . .

But it’s all the same for Katherine Moriarty, a singer whose sudden fame and precipitous downfall were followed by the mysterious death of her estranged husband—suicide, allegedly. Her trauma has made her agoraphobic, shackled within the confines of her apartment. Her son, Nick, has moved home to care for her, quietly making his living working for Hutch’s boss.

When Hutch calls Nick in distress, looking for someone else to take the hand, Katherine and Nick are plunged into a global struggle that will decimate the walls of the carefully arranged life they’ve built. Mother and son must evade both crazed, bloodthirsty masses and deceitful government agents while exorcising family secrets that have risen from the dead—secrets, they soon discover, that might hold the very key to humanity’s survival.

Can you resist the hand? Find an excerpt from the next Fever House novel at the end of the book.]]> 417 Keith Rosson 0593595750 Rayroy 4 4.02 2023
author: Keith Rosson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/07/27
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]]> 120017148
Unwilling to accept this fate, Slide--a barber with an opaque past--embarks on a quest for the perfect apartment, pinballing through the sprawling, madcap city of Polis and its endless procession of neighborhoods. As he bounces from foldout couch to disaster-relief tent, falling in with some tough types, Slide begins to realize that he's going to have to scratch and claw just to claim a place for himself in this world--let alone a place with in-unit laundry.

An exuberant, fantastical odyssey, Pay As You Go wonders if what we're searching for is ever really out there. Its pages--surreal, biting, and teeming with life--announce the startling talents of Eskor David Johnson, who knows that all any of us really want is a place to rest our head.]]> 500 Eskor David Johnson 195211974X Rayroy 0 currently-reading 4.01 2023
author: Eskor David Johnson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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

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

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Rayroy 4 4.12 2022
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/18
date added: 2024/07/18
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]]> 39096844 ��
“History as it should be written.”—Barry Cunliffe, Guardian
��
“Scott hits the nail squarely on the head by exposing the staggering price our ancestors paid for civilization and political order.”—Walter Scheidel, Financial Times
��
Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today’s states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family—all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction.
��
Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the “barbarians�� who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.]]> 336 James C. Scott 030024021X Rayroy 0 to-read 4.10 2017
author: James C. Scott
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13646449 279 Luis Alberto Urrea Rayroy 4 4.03 2004
author: Luis Alberto Urrea
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/09
date added: 2024/07/09
shelves:
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]]> 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

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

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 Rayroy 5 4.46 2022
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/09
date added: 2024/07/09
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]]> 61049 Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

"A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." -- The New York Times Book Review

"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday."����-- The Village Voice

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

National book Critics Circle Award Finalist]]> 160 Anne Carson 037570129X Rayroy 3 4.28 1998
author: Anne Carson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/24
date added: 2024/06/24
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" A volcano is not a mountain like others. Raising a camera to one's face has effects no one can calculate in advance."
]]> 36348525
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]> 291 Ling Ma 0374261598 Rayroy 4 3.90 2018
author: Ling Ma
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/08
date added: 2024/06/08
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]]> 62919847 A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.

Gracetown, Florida
June 1950

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.

The Reformatory is a haunting work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.]]> 576 Tananarive Due 1982188340 Rayroy 5 4.44 2023
author: Tananarive Due
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/29
date added: 2024/05/29
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]]> 43861557 208 Iain Sinclair 1788160479 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.10 2018
author: Iain Sinclair
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.10
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6623551
In this sequel to her Essence bestsellers, The Living Blood and My Soul to Keep , fan-favorite Tananarive Due introduces readers to a new Glow. Said to heal almost any illness, Glow gets its power from the blood of immortals, and it’s up to the Blood Colony, a small but powerful group of immortals, to keep the supplies coming so that AIDS and other diseases will be wiped out.

Meet Fana Wolde, seventeen years old, the only immortal born with the Living Blood. She can read minds and her injuries heal immediately. When her best friend, a mortal, is imprisoned by Fana’s family, Fana helps her escape and together they run away from Fana’s protected home in Washington State to join the Underground Railroad of Glow peddlers. But Fana has more than her parents to worry Glow peddlers are being murdered by a violent, hundred-year-old sect with ties to the Vatican. Now, when Fana is most vulnerable, she is being hunted to fulfill an ancient blood prophecy that could lead to countless deaths. While her people search for Fana and race to unravel the unknown sect’s mysterious origins, Fana must learn to confront the deadly forces—or she and everyone she loves will die.]]> 432 Tananarive Due 0743287363 Rayroy 5 4.14 2008
author: Tananarive Due
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/06
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves:
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]]> 1054551 342 Robert Stone 0140098356 Rayroy 3 Strange and Violent. 3.66 1974
author: Robert Stone
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1974
rating: 3
read at: 2011/09/18
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves:
review:
Strange and Violent.
]]> 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 Rayroy 5 4.47 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/29
date added: 2024/04/29
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]]> 41538 --Cynthia Ward]]> 515 Tananarive Due 0671040847 Rayroy 5 4.34 2001
author: Tananarive Due
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/13
date added: 2024/04/13
shelves:
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]]> 57504 In this “impressive debut�� from award-winning speculative fiction author Nalo Hopkinson, a young woman must solve the tragic mystery surrounding her family and bargain with the gods to save her city and herself. (The Washington Post)

The rich and privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways-farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, and the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother. She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.]]> 256 Nalo Hopkinson 0446674338 Rayroy 3 3.83 1998
author: Nalo Hopkinson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/31
date added: 2024/03/31
shelves:
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]]> 11786836 956 William Gaddis 1564786919 Rayroy 0 to-read Copy arrived and I picked it up, I feel smug so be it]]> 4.37 1955
author: William Gaddis
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:
just ordered a copy form the local book store should arrive in a week
Copy arrived and I picked it up, I feel smug so be it
]]> 7949999
Veycosi, a scholar of folklore, hopes to sail off to examine the rare Alamat Book of Light and thus secure a spot for himself on Cynchin’s Colloquium. However, unexpected events prevent that from happening. Fifteen Ymisen galleons arrive in the harbor to force a trade agreement on Cynchin. Veycosi is put in charge of the situation, but quickly finds himself in way over his head.

Bad turns to worse when malign forces start stirring. Pickens (children) are disappearing and an ancient invading army, long frozen into piche (tar) statues by island witches is stirring to life—led by the fearsome demon known as the Blackheart Man. Veycosi has problems in his polyamorous personal life, too. How much trouble can a poor scholar take? Or cause all by himself?]]> 288 Nalo Hopkinson 0446576905 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.57 2024
author: Nalo Hopkinson
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 26846443 Alternate cover for ISBN: 9780679775430

Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.

In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.]]> 607 Haruki Murakami Rayroy 5 4.00 1994
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/03/24
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review:
i never finheshed this book and i need to soon
]]> 65650229 A witty and poignant novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture and the bonds that keep people together

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit.��Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.��]]> 611 Nathan Hill 0593536118 Rayroy 5 3.97 2023
author: Nathan Hill
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2024/03/24
shelves:
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]]> 75593883
Ross Gay’s essays have been called “exquisite�� (Tracy K. Smith), “imperative�� (the New York Times Book Review ), and “brilliant�� (Ada Limón). Now, in this new collection of genre-defying pieces, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.

For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “ubiquitous, nefarious�� scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren.

As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

For his many fans eagerly awaiting this new volume and for readers who have enjoyed the works of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Solnit, Gay once again offers us “literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close friend�� (the New York Review of Books ). The Book of (More) Delights is a collection to savor and share.
��]]> 304 Ross Gay 1643753096 Rayroy 4 4.26 2023
author: Ross Gay
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/08
date added: 2024/03/08
shelves: cuntwt-can-t-understand-the-writer
review:

]]> 142392376 Get Out, Us, and Nope, and founder of Monkeypaw Productions, curates this groundbreaking anthology of all-new stories of Black horror, exploring not only the terrors of the supernatural but the chilling reality of injustice that haunts our nation.

A cop begins seeing huge, blinking eyes where the headlights of cars should be that tell him who to pull over. Two freedom riders take a bus ride that leaves them stranded on a lonely road in Alabama where several unsettling somethings await them. A young girl dives into the depths of the Earth in search of the demon that killed her parents. These are just a few of the worlds of Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele’s anthology of all-new horror stories by Black writers. Featuring an introduction by Peele and an all-star roster of beloved writers and new voices, Out There Screaming is a master class in horror, and—like his spine-chilling films—its stories prey on everything we think we know about our world . . . and redefine what it means to be afraid.

Featuring stories by: Erin E. Adams, Violet Allen, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Maurice Broaddus, Chesya Burke, P. Djèlí Clark, Ezra Claytan Daniels, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Justin C. Key, L. D. Lewis, Nnedi Okorafor, Tochi Onyebuchi, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nicole D. Sconiers, Rion Amilcar Scott, Terence Taylor, and Cadwell Turnbull.]]> 387 Jordan Peele 059324379X Rayroy 4 3.77 2023
author: Jordan Peele
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/26
date added: 2024/02/26
shelves:
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]]> 85867
Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there.... The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man—poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid.

Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.]]> 801 Samuel R. Delany 0375706682 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.78 1975
author: Samuel R. Delany
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 64000510 An epic��comedy about love, spirit, and the quest for transcendence in an anything-but-transcendent America, from the author of the perennial cult bestsellers�� The River Why and��The Brothers K
��
A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit into crisis.��A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.

The journeys of this unintentional menagerie carry them to the healing lands of Montana and a newly founded community—where nothing tastes better than Maker's Mark mixed with glacier ice, and nothing seems less likely than the soul-filling delight that a troupe of spiritual refugees, urban sophisticates, road-weary musicians, and local cowboys begin to find in each other's company.����������������������

With��Sun House, David James Duncan continues exploring the American search for meaning and love. This stunning novel, set amid the gorgeous landscapes of the American West, illuminates the contemporary world through the prisms of Eastern wisdom; cast-off ecstatic religious ideals; and the unpredictable, expansive yearnings of the human heart.]]> 784 David James Duncan 0316129372 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.75 2023
author: David James Duncan
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Rayroy 5 4.21 2023
author: Naomi Klein
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/16
date added: 2024/02/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 23525954 Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.]]> 224 Simone Browne 0822359197 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.48 2015
author: Simone Browne
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 41536 My Soul to Keep traps Jessica between the desperation of immortals who want to rob her of her life and a husband who wants to rob her of her soul. With deft plotting and an unforgettable climax, this tour de force reminiscent of early Anne Rice will win Due a new legion of fans.]]> 346 Tananarive Due 006105366X Rayroy 5 4.16 1997
author: Tananarive Due
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/10
date added: 2024/02/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 60581087
Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.]]> 385 Cormac McCarthy 0593535227 Rayroy 5 3.58 2022
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/25
date added: 2024/02/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 6763725 81 Mark Fisher 1846943175 Rayroy 4 4.20 2009
author: Mark Fisher
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 41135541 440 Lerone Bennett Jr. Rayroy 0 to-read 4.52 1964
author: Lerone Bennett Jr.
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57693663
Now, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success--and movie adaptation--to his name, along with a series of subsequent lesser efforts that have paid the bills but not much more. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: To move into the house--what the locals call "The Devil House"--in which a briefly notorious pair of murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected 1980s teens. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected--back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.]]> 403 John Darnielle 0374212236 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.21 2022
author: John Darnielle
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60165403 Shortlisted for the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Society Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
A Kirkus Review Best Nonfiction Book of 2022

A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America . In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness.

Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world�� of North America―a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before.

The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity’s success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction�� to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades.

In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America’s animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.]]> 448 Dan Flores 1324006161 Rayroy 5 3.95 2022
author: Dan Flores
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/17
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

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

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Rayroy 4 3.92 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/13
date added: 2023/12/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 45359085 A bold and impassioned meditation on injustice in our country that punctures the illusion of a postracial America and reveals it as a place where authoritarianism looms large.

Whether the issues are protest, labor, patriotism, or class division, it is clear that professional sports are no longer simply fun and games. Rather, the industry is a hotbed of fractures and inequities that reflect and even drive some of the most divisive issues in our country. The nine provocative and deeply personal essays in Full Dissidence confront the dangerous narratives that are shaping the current dialogue in sports and mainstream culture. The book is a reflection on a culture where African Americans continue to navigate the sharp edges of whiteness--as citizens who are always at risk of being told, often directly from the White House, to go back to where they came from. The topics Howard Bryant takes on include the player-owner relationship, the militarization of sports, the myth of integration, the erasure of black identity as a condition of success, and the kleptocracy that has forced America to ask itself if its beliefs of freedom and democracy are more than just words.

In a time when authoritarianism is creeping into our lives and is being embraced in our politics, Full Dissidence will make us question the strength of the bonds we think we have with our fellow citizens, and it shows us why we must break from the malignant behaviors that have become normalized in everyday life.]]> 200 Howard Bryant 0807019550 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.47 2020
author: Howard Bryant
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 85173872
In some of these stories, the monster is racism itself; others address the monster within, each set against the supernatural or surreal. All are written with Due’s trademark attention to detail and deeply drawn characters.

In addition to previously published work, this collection contains brand-new stories, including “Rumpus Room,�� a supernatural horror novelette set in Florida about a woman’s struggle against both outer and inner demons.]]> 296 Tananarive Due 1636141056 Rayroy 5 4.02 2023
author: Tananarive Due
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/01
date added: 2023/12/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 413
We follow the mismatch'd pair—one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic—from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.]]> 773 Thomas Pynchon 0312423209 Rayroy 5
Rather than write a review, because how can you review Thomas Pynchon’s work. The man is a genius, who's depth of vocabulary is out of this world, whose knowledge is so vast it’s a wonder he can retain all he knows, and he is one of the most original authors to ever write. So here’s a top ten list of Mason & Dixon, its top ten phenomenal moments if you will.

10. The Vroom sisters messing with Mason
Here are some lines in which Mason is on a ladder because he is locked out
“With no more than precarious hold upon the Balcony, Mason now feels activity beneath his Soles, and looks down in time to see the Ladder being deftly abstracted and taken ‘roud the Corner in malicious fun by Jet, who for some reason is feeling underappreciated today. As he hangs there in Misery, tasting Ocean Salt in the Wind, watching in spirit of Distance, “Soon,�� he mutters aloud, “to be Detachment,�� the Bolts connecting the House to the Balcony, which was never meant to bear much more weight than that of an adolescent Female’s Foot, begin to slide, protesting with horrid sucking Shrieks, out of the Lime and Sand that have held them there so ornamentally till now. “What,�� he is heard to exclaim,-“not again?�� before jumping clear of the falling Iron-work, landing, mercifully with-out more than Contusions and Pain, upon the soak’d Earth��

9. The Talking Norfolk terrier at a pub, who talks to Mason and Dixon

8. Pissing in the snow, part of side story about a wedding.
“Threading their way among snoring celebrants, trying not blunder onto drooling Faces or disarrange’d Skirts, they go outside, and together piss in the Snow. Shelby writes his name, sweepingly, as if at the bottom of some Blank and all-powerful Warrant of the Winter, whilst Tom draws a simple Heart, unpierc’d, unletter’d, whose outline he fills carefully, completely and then some. The Captain looks over. “You certainly did have to piss��

7. Jenkins’s Ear Museum.

6. Garden of giant vegetables

5. Eliza’s and Zhang’s escape from French Canada

4. The Lambton Worm

3. Mason on the other side of St Helena Island with its mind-altering winds, which Mason is visited by the Ghost of his dead wife, or is just the wind.

2. all the back and forth Banter between Mason and Dixon rather it is talk of star gazing, tea vs. coffee, or the conversations with many other people along their journey

1. Armand’s mechanical duck (what else?) and the duck talks
“So,�� spray’d the Duck,-“the terrible Bluebeard of the Kitchen, whose Celebrity is purchas’d with the lives of my Race. Not so brave now, Eh��

“…its Beak being of the finest Swedish Steel, did I mention that, yes quite able, when the Duck, in its homicidal Frenzy, is flying at high speed, to penetrate all known Fortification, solid walls being as paper to this Juggernaut…One can cower within, but one cannot avoid,-Bec de la Mort…’Beak of Death.��

]]> 4.12 1997
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2011/12/04
date added: 2023/11/21
shelves: ever, great-and-dense, currently-reading
review:
To sum it up in two words, "Mason & Dixon" is, overwhelmingly phenomenal!

Rather than write a review, because how can you review Thomas Pynchon’s work. The man is a genius, who's depth of vocabulary is out of this world, whose knowledge is so vast it’s a wonder he can retain all he knows, and he is one of the most original authors to ever write. So here’s a top ten list of Mason & Dixon, its top ten phenomenal moments if you will.

10. The Vroom sisters messing with Mason
Here are some lines in which Mason is on a ladder because he is locked out
“With no more than precarious hold upon the Balcony, Mason now feels activity beneath his Soles, and looks down in time to see the Ladder being deftly abstracted and taken ‘roud the Corner in malicious fun by Jet, who for some reason is feeling underappreciated today. As he hangs there in Misery, tasting Ocean Salt in the Wind, watching in spirit of Distance, “Soon,�� he mutters aloud, “to be Detachment,�� the Bolts connecting the House to the Balcony, which was never meant to bear much more weight than that of an adolescent Female’s Foot, begin to slide, protesting with horrid sucking Shrieks, out of the Lime and Sand that have held them there so ornamentally till now. “What,�� he is heard to exclaim,-“not again?�� before jumping clear of the falling Iron-work, landing, mercifully with-out more than Contusions and Pain, upon the soak’d Earth��

9. The Talking Norfolk terrier at a pub, who talks to Mason and Dixon

8. Pissing in the snow, part of side story about a wedding.
“Threading their way among snoring celebrants, trying not blunder onto drooling Faces or disarrange’d Skirts, they go outside, and together piss in the Snow. Shelby writes his name, sweepingly, as if at the bottom of some Blank and all-powerful Warrant of the Winter, whilst Tom draws a simple Heart, unpierc’d, unletter’d, whose outline he fills carefully, completely and then some. The Captain looks over. “You certainly did have to piss��

7. Jenkins’s Ear Museum.

6. Garden of giant vegetables

5. Eliza’s and Zhang’s escape from French Canada

4. The Lambton Worm

3. Mason on the other side of St Helena Island with its mind-altering winds, which Mason is visited by the Ghost of his dead wife, or is just the wind.

2. all the back and forth Banter between Mason and Dixon rather it is talk of star gazing, tea vs. coffee, or the conversations with many other people along their journey

1. Armand’s mechanical duck (what else?) and the duck talks
“So,�� spray’d the Duck,-“the terrible Bluebeard of the Kitchen, whose Celebrity is purchas’d with the lives of my Race. Not so brave now, Eh��

“…its Beak being of the finest Swedish Steel, did I mention that, yes quite able, when the Duck, in its homicidal Frenzy, is flying at high speed, to penetrate all known Fortification, solid walls being as paper to this Juggernaut…One can cower within, but one cannot avoid,-Bec de la Mort…’Beak of Death.��


]]> 123414019 From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss.

Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?

When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.]]> 320 Bryan Washington 0593421094 Rayroy 3 3.51 2023
author: Bryan Washington
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/21
date added: 2023/11/21
shelves:
review:
I ended up wanting a second plate of "Memorial " more than I wanted to finish "Family Meal", still Byran Washington writes realism fiction better than most.
]]> 62026070
An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents���� neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch.

Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives.

Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.]]> 11 Tess Gunty 0593627997 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.34 2022
author: Tess Gunty
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60219269
In this fiery, theoretical tour-de-force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health.

Written by co-hosts of the hit “Death Panel�� podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as “surplus,�� regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the “unfit�� to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this “surplus�� population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health.

Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one’s willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy. Capital, it turns out, only fears health.]]> 240 Beatrice Adler-Bolton 183976516X Rayroy 0 to-read 4.32 2022
author: Beatrice Adler-Bolton
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61358638 Reimagining the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.]]> 304 Matthew Desmond 0593239911 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.27 2023
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7858 448 Mike Davis 1565848446 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.09 2002
author: Mike Davis
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36424258 “The most honest book about climate change yet.�� —The Atlantic��The��Infinite Jest��of climate books.�� —The BafflerAn eye-opening look at the consequences of coal mining and oil and natural gas production—the second of a two volume work by award-winning author William T. Vollmann on the ideologies of energy production and the causes of climate changeThe second volume of William T. Vollmann's epic book about the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coal fields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, where "America's best friend" is not merely a fuel, but a "heritage." Over the course of four years Vollmann finds hollowed out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water; makes covert visits to mountaintop removal mines; and offers documented accounts of unpaid fines for federal health and safety violations and of miners who died because their bosses cut corners to make more money.To write about natural gas, Vollmann journeys to Greeley, Colorado, where he interviews anti-fracking activists, a city planner, and a homeowner with serious health issues from fracking. Turning to oil production, he speaks with, among others, the former CEO of Conoco and a vice president of the Bank of Oklahoma in charge of energy loans, and conducts furtive roadside interviews of guest workers performing oil-related contract labor in the United Arab Emirates.As with its predecessor, No Immediate Danger, this volume seeks to understand and listen, not to lay blame--except in a few corporate and political cases where outrage is clearly due. Vollmann is a carbon burner just like the rest of us; he describes and quantifies his own power use, then looks around him, trying to explain to the future why it was that we went against scientific consensus, continually increasing the demand for electric power and insisting that we had no good alternative.]]> 687 William T. Vollmann 0525558500 Rayroy 5 4.36 2018
author: William T. Vollmann
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/07
date added: 2023/11/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 7354
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why E. Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
(back cover)]]> 337 Annie Proulx 0743225422 Rayroy 4 3.88 1993
author: Annie Proulx
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2013/02/08
date added: 2023/10/31
shelves:
review:

]]> 34791355 Winner of the 2018 Donald Fixico Book Award

Rosalyn R. LaPier demonstrates that Blackfeet history is incomplete without an understanding of��the Blackfeet people’s relationship and mode of interaction with the “invisible reality�� of the supernatural world. Religious beliefs provided the Blackfeet with continuity through privations and changing times. The stories they passed to new generations and outsiders reveal the fundamental philosophy of Blackfeet existence, namely, the belief that they could alter, change, or control nature to suit their needs and that they were able to do so with the assistance of supernatural allies. The Blackfeet did not believe they had to adapt to nature. They made nature adapt. Their relationship with the supernatural provided the Blackfeet with stability and made predictable the seeming unpredictability of the natural world in which they lived.

In Invisible Reality ��LaPier presents an unconventional, creative, and innovative history that blends extensive archival research, vignettes of family stories, and traditional knowledge learned from elders along with personal reflections on her own journey learning Blackfeet stories. The result is a nuanced look at the history of the Blackfeet and their relationship with the natural world.]]> 246 Rosalyn R. LaPier 1496201507 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.50 2017
author: Rosalyn R. LaPier
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 19053416 John McMurtry argues that our world disorder of unending crises is the predictable result of a cancerous economic system multiplying out of all control and destroying ecological, social and organic life - a process he describes as "global ecogenocide." In this updated edition he explains the "social immune response" required to fight the "macro cancer," something which has already been shown in developments such as the Occupy movement and the democratic social transformation of Latin America.In an official global culture increasingly destructive of life, this book shows the necessity and possibility of building a sustainable society based on a universal commitment to life and nature. ]]> 394 John McMurtry 1849648050 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.00 1998
author: John McMurtry
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62668811
Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway.

Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colorful lives--sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent--Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days.

In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on displays the prose, wit, and intelligence that make him one of our most acclaimed living writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.]]> 352 Richard Ford 0061692085 Rayroy 5 3.88 2023
author: Richard Ford
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/29
date added: 2023/10/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 4070095
Meet Asterios middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape�� really about?

As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how he’s gotten to where he is. And isn’t. And we meet a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.

In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.

Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli’s a great American graphic novel.]]> 324 David Mazzucchelli 0307377326 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.21 2009
author: David Mazzucchelli
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40511378 Nightshift is a story of obsession set in London’s liminal world of nightshift workers.

When twenty-three-year-old Meggie meets distant and enigmatic Sabine, she recognises in her the person she would like to be. Giving up her daytime existence, her reliable boyfriend, and the trappings of a normal life in favour of working the same nightshifts as Sabine could be the perfect escape for Meggie. She finds a liberating sense of freedom in indulging her growing obsession with Sabine and plunges herself into another existence, gradually immersing herself in the transient and uncertain world of the nightshift worker.

Dark, sexy, frightening, Nightshift explores ambivalent friendship, sexual attraction and lives that defy easy categorisation. London’s stark urban reality is rendered other-worldly and strange as Meggie’s sleep deprivation, drinking and obsession for Sabine gain a momentum all of their own. Can Meggie really lose herself in her trying to become someone else?

A novel of obsession and desire, Kiare Ladner's Nightshift is a beautiful and moving debut which asks profound questions about who we are and if we can ever really truly escape ourselves.]]> 256 Kiare Ladner 1529010381 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.42 2021
author: Kiare Ladner
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57331880
A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces��our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the��New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse�� argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.

Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.
��]]> 336 Amitav Ghosh 0226815455 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.23 2021
author: Amitav Ghosh
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 157965 ��������
It was called "The City Too Busy To Hate," but two decades ago more than forty black children were murdered there with grim determination, their bodies found -- in ditches, on riverbanks -- strangled, beaten, and sexually assaulted. Bambara was living in Atlanta at the time, and Those Bones Are Not My Child is the result of twelve years of first-hand research, as she delved into the murders and the world in which they occurred.����Evoking the culture of the late 1970s and early '80s with a keen eye -- the Iranian hostage crisis, disco, Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver -- Those Bones Are Not My Child powerfully dramatizes the story of one black family surviving on the margins of a seemingly prosperous city.
����
On Sunday morning, July 20, 1980, Marzala Rawls Spencer awakens to find that her teenage son has gone missing, even as the Atlanta child abductions are beginning to be reported. As she and her estranged husband frantically search for their son, the story moves with authority through the full spectrum of Atlanta's political, social, and cultural life, illuminating the vexing issues of race and class that bedevil the city.

Suspenseful, richly dramatic, profoundly affecting, Those Bones Are Not My Child explores the complex relationships within one family in dire crisis. And as Toni Morrison, who edited Bambara's manuscript, has observed, it is also "the narrative revelation of a major Southern city of the '80s, a revelation of what clogs the bloodstream of 'The City Too Busy to Hate.' "]]> 688 Toni Cade Bambara 0679442618 Rayroy 3 3.45 1999
author: Toni Cade Bambara
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/20
date added: 2023/10/20
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]]> 407315 208 John Edgar Wideman 0395897971 Rayroy 5 4.13 1986
author: John Edgar Wideman
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/17
date added: 2023/10/17
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]]> 52236404
TENDER is brought to you by late-night conversations among Black womxn and femmes telling our stories, talking about us, loving on us. Conversations of reckoning and consideration of the heart and the soul and how we are living with ourselves, friends, family and lovers, through times of stress and social media and false media. This book is brought to you by healing hands, prayers, loud laughter, and freestyles.]]> Vanessa German Rayroy 0 to-read 4.50
author: Vanessa German
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 51541232
After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.

A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.]]> 216 Percival Everett 1644450224 Rayroy 5 3.97 2020
author: Percival Everett
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/14
date added: 2023/10/14
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]]> 85148114
��������As these characters�� stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.]]> 400 James McBride 0593422961 Rayroy 5 4.25 2023
author: James McBride
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/12
date added: 2023/10/12
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]]> 63310838 A playful and deeply affective short story collection about the histories, technologies, and generational divides that shape our relationships—from the award-winning writer of Days of Distraction

Compelling and perceptive, Tomb Sweeping probes the loyalties we hold: to relatives, to strangers, and to ourselves. In stories set across the US and Asia, Alexandra Chang immerses us in the lives of immigrant families, grocery store employees, expecting parents, and guileless lab assistants.

A woman known only to her neighbors as “the Asian recycling lady�� collects bottles from the streets she calls home. A young college grad ponders the void left from a broken friendship. An unfulfilled housewife in Shanghai finds a secret outlet for her ambitions in an undercover gambling den. Two strangers become something more through the bond of mistaken identity.

These characters, adeptly attuned to the mystery of living, invite us to consider whether it is possible for anyone to entirely do right by another. Tomb Sweeping brims with remarkable skill and talent in every story, keeping a definitive pulse on loss, community, and what it means to feel fully alive.]]> 256 Alexandra Chang 006295184X Rayroy 0 to-read 3.34 2023
author: Alexandra Chang
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire.��A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.12 2023
author: Daniel Mason
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61089492
Benjamin Honey- American, Bantu, Igbo- born enslaved- freed or fled at fifteen- aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, and discovered they could make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of 'civilization': officials determine to 'cleanse' the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark.

Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.]]> 224 Paul Harding 132403629X Rayroy 0 to-read 3.73 2023
author: Paul Harding
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 87556695
“‘Let us descend,�� the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’�� �� Inferno, Dante Alighieri

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.]]> 305 Jesmyn Ward 198210449X Rayroy 0 to-read 3.68 2023
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 54503590 In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower the author takes us a journey from Hartford to Chicago, from Phoenix to Manhattan, using the stories of ever-expanding campuses to illustrate the increasingly parasitic relationship between higher education and our cities. As scholar and author Davarian L. Baldwin illustrates, urban planners have used the model of the university campus as a blueprint for the city as a whole. Through conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students' needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power -- and who is left especially vulnerable.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for campus life and urban life, one that centers a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.]]> 213 Davarian L. Baldwin 1568588925 Rayroy 4 3.98 2021
author: Davarian L. Baldwin
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/30
date added: 2023/09/30
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]]> 18211204
The biggest takeover in American business that you’ve n ever heard of

The American supermarket seems to represent the best in abundance, freedom, choice. But that turns out to be an illusion. The rotisserie chicken, the pepperoni, the cordon bleu, the frozen pot pie, and the bacon virtually all come from four companies.

In The Meat Racket , investigative reporter Christopher Leonard delivers the first-ever account of how a handful of companies have seized the nation’s meat supply. He shows how they built a system that puts farmers on the edge of bankruptcy, charges high prices to consumers, and returns the industry to the shape it had in the 1900s before the meat monopolists were broken up. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the greatest capitalist country in the world has an oligarchy controlling much of the food we eat and a high-tech sharecropping system to make that possible.

Forty years ago, more than thirty-six companies produced half of all the chicken Americans ate. Now there are only three that make that amount, and they control every aspect of the process, from the egg to the chicken to the chicken nugget. These companies are even able to raise meat prices for consumers while pushing down the price they pay to farmers. And tragically, big business and politics have derailed efforts to change the system.

We know that it takes big companies to bring meat to the American table. What The Meat Racket shows is that this industrial system is rigged against all of us. In that sense, Leonard has exposed our heartland’s biggest scandal.]]> 384 Christopher Leonard 1451645813 Rayroy 0 to-read 4.12 2014
author: Christopher Leonard
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/23
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]]> 35791987 A timely, eye-opening book about climate change and energy generation that focuses on the consequences of nuclear power production, from award-winning author William T. Vollmann

In his nonfiction, William T. Vollmann has won acclaim as a singular voice tackling some of the most important issues of our age, from poverty to violence to the dark soul of American imperialism as it has played out on the U.S./Mexico border. Now, Vollmann turns to a topic that will define the generations to come--the factors and human actions that have led to global warming. Vollmann begins No Immediate Danger, the first volume of Carbon Ideologies, by examining and quantifying the many causes of climate change, from industrial manufacturing and agricultural practices to fossil fuel extraction, economic demand for electric power, and the justifiable yearning of people all over the world to live in comfort. Turning to nuclear power first, Vollmann then recounts multiple visits that he made at significant personal risk over the course of seven years to the contaminated no-go zones and sad ghost towns of Fukushima, Japan, beginning shortly after the tsunami and reactor meltdowns of 2011. Equipped first only with a dosimeter and then with a scintillation counter, he measured radiation and interviewed tsunami victims, nuclear evacuees, anti-nuclear organizers and pro-nuclear utility workers.

Featuring Vollmann's signature wide learning, sardonic wit, and encyclopedic research, No Immediate Danger, whose title co-opts the reassuring mantra of official Japanese energy experts, builds up a powerful, sobering picture of the ongoing nightmare of Fukushima.]]> 624 William T. Vollmann 0399563490 Rayroy 5 3.80 2018
author: William T. Vollmann
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/23
date added: 2023/09/23
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]]> 62039176 An enthralling and original first novel about exile, diaspora, and the impossibility of Black refuge in America and beyond.

In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up.

A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn’t recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone recognizes him, a man who calls him brother—setting him on a quest to find his real brother, who is dying.

In Hangman, Maya Binyam tells the story of that search, and of the phantoms, guides, tricksters, bureaucrats, debtors, taxi drivers, relatives, riddles, and strangers that will lead to the truth.

It is an uncommonly assured debut: an existential journey; a tragic farce; a slapstick tragedy; and a strange, and strangely honest, story of one man’s stubborn quest to find refuge—in this world and in the world that lies beyond it.]]> 194 Maya Binyam 037461007X Rayroy 0 to-read 3.62 2023
author: Maya Binyam
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 1044551
"The incidents that take place as a world turns to waste and its population perishes are spectacular. The heroics of the scattered leaders and geniuses, scholars and helpers, struggling to restore bands of people turned wild, and to nurse humanity back to life, are gripping. Wylie's simple, straightforward writing strikes home, as it has in so many of his dozens of books."]]> 206 Philip Wylie Rayroy 0 to-read 3.30 1972
author: Philip Wylie
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61683343 192 Sara Baume 006326868X Rayroy 3 3.39 2022
author: Sara Baume
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/05
date added: 2023/09/05
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]]> 61812836 Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him -- until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.

1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney's endearingly violent partner in crime. It's getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. ("Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!"), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.]]> 336 Colson Whitehead 0385545150 Rayroy 0 to-read 3.82 2023
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61273558 This sweeping survey of Black history��shows how Black humanity has been erased and how its recovery can save the humanity of us all.

Using history as a foundation,��The Humanity Archive��uses storytelling techniques to make history come alive and uncover the truth behind America's whitewashed history.

The Humanity Archive�� focuses on the overlooked narratives in the pages of the past.

Challenging dominant perspectives, author��Jermaine��Fowler goes outside the textbooks to find recognizably human stories. Connecting current issues with the heroic struggles of those who have come before us, Fowler brings hidden history to light.

Praise for The Humanity Archive:

From the African Slave Trade to Seneca Village to Biddy Mason and more, The Humanity Archive is a very enriching read on the history of Blackness around the world. I was hooked by Fowler's storytelling and would recommend others who want to pore over a book that outlines critical moments in history—without putting you to sleep. �� ��Philip Lewis, Senior Editor, HuffPost

Fowler sees historical storytelling and the sharing of knowledge as a vocation and a means of fostering empathy and understanding between cultures. A deft storyteller with a sonorous voice, Fowler's passion for his material is palpable as he unfurls the hidden histories. —��Vanity Fair

Born in Louisville, Kentucky,��Jermaine Fowler��is a storyteller and self-proclaimed intellectual adventurer who spent his youth seeking knowledge on the shelves of his local free public library. Between research and lecturing, he is the host of the top-rated history podcast,��The Humanity Archive, praised as a must-listen by��Vanity Fair. Challenging dominant perspectives, Fowler goes outside the textbooks to find recognizably human stories. Connecting current issues with the heroic struggles of those who've come before us, he brings hidden history to light and makes it powerfully relevant.]]> 416 Jermaine Fowler 1955905142 Rayroy 5 4.44 2023
author: Jermaine Fowler
name: Rayroy
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/29
date added: 2023/08/29
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]]> 25897944 You find me on a Tuesday, on my Tuesday trip to town. You're sellotaped to the inside pane of the jumble shop window. A photograph of your mangled face and underneath an appeal for a COMPASSIONATE AND TOLERANT OWNER. A PERSON WITHOUT OTHER PETS & WITHOUT CHILDREN UNDER FOUR.

A misfit man finds a misfit dog. Ray, aged fifty-seven, ‘too old for starting over, too young for giving up��, and One Eye, a vicious little bugger, smaller than expected, a good ratter. Both are accustomed to being alone, unloved, outcast �� but they quickly find in each other a strange companionship of sorts. As spring turns to summer, their relationship grows and intensifies, until a savage act forces them to abandon the precarious life they’d established, and take to the road.]]> 275 Sara Baume 0544716191 Rayroy 5 3.77 2015
author: Sara Baume
name: Rayroy
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/15
date added: 2023/08/15
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]]>