en-US Sun, 27 Apr 2025 09:26:37 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 174876 A profound and deeply personal collection of essays by renowned psychologist Carl Rogers

The late Carl Rogers, founder of the humanistic psychology movement and father of client-centered therapy, based his life's work on his fundamental belief in the human potential for growth. A Way of Being was written in the early 1980s, near the end of Carl Rogers's career, and serves as a coda to his classic On Becoming a Person. More philosophical than his earlier writings, it traces his professional and personal development and ends with a prophetic call for a more humane future.]]> 395 Carl R. Rogers 0395755301 Demo 0 to-read 4.23 1980
author: Carl R. Rogers
name: Demo
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1980
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]]> 174879 420 Carl R. Rogers 039575531X Demo 0 to-read 4.16 1961
author: Carl R. Rogers
name: Demo
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1961
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]]> 195608187 Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction

It’s the new millennium and the anxiety of midlife is creeping up on Sam Singer, a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor. Fed up with his partner and his life in New York, Sam flies to Berlin to attend a gallery opening. There he finds a once-divided city facing an identity crisis of its own. In Berlin the past is everywhere: the graffiti-stained streets, the candlelit cafés and techno clubs, the astonishing mash-up of architecture, monuments, and memorials.

A trip that begins in isolation evolves into one of deep connection and possibility. In an intensely concentrated series of days, Sam finds himself awash in the city, stretched in limbo between his own past and future—in nightclubs with Jeremy, a lonely wannabe DJ; navigating a flirtation with Kaspar, an East Berlin artist he meets at a café; and engaged in a budding relationship with Magda, the enigmatic and icy manager of Sam’s hotel, whom Sam finds himself drawn to, and determined to thaw. I Make Envy on Your Disco is at once a tribute to Berlin, a novel of longing and connection, and a coming-of-middle-age story about confronting the person you were and becoming the person you want to be.]]> 296 Eric Schnall 1496239016 Demo 0 to-read 4.31 2024
author: Eric Schnall
name: Demo
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
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]]> 59575964 A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma.

When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope.

All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender portrayal of what it's like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one's suffering. By turns devastating and soaring, it is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a work of rare and transcendent beauty.]]> 240 Seán Hewitt 0593300084 Demo 0 4.16 2022
author: Seán Hewitt
name: Demo
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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catholicism, queerness, depression - what more can you expect from an irish memoir? prose infused with poetry, but at times, seemed to linger a little too long. beautiful and tragic though. we all go through so much pain and darkness to experience the light.
]]> 51587 The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.]]> 263 Dennis Cooper 0786716746 Demo 0 to-read 3.79 2004
author: Dennis Cooper
name: Demo
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/23
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]]> 44492285
Dune Messiah continues the story of Paul Atreides, better known--and feared--as the man christened Muad'Dib. As Emperor of the Known Universe, he possesses more power than a single man was ever meant to wield. Worshipped as a religious icon by the fanatical Fremens, Paul faces the enmity of the political houses he displaced when he assumed the throne--and a conspiracy conducted within his own sphere of influence.

And even as House Atreides begins to crumble around him from the machinations of his enemies, the true threat to Paul comes to his lover, Chani, and the unborn heir to his family's dynasty...

Includes an introduction by Brian Herbert]]> 336 Frank Herbert 0593098234 Demo 0 3.89 1969
author: Frank Herbert
name: Demo
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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every time i read scifi/fantasy with political intrigue i just miss game of thrones. maybe i should read game of thrones. love paul being like, i became a god to these people but at what cost...and it's like yeah man i mean that's like what happens with a jihad you know?
]]> 214151232 A highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea that tells the story of three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—as they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.

Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.

On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he’s unlike anything she’s seen before.

While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun’s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.]]> 391 Silvia Park 1668021668 Demo 0 to-read 3.89 2025
author: Silvia Park
name: Demo
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
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]]> 219401075 Four strangers time travel to the past and find themselves stuck on the day all their lives were changed in this stunning speculative mystery from award-winning film and television producer Dete Meserve, perfect for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Wrong Place Wrong Time and The Paradox Hotel.

What would you do if you could spend an hour in your past? Four strangers in the beach town of Ventura, California are about to find out.��

Elizabeth aches for one more precious hour with her son who died in a senseless accident. Andy is desperate to find his first love who vanished after a whirlwind romance. Logan craves the rush of surfing and mountain climbing, yearning to reclaim the freedom he lost after a misstep��landed him in a wheelchair. Brooke is looking for an hour of relief from the guilt of an unforgivable mistake.

Enter Aeon Expeditions, the groundbreaking time travel��invention of Mark Saunders—which allows��some lucky clients�� the chance��to spend an hour in their past. Even though Aeon’s technology ensures time travel can’t alter the future, all four clients,��including Mark’s ex-wife Elizabeth,��yearn to revisit the hour that changed their lives forever.��

But when their “hour�� extends beyond sixty minutes, they find themselves stranded in the past. As their paths intertwine unexpectedly, they unearth shocking secrets hidden in the shadows of their shared All their lives were shattered the same night on a secluded highway by the beach. As they delve into the hidden truths of that pivotal hour, a startling revelation emerges. They were not alone. Someone else was present, harboring deadly intentions.

The Memory Collectors is a heart-wrenching, genre-bending novel brimming with hope, grief and second chances.

]]> 336 Dete Meserve Demo 0 to-read 4.19 2025
author: Dete Meserve
name: Demo
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> 77565 517 Dan Simmons 0553288202 Demo 0 to-read 4.23 1990
author: Dan Simmons
name: Demo
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/20
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]]> 15839976 "I live for the dream that my children will be born free," she says. "That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them."

"I live for you," I say sadly.

Eo kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations.

Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.

But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.]]> 382 Pierce Brown 0345539788 Demo 0 to-read 4.26 2014
author: Pierce Brown
name: Demo
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
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date added: 2025/04/20
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]]> 210367505 TOP SECRET: A clear and present threat exists. Open-ended. Existential. Confirmation via uncanny op. Nature of same: Unknown. Initiating entity: Unknown. Priority: High.

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance �� award winners and international bestsellers all, the first the basis for a now-classic film �� Jeff VanderMeer brings us back for a surprise fourth and final foray into Area X.

Absolution opens decades before Area X forms, with a science expedition whose mysterious end suggests terrifying consequences for the future �� and marks the Forgotten Coast as a high-priority area of interest for Central, the shadowy government agency responsible for monitoring extraordinary threats.

Many years later, the Forgotten Coast files wind up in the hands of a washed-up Central operative known as Old Jim. He starts pulling a thread that reveals a long and troubling record of government agents meddling with forces they clearly cannot comprehend. Soon, Old Jim is back out in the field, grappling with personal demons and now partnered with an unproven young agent, the two of them tasked with solving what may be an unsolvable mystery. With every turn, the stakes get higher: Central agents are being liquidated by an unknown rogue entity and Old Jim’s life is on the line.

Old Jim’s investigation culminates in the first Central expedition into what has now been labeled Area X. A border has come down, and a full team �� well trained but eccentric �� has been assembled to find Area X’s “off switch�� somewhere in the volatile, dangerous terrain that has mysteriously defied all attempts to be explored, mapped, or controlled. A landscape that, one way or another, seems to consume all who enter it.

Sweeping in scope and rich with ideas, iconic characters, and unpredictable adventure, Absolution converges the past, present, and future in terrifying, ecstatic, and mind-bending ways. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.]]> 441 Jeff VanderMeer 0374616590 Demo 0 3.61 2024
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Demo
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/16
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an absurd amount of people get pushed off ledges or thrown into holes in this one
]]> 10127008
The relentless pursuit of high self-esteem has become a virtual religion—and a tyrannical one at that. Our ultracompetitive culture tells us we need to be constantly above average to feel good about ourselves, but there is always someone more attractive, successful, or intelligent than we are. And even when we do manage to grab hold of high self-esteem for a brief moment, we can't seem to keep it. Our sense of self-worth goes up and down like a ping-pong ball, rising and falling in lockstep with our latest success or failure.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to self-esteem that many experts believe is a better and more effective path to happiness: self-compassion. The research of Dr. Kristin Neff and other leading psychologists indicates that people who are compassionate toward their failings and imperfections experience greater well-being than those who repeatedly judge themselves. The feelings of security and self-worth provided by self-compassion are also highly stable, kicking in precisely when self-esteem falls down. This book powerfully demonstrates why it's so important to be self-compassionate and give yourself the same caring support you'd give to a good friend.

This groundbreaking work will show you how to let go of debilitating self-criticism and finally learn to be kind to yourself. Using solid empirical research, personal stories, practical exercises, and humor, Dr. Neff—the world's foremost expert on self-compassion—explains how to heal destructive emotional patterns so that you can be healthier, happier, and more effective. Engaging, highly readable, and eminently accessible, this book has the power to change your life.]]> 320 Kristin Neff 0061733512 Demo 0 to-read 4.11 2011
author: Kristin Neff
name: Demo
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2011
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]]> 19161852
Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She'll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.]]> 468 N.K. Jemisin Demo 0 to-read 4.29 2015
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Demo
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2015
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]]> 215362032 In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones�� imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,�� a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,�� a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.]]> 304 Torrey Peters 0593595645 Demo 0 4.05 2025
author: Torrey Peters
name: Demo
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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good short stories, ok novella. would have liked any of the other short stories to become the novella. torrey peters does a lot of interesting stuff with gender and hormones and presentation of the self and more in this one. worth reading even if the middle is a slog
]]> 195791689 From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost?

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,�� May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights�� respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”]]> 262 Helen Phillips 1668008831 Demo 0 3.49 2024
author: Helen Phillips
name: Demo
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
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interesting concepts but...the writing...one of those books where i'm like okay so if this gets published surely i can be one too day.
]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]> 160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 Demo 0 to-read 3.88 2020
author: Solvej Balle
name: Demo
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2020
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]]> 61813107
An enormous snow-covered mountain has appeared in the Pacific Ocean. No one knows when exactly it showed up, precisely how big it might be, or how to explain its existence. When Harold Tunmore, a scientist of mysterious phenomena, is contacted by a shadowy organization to help investigate, he has no idea what he is getting into as he and his team set out for the mountain.

The higher Harold’s team ascends, the less things make sense. Time moves differently, turning minutes into hours, and hours into days. Amid the whipping cold of higher elevation, the climbers�� limbs numb and memories of their lives before the mountain begin to fade. Paranoia quickly turns to violence among the crew, and slithering, ancient creatures pursue them in the snow. Still, as the dangers increase, the mystery of the mountain compels them to its peak, where they are certain they will find their answers. Have they stumbled upon the greatest scientific discovery known to man or the seeds of their own demise?

Framed by the discovery of Harold Tunmore’s unsent letters to his family and the chilling and provocative story they tell, Ascension considers the limitations of science and faith and examines both the beautiful and the unsettling sides of human nature.]]> 344 Nicholas Binge 0593539583 Demo 0 to-read 3.53 2023
author: Nicholas Binge
name: Demo
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2023
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]]> 215362027 A woman dives into her husband's memories to uncover a decades-old feud threatening reality itself in this staggering technothriller from the bestselling author of Ascension.

Maggie Webb has lived the last decade caring for elderly husband, Stanley, as memory loss gradually erases all the beautiful moments they created together. It's the loneliest she's ever felt in her life.

When a mysterious stranger named Hassan appears at her door, he reveals a shocking truth: Stanley isn't losing his memories. Someone is actively removing them to hide a long-buried secret from coming to light. If Maggie does what she's told, she can reverse it. She can get her husband back.

Led by Hassan and his technological marvels, Maggie breaks into her husband's mind, probing the depths of his past in an effort to save him. The deeper she dives, the more she unravels a mystery spanning continents and centuries, each layer more complex than the last.

But Hassan cannot be trusted. Not just memories are disappearing, but pieces of reality itself. If Maggie cannot find out what Stanley did all those years ago, and what Hassan is after now, she risks far more than her husband's life. The very course of human history hangs in the balance.]]> 384 Nicholas Binge 0593852168 Demo 0 to-read 4.13 2025
author: Nicholas Binge
name: Demo
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2025
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]]> 214329001 The future of storytelling is here.

Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.

In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.

What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.]]> 448 Nnedi Okorafor 0063391155 Demo 0 to-read 4.04 2025
author: Nnedi Okorafor
name: Demo
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,�� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics�� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,�� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Demo 0 3.87 2024
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Demo
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
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i /get/ it but like why did he have to do all that
]]> 9778945 Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?

Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.

Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.

Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.]]> 280 Nicholas Carr 0393339750 Demo 0 to-read 3.90 2010
author: Nicholas Carr
name: Demo
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
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]]> 68494 710 China Miéville 0345459407 Demo 0 to-read 3.98 2000
author: China Miéville
name: Demo
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 209166121 A publishing event ten years in the making��a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists��the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until �� betrayed and brokenhearted �� she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America �� but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 320 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0593803477 Demo 0 to-read 3.94 2025
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Demo
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 45688217
The 2010s have been a double-edged decade. Socioeconomic factors have led to the widespread and increased disenfranchisement of poorer people from the mainstream media and the institutions shaping it. This has coincided with a growing number of people from low income backgrounds also receiving better educations than ever before, and having the means at their disposal to both name and resent it.

Steal as much as you can is the story of how this bright generation came to be, and what effective means are still at their disposal to challenge the establishment and ultimately win. By rejecting the established routines of achieving prosperity, and by stealing what you can from them on the way, this book offers hope to anyone who feels increasingly frustrated by our increasingly unequal society.]]> 300 Nathalie Olah 1912248565 Demo 0 to-read 3.88
author: Nathalie Olah
name: Demo
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

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

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

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 387 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 Demo 0 to-read 4.62 2025
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Demo
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 2266967 116 Michel Bernanos 0877973520 Demo 0 to-read 4.13 1967
author: Michel Bernanos
name: Demo
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

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

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Demo 0
maybe i'll visit the brooklyn museum being so close and all.

also, strange to have been 17 at the moma on a school trip and seeing "the artist is present" in person by accident, knowing nothing about it other than some weird lady in red just sitting, but funny to see it come back and back again in my life. i should think about that some more.]]> 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Demo
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
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purchased this a few months ago and have been savoring it for a time when i needed to read something /good/ ya know. drawn to the fact the author is a poet. i love beautiful writing. plot is secondary to me in most cases. not only were the lines poetic but the way the story unfolds and the journeys of cyrus and roya mirror each other was lovely to see. abruptness here and there and sections of the novel that seemed supplementary more than anything, but thankful this has gotten me out of a reading rut.

maybe i'll visit the brooklyn museum being so close and all.

also, strange to have been 17 at the moma on a school trip and seeing "the artist is present" in person by accident, knowing nothing about it other than some weird lady in red just sitting, but funny to see it come back and back again in my life. i should think about that some more.
]]> 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Demo 0 to-read 3.65 2025
author: Laila Lalami
name: Demo
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 214152259 A hilarious and painfully relatable debut novel about two thirtysomething best friends�� messy search for connection and love in New York, perfect for fans of Rebecca Serle, Gabrielle Zevin, and Dolly Alderton.

Sometimes friendship can be its own love story.

Victor and Zoey are getting old, well old-er, and it’s beginning to be a real problem.

Best friends for a decade, they have seen each other through bad dates and office drama, late nights and hungover brunches, during their years together in New York City.

As their wild twenties come to a close, though, the dynamic between the two is shifting. Coming off a tough breakup, Victor dedicates his energies toward building a career writing celebrity profiles for one of the last glossy magazines left, while Zoey navigates the terrain at her nascent fashion startup, questioning her future with her fiancé. The friends and acquaintances in their orbit—authors, influencers, “It girls”—are also searching for a sense of belonging, amidst anxieties and self-doubt.

But when tragedy befalls Victor, his once unbreakable bond with Zoey really starts to crack. They find themselves ignoring their ongoing text thread and pushing away what might be the most meaningful relationship of their lives. An immersive, hilarious, and heartbreaking story, this is a debut novel about best friendship, finding yourself, and realizing growing up has as much to do with the person you were as it does with the person you are desperately trying to become.]]> 336 Josh Duboff 1668059932 Demo 0 to-read 3.23
author: Josh Duboff
name: Demo
average rating: 3.23
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 223436601 An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

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

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

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]> 400 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Demo 0 to-read 4.30 2025
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Demo
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 23426
The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris-London flight, and by the time they've reached the luggage carousel, he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair and pale nape and watery green eyes, the way she drives a car and eats Chinese food, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, her views on Heidegger's Being and Time - although he hates her taste in shoes.
On Love plots the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through the (Groucho) "Marxist" stage of coming to terms with being loved by the unattainable beloved, through a fit of anhedonia, defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness, and finally through the nausea induced and terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away.

Alain de Botton is simultaneously hilarious and intellectually astute, shifting with ease among such seminal romantic texts as The Divine Comedy, Madame Bovary, and The Bleeding Heart, a self-help book for those who love too much. He is schematically flawless, funny, funky, and totally engaging.
Filled with profound observations and useful diagrams, On Love displays and examines for all of us the pain and exhilaration of love, asking, "Can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams? Can we not be excused a certain superstitious faith in a creature who will prove the solution to our relentless yearnings?"]]> 194 Alain de Botton 0802142400 Demo 0 to-read 3.99 1993
author: Alain de Botton
name: Demo
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 27845690
The long-awaited and beguiling second novel from Alain de Botton that tracks the beautifully complicated arc of a romantic partnership, from the internationally bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life. De Botton's essay "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person" (The New York Times, May 28, 2016), which draws from The Course of Love, was the #1 most emailed article for days.

We all know the headiness and excitement of the early days of love. But what comes after? In Edinburgh, a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children—but no long-term relationship is as simple as "happily ever after." The Course of Love is a novel that explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain love, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence. You experience, along with Rabih and Kirsten, the first flush of infatuation, the effortlessness of falling into romantic love, and the course of life thereafter. Interwoven with their story and its challenges is an overlay of philosophy—an annotation and a guide to what we are reading.

This is a Romantic novel in the true sense, one interested in exploring how love can survive and thrive in the long term. The result is a sensory experience—fictional, philosophical, psychological—that urges us to identify deeply with these characters and to reflect on his and her own experiences in love. Fresh, visceral, and utterly compelling, The Course of Love is a provocative and life-affirming novel for everyone who believes in love.]]> 240 Alain de Botton 0241145473 Demo 0 to-read 4.01 2016
author: Alain de Botton
name: Demo
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/15
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]]> 214537790 From��Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling��author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples�� memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 432 Karen Russell 059380225X Demo 0 to-read 4.03 2025
author: Karen Russell
name: Demo
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 214597760 All Joseph wants is to be let into Tartuffe's world. All Ettie wants is to escape it.

The year is 1920. The place is a remote farmhouse in Provence, home to the reclusive painter Edouard Tartuffe and his niece, Ettie. Into this strange, silent house walks a young journalist hoping to write an article about Tartuffe. But the more he entangles himself in the peculiar household, the more Joseph's curiosity grows . . .

Ettie cooks and cleans for her uncle. She prepares his studio, scrubs his paintbrushes, and creates the perfect environment for him to work. She has never gone further than the local village. She is sharp-eyed and watchful. But beneath her cool exterior, Joseph senses something simmering. Ettie, Joseph and Tartuffe circle each other throughout the hot, crackling summer, until finally they collide.

The Artist is about two people grabbing the other by the hand and pulling each other into life.]]> 327 Lucy Steeds 1399819593 Demo 0 to-read 4.45 2025
author: Lucy Steeds
name: Demo
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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]]> 8477057
Meet Brás de Oliva Domingos. The miracle child of a world-famous Brazilian writer, Brás spends his days penning other people's obituaries and his nights dreaming of becoming a successful author himself—writing the end of other people's stories, while his own has barely begun.

But on the day that life begins, would he even notice? Does it start at 21 when he meets the girl of his dreams? Or at 11, when he has his first kiss? Is it later in his life when his first son is born? Or earlier when he might have found his voice as a writer?

Each day in Brás's life is like a page from a book. Each one reveals the people and things who have made him who he is: his mother and father, his child and his best friend, his first love and the love of his life. And like all great stories, each day has a twist he'll never see coming...

In Daytripper, the Eisner Award-winning twin brothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá tell a magical, mysterious and moving story about life itself—a hauntingly lyrical journey that uses the quiet moments to ask the big questions.]]> 247 Fábio Moon 1401229697 Demo 0 to-read 4.31 2011
author: Fábio Moon
name: Demo
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 211003937 The long-awaited follow-up from one of the most original and hilarious voices writing today.

Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her signature humor and fierce intelligence to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she’s had—with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself—all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.]]> 272 Scaachi Koul 1250270502 Demo 0 to-read 4.04 2025
author: Scaachi Koul
name: Demo
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 38787
As one enters Juan Rulfo's legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo - lover, overlord, murderer.

Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.]]> 124 Juan Rulfo 0802133908 Demo 0 to-read 4.06 1955
author: Juan Rulfo
name: Demo
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1955
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 211934948 Braiding together biography and criticism, Adam Plunkett challenges our understanding of Robert Frost’s life and poetic legacy in a pathbreaking new work.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation’s bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us on wooded roads and articulating our hopes and fears. After Frost’s death, these cliches gave way to equally broad (though opposed) portraits sketched by his biographers, chief among them Lawrance Thompson. When the critic Helen Vender reviewed Thompson’s biography, she asked
whether anyone could avoid the conclusion that Frost was a “monster.��

In Love and The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, Adam Plunkett blends biography and criticism to find the truth of Frost’s life—one that lies between the two poles of perception. Plunkett reveals a new Frost through a careful look at the poems and people he knew best, showing how the stories of his most important relationships,
heretofore partly told, mirror dominant themes of Frost’s enduring withholding and disclosure, privacy and intimacy. Not least of these relationships is the fraught, intense friendship between Frost and Thompson, the major biographer whose record of Frost Plunkett seeks to set straight.

Moving through Frost’s most important work and closest relationships with the attention to detail necessary to see familiar things anew, Plunkett offers an original interpretation of Frost’s poetry, tracing Frost’s distinctive achievement to an engagement with poetic tradition far deeper and more extensive than he ever let
on. Frost invited his readers into a conversation like the one he sustained with his literary forebears, intimate and profound, yet Frost kept his private self at a remove. Here, Plunkett brings the two together—the poet and the poetry—and draws us back into conversation with America’s poet.]]> 512 Adam Plunkett 0374282080 Demo 0 to-read 4.37 2025
author: Adam Plunkett
name: Demo
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 216822994 Unfolding in South Wales against the backdrop of Section 28, the age of consent debate and the HIV and AIDS crisis, this is a tender and resonant love story, and a powerful debut.]]> 119 Anthony Shapland 1803511613 Demo 0 to-read 4.05
author: Anthony Shapland
name: Demo
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 52544242 A remarkable first collection by an important new poet

In this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual.

Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent.

In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet’s father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. ‘This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.��

Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet.]]> 80 Seán Hewitt 1787332268 Demo 0 to-read 4.20 2020
author: Seán Hewitt
name: Demo
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 638335 176 Pedro Lemebel 0802141870 Demo 0 to-read 4.34 2001
author: Pedro Lemebel
name: Demo
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:
so lovely and queer - i did not like it at first but won me over with its meditative prose
]]> 284996 ISBN: 0374515360 (ISBN13: 9780374515362

Winner of the National Book Award

The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime - Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day" - sent to her publisher shortly before her death - is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.

Contents:
The geranium --
The barber --
Wildcat --
The crop --
The turkey --
The train --
The peeler --
The heart of the park --
A stoke of good fortune --
Enoch and the gorilla --
A good man is hard to find --
A late encounter with the enemy --
The life you save may be your own --
The river --
A circle in the fire --
The displaced person --
A temple of the Holy Ghost --
The artificial nigger --
Good country people --
You can't be any poorer than dead --
Greenleaf --
A view of the woods --
The enduring chill --
The comforts of home --
Everything that rises must converge --
The partridge festival --
The lame shall enter first --
Why do the heathen rage? --
Revelation --
Parker's back --
Judgement Day.]]> 555 Flannery O'Connor Demo 0 to-read 4.41 1971
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Demo
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 212806569 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey to��peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of��Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz �� just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy �� collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied ways��those of��other cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls��that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]> 224 Geraldine Brooks 059365398X Demo 0 4.34 2025
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Demo
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/22
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in the prose you truly can feel the absence her husband’s death caused
]]> 123632 Man and His Symbols owes its existence to one of Jung's own dreams. The great psychologist dreamed that his work was understood by a wide public, rather than just by psychiatrists, and therefore he agreed to write and edit this fascinating book. Here, Jung examines the full world of the unconscious, whose language he believed to be the symbols constantly revealed in dreams. Convinced that dreams offer practical advice, sent from the unconscious to the conscious self, Jung felt that self-understanding would lead to a full and productive life. Thus, the reader will gain new insights into himself from this thoughtful volume, which also illustrates symbols throughout history. Completed just before his death by Jung and his associates, it is clearly addressed to the general reader.]]> 415 C.G. Jung 0440351839 Demo 0 to-read 4.19 1964
author: C.G. Jung
name: Demo
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1964
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 169272349
In 2018, novelist Jami Attenberg, faced with a looming deadline, needed writing inspiration. Using a bootcamp model, she and a friend set out to write one thousand words daily for two weeks straight. They opened this practice to Attenberg’s online community and soon hundreds then thousands of people started using the #1000WordsofSummer hashtag to track their work and support one another. What began as a simple challenge between two friends has become a literary movement—write 1,000 words per day without judgment, or bias, or concerns about writer’s block, and see what comes of it.

1000 Words is the book-length extension of this movement. It is about becoming—and staying—motivated, discovering yourself and your creative desires, and approaching your craft from a new direction. It features advice from more than fifty well-known writers, including New York Times bestsellers, Pulitzer Prize winners, and stars of the literary world. Framing these letters are words of wisdom and encouragement, plus specific strategies, from Attenberg on how to carve out a creative path for yourself all year round.

Paired with vibrant word art illustrations, 1000 Words is an accessible and motivational craft book that allows you to open any page and get a quick and fulfilling hit of inspiration.

Featuring Roxane Gay, Bryan Washington, Susan Orlean, Maris Kreizman, Sara Novic, Rumaan Alam, Lauren Oyler, Emma Straub, Christopher Gonzales, Benjamin Percy, Mira Jacob, Laura van den Berg, Carmen Maria Machado, Courtney Sullivan, Rebecca Carroll, Ada Limon, R.O. Kwon, Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, Elissa Watusha, Alexander Chee, Maggie Shipstead, Deesha Philyaw, Jasmine Guillory, Kristen Arnett, Attica Locke, Megan Abbott, Min Jin Lee, Lauren Groff, Andrew Sean Greer, Camille Dungy, Megan Giddings, Isaac Fitsgerald, Hannah Tinti, Michael H. Weber, Celeste Ng, Elizabeth McCracken, Will Leitch, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Morgan Parker, Kiese Laymon, Melissa Febos, Alissa Nutting, Liz Moore, Laila Lalami, Megan Mayhew Berman, Rebecca Makkai, Meg Wolitzer, Mychal Denzel Smith, Josh Gondelman, and Dantiel W. Moniz.]]> 272 Jami Attenberg 1668023601 Demo 0 4.18 2024
author: Jami Attenberg
name: Demo
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
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I feel like Jami and I would vibe
]]> 54493401
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?]]> 476 Andy Weir 0593135202 Demo 0 4.49 2021
author: Andy Weir
name: Demo
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves:
review:
dad literature through and through. terrible writing, interesting concept and story.
]]> 150222

John Ashberry won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashberry reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been. ]]> 96 John Ashbery 0140586687 Demo 0 to-read 4.09 1975
author: John Ashbery
name: Demo
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> 57693457 After several deaths punctuating a series of all-too-brief life spans, a clone reassesses his purpose �� and his humanity �� in Edward Ashton’s Mickey7, “a unique blend of thought-provoking sci-fi concepts, farcical relationship drama, and exotic body horror�� (New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin).

EXPENDABLE \ik’spen-d��-b’l\ n. A human clone utilized for dangerous work on space exploration missions. An Expendable’s personality and memories may be transferred intact to a new body if and when the current host dies.

Mickey Barnes is an Expendable, now on his seventh iteration, living �� and dying �� among his fellow colonists on the near-uninhabitable ice world of Niflheim. Some consider him immortal. Others believe he’s a soulless monstrosity. For the past nine years, he has been deployed for hazardous assignments and subjected to experiments that test the limits of human endurance, his humanity sacrificed for the greater good.

While on reconnaissance, Mickey7 is injured and left for dead, only to be saved by Niflheim’s native species, thought to be insentient by the colonists. Returning to base, Mickey7 meets his next generation, Mickey8. Neither clone is willing to recycle himself, but if anyone discovers multiple Mickeys exist, they’ll both be executed �� and there won’t ever be a Mickey9.

But Mickey7’s premature twin isn’t his only secret. He hasn’t uploaded his memories in a month, leaving his clone in the dark about his near death and close encounter with the planet’s inhabitants. Mickey7 also doesn’t know how all of his previous selves died, and those he remembers have left him traumatized and mistrustful of the colony’s mission. A mission that has Mickey Barnes questioning his moral and mortal existence...again...and again....]]> 296 Edward Ashton 1250275032 Demo 0 to-read 3.74 2022
author: Edward Ashton
name: Demo
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> 214151927 From Lambda Literary Award–winning author Alejandro Heredia comes a spellbinding debut about intersectionality, enduring friendship, and found family set at the turn of the millennium in 1999, following two Afro-Caribbean friends as they journey beyond the confined expectations of their home country in the Dominican Republic and begin new lives in New York City.

Sal and Charo, two best friends from Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic, arrive in New York City and dream of making the United States their new home—but for very different reasons. Charo left Santa Domingo to escape the life of domesticity that was all but guaranteed for women like her, but soon finds herself in the exact situation she tried to partnered to a controlling man, mother of a young child, and working long hours as a cashier. Sal on the other hand, fled Santa Domingo after an unspeakable tragedy, hoping that the distance would allow him a fresh start. But trauma keeps him in its grips, and he’s unable to move on.

With both friends feeling the same pressures in New York that forced them from their homes, a chance outing at a gay bar introduces Sal to Vance, an African American gay man whose romantic relationship with Sal challenges him to confront the trauma of his past. Through Vance, Charo befriends Ella, an African American trans woman, and Ella’s refusal to be who or what society dictates she should be inspires Charo to reckon with the role she’s grown comfortable in. Sal and Charo soon find themselves part of a queer intersectional community who disrupt the status quo of gender politics and conformity, allowing both to create the family and identities they’ve always longed for.]]> 352 Alejandro Heredia 1668050463 Demo 0 to-read 3.98 2025
author: Alejandro Heredia
name: Demo
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 146310958
Part falling-in-love story.

Part falling-apart story.

Harvey's dads are splitting up. It's been on the cards for a while, but it's still sudden. Woken-by-his-father-to-catch-a-red-eye sudden. Now he's restarting His Life In A New City, Living Above A Cafe With The Extended Greek Family He Barely Knows.

Sotiris is a rising star. At seventeen, he's already achieved his dream of publishing a novel. When his career falters, a cute, wise-cracking bookseller named Jem upends his world.

Harvey and Sotiris's stories converge on the same street in Darlinghurst, in this beautifully heartfelt novel about how our dreams shape us, and what they cost us.]]> 401 Will Kostakis 1761180177 Demo 0 to-read 3.79 2023
author: Will Kostakis
name: Demo
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 242006 336 Augusten Burroughs 031242227X Demo 0 3.77 2002
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Demo
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
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i read this once as a freshman in high school and i think it may have been the first time i read about a gay character. someone in study hall heard that it was gay and took my copy and ripped it apart and threw it in the garbage. a few months ago, he requested me on linkedin. don't think i'll read this again - found it strange and boring. i can't believe this was a nyt bestseller for like, years, to the point where there was a movie made. man, the early 2000s didn't know what was coming if they thought this was something special.
]]> 18077752
Meanwhile, Acceptance tunnels ever deeper into the circumstances surrounding the creation of Area X—what initiated this unnatural upheaval? Among the many who have tried, who has gotten close to understanding Area X—and who may have been corrupted by it?

In this last installment of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may be solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound—or terrifying.]]> 341 Jeff VanderMeer 0374104115 Demo 0 3.66 2014
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Demo
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
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not as strong as the other two - just didn't seem like the author knew where he wanted to go with the story. was a bit frustrating to have multiple povs that retread the same plot points and symbols in a way that did not progress anything forward and did not resolve much.
]]> 23841432 89 Ocean Vuong Demo 0 to-read 4.20 2016
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Demo
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 1039371 532 Brad Gooch 0394571185 Demo 0 to-read 4.12 1993
author: Brad Gooch
name: Demo
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 79350
Joe LeSueur lived with Frank O'Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O'Hara wrote his greatest poems, including 'To the Film Industry in Crisis', 'In Memory of My Feelings', 'Having a Coke with You', and the famous Lunch Poems-so called because O'Hara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of O'Hara's talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced America's greatest poet of city life since Whitman.

Alternating between O'Hara's poems and LeSueur's memory of the circumstances that inspired them, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara is a literary commentary like no other--an affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of O'Hara and the New York that animated his friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of O'Hara's best-loved poems, is the most intimate, true-to-life portrait we will ever have of this quintessential American figure and his now legendary times.]]> 336 Joe LeSueur 0374529043 Demo 0 to-read 4.04 2003
author: Joe LeSueur
name: Demo
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 139871
Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England; from 1951 he lived and worked in New York, both for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an associate curator. O'Hara’s untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, "the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed.�� This collection is a reissue of a volume first published by Grove Press in 1957, and it demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying O'Hara’s conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, "you just go on your nerve.��
]]> 52 Frank O'Hara 0802134521 Demo 0 4.14 1957
author: Frank O'Hara
name: Demo
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/18
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]]> 51193619 An intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.

Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.

A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May's story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.

Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.]]> 276 Katherine May 1846045991 Demo 0 to-read 3.84 2020
author: Katherine May
name: Demo
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62873378 One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first the story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser.

In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser’s strange world—unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.

In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.

This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.]]> 224 Michael Finkel 0525657320 Demo 0 to-read 3.92 2023
author: Michael Finkel
name: Demo
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6867
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.

As it follows that crime's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.]]> 351 Ian McEwan 038572179X Demo 0 to-read 3.94 2001
author: Ian McEwan
name: Demo
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 213618152 From a rising literary star and the author of How to Be a Good Girl comes��a brilliant, biting, and beautifully wrought memoir of trauma and the cost of survival

In the thick of lockdown, 2020, poet, critic, and memoirist Jamie Hood published her debut, How to Be a Good Girl,��an interrogation of modern femininity and the narratives of love, desire, and violence yoked to it. The Rumpus praised Hood's “bold vulnerability,�� and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020.��

In Trauma Plot, her long-awaited follow-up, Hood turns her eye to the archetype of the rape survivor, who must perform penitence long after living through the unthinkable. In her trademark blend of memoir and criticism, Hood investigates the lives of art's most infamous women, from Ovid's Philomela and David Lynch’s Laura Palmer to Artemisia Gentileschi, the painter who captured Judith’s wrath—as well as Hood herself,��reckoning with three decades of sexual violence and the wreckage left behind. In so doing, she What do we as a culture demand of survivors? And what do survivors, in turn, owe a world that has abandoned them?��

Trauma Plot is a scalding work of personal and literary criticism. It is a send-up of our culture's pious disdain for “trauma porn,�� a dirge for the broken promises of #MeToo, and a paean to��life after death.]]> 336 Jamie Hood 059370097X Demo 0 to-read 4.57 2025
author: Jamie Hood
name: Demo
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 216634841 A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening.

Set in a remote village in the North of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two sixteen year old boys meet and transform each other’s lives.

James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him, like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre, drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.

Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.]]> 204 Seán Hewitt 1039056571 Demo 0 to-read 4.29 2025
author: Seán Hewitt
name: Demo
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
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]]> 7235533 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.]]> 1007 Brandon Sanderson 0765326353 Demo 0 to-read 4.66 2010
author: Brandon Sanderson
name: Demo
average rating: 4.66
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 760702
In linked short stories, he says goodbye to Sally Bowles, to Fraulein Schroeder, to pranksters, perverts, political manipulators; to the very, very guilty and to the dwindling band of innocents. It is goodbye to a Berlin wild, wicked, breathtaking, decadent beyond belief and already -- in the years between the wars -- welcoming death in through the door, though more with a wink than a whimper.

~from the back cover]]> 208 Christopher Isherwood 0586047956 Demo 0 to-read 3.95 1939
author: Christopher Isherwood
name: Demo
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1939
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/06
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]]> 198471322 A stunningly intimate exploration of the writer and gay cultural icon and of his lifelong search for authenticity. The story of Christopher Isherwood’s life is one of away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born an heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait. Isherwood began his career depicting the psychological wreckage of World War I. Living in Berlin, his stories and plays (cowritten with W. H. Auden), inspired by the city’s nightlife and artistic underbelly, made him famous. With the rise of fascism and the Gestapo’s arrest of his boyfriend, Isherwood left the country and found work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he became the disciple of a Hindu monk, Swami Prabhavananda. Together they translated the Bhagavad Gita. Isherwood shed his family ghosts and became a chief instigator of the cultural shift that made gay liberation possible. Every step of the journey served his writing; one of our greatest diarists, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, penetrating, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations for self-understanding and happiness. Here is Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.]]> 852 Katherine Bucknell 1429951982 Demo 0 to-read 4.20 2024
author: Katherine Bucknell
name: Demo
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56140 Cadillac Desert Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West.

Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning expose and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of an Eden—an Eden that may be only a mirage.]]> 582 Marc Reisner 0140178244 Demo 0 to-read 4.27 1986
author: Marc Reisner
name: Demo
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 211003759 In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most �� love and work, community and knowledge �� will survive.]]> 304 Eiren Caffall 1250353521 Demo 0 to-read 3.56 2025
author: Eiren Caffall
name: Demo
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 196056205 A mesmerising novel of two sisters on a Pacific Northwest island whose lives are upended by an unexpected visitor �� a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods, by the celebrated, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth.

They were sisters and they would last past the end of time.

Sam and her sister, Elena, dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works long days on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can’t earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence.

Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want? When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it’s time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the plan to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger.

A story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us �� and within us �� Bear is a propulsive, mythical, rich novel from one of the most acclaimed young writers in America.]]> 304 Julia Phillips 0525520430 Demo 0 3.21 2024
author: Julia Phillips
name: Demo
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/26
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really clicked for me towards the end - lovely yet heartbreaking novel throughout
]]> 18077769 The bone-chilling, hair-raising second installment of the Southern Reach Trilogy

After thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X—a seemingly malevolent landscape surrounded by an invisible border and mysteriously wiped clean of all signs of civilization—has been a series of expeditions overseen by a government agency so secret it has almost been forgotten: the Southern Reach. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.

John Rodríguez (aka "Control") is the Southern Reach's newly appointed head. Working with a distrustful but desperate team, a series of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, Control begins to penetrate the secrets of Area X. But with each discovery he must confront disturbing truths about himself and the agency he's pledged to serve.

In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Area X's most disturbing questions are answered . . . but the answers are far from reassuring.]]> 341 Jeff VanderMeer 0374104107 Demo 0 3.54 2014
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Demo
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/24
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves:
review:
you learn so much and also so little - fun read and great idea to switch to a detective novel type style after the first one. wish the payoff were a bit better. once it got good I wondered why it hadn’t been for so long
]]> 16640 149 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0812969901 Demo 0 to-read 3.71 1774
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Demo
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1774
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 9004342
Daring to Trust offers key insights and practical exercises for exploring and addressing our trust issues in relationships. Topics

������•��How we learn early in life to trust others (or not to trust them)
������•��Why we fear trusting
������•��Developing greater trust in ourselves as the basis for trusting others
������•��How to know if someone is trustworthy
������•��Naïve trust vs. healthy, adult trust
������•��What to do when trust is broken


Ultimately, Richo explains, we must develop trust in four toward ourselves, toward others, toward life as it is, and toward a higher power or spiritual path. These four types of trust are not only the basis of healthy relationships, they are also the foundation of emotional well-being and freedom from fear.]]> 192 David Richo 1590308247 Demo 0 3.95 2010
author: David Richo
name: Demo
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
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trusting yourself is so crazy but so important
]]> 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

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

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Demo 0 to-read 4.15 2024
author: Liz Moore
name: Demo
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 46041465
When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else�� realizing that you are enough.

Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones�� Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.]]> 368 Dolly Alderton 0062968785 Demo 0 3.98 2018
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Demo
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
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who knew British dating required so much public transportation
]]> 214614 Desert Solitaire is one of Edward Abbey’s most critically acclaimed works and marks his first foray into the world of nonfiction writing. Written while Abbey was working as a ranger at Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah, Desert Solitaire is a rare view of one man’s quest to experience nature in its purest form.

Through prose that is by turns passionate and poetic, Abbey reflects on the condition of our remaining wilderness and the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world as well as his own internal struggle with morality. As the world continues its rapid development, Abbey’s cry to maintain the natural beauty of the West remains just as relevant today as when this book was written.]]> 337 Edward Abbey 0345326490 Demo 0 to-read 4.18 1968
author: Edward Abbey
name: Demo
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1968
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]]> 42121525
Epic and intimate, heartbreaking and galvanizing, Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations is an ode to a disappearing world and a breathtaking page-turner about the possibility of hope against all odds.]]> 256 Charlotte McConaghy 125020402X Demo 0 to-read 4.11 2020
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Demo
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
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]]> 14249 Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.

From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the possibilities of a future neither of them expected.

Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place. Prodigal Summer demonstrates a balance of narrative, drama and ideas that is characteristic of Barbara Kingsolver's finest work.]]> 444 Barbara Kingsolver 0060959037 Demo 0 to-read 4.03 2000
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Demo
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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]]> 55228162 A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week

'The very treeline is on the move: a devastating image. This book is an evocative, wise and unflinching exploration of what it will mean for humanity.' —Jay Griffiths

The Arctic treeline is the frontline of climate change, where the trees have been creeping towards the pole for fifty years already. These vast swathes of forests, which encircle the north of the globe in an almost unbroken green ring, comprise the world's second largest biome.

Scientists are only just beginning to understand the astonishing significance of these northern forests for all life on Earth. Six tree species—Scots pine, birch, larch, spruce, poplar and rowan—form the central protagonists of Ben Rawlence's story. In Scotland, northern Scandinavia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland, he discovers what these trees and the people who live and work alongside them have to tell us about the past, present and future of our planet.

At the treeline, Rawlence witnesses the accelerating impact of climate change and the devastating legacies of colonialism and capitalism. But he also finds reasons for hope. Humans are creatures of the forest; we have always evolved with trees. The Treeline asks us where our co-evolution might take us next. Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Treeline is a spellbinding blend of nature, travel and science writing, underpinned by an urgent environmental message.]]> 342 Ben Rawlence 1787332241 Demo 0 to-read 4.23 2022
author: Ben Rawlence
name: Demo
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
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]]> 205436008 A riveting courtroom drama as victims of a manmade environmental disaster—the survivors—pursue justice in a Tennessee court led by a country lawyer challenging the notion that, in America, justice can be bought. For more than 50 years, a power plant in the little town of Kingston that was operated by Tennessee Valley Authority burned some fourteen thousand tons of coal a day, creating a mountain of ashen waste 60 feet high and covering 84 acres, contained only by an earthen embankment. On December 22, 2008, that embankment broke, unleashing a lethal wave of sludge that covered hundreds of acres, damaged nearly 30 homes, and precipitated a cleanup effort that would cost more than $1 billion—and the lives of more than 50 workers.��Jim Scott, a local attorney, after meeting with workers who had developed respiratory problems, decided to take on TVA, a colossal, federally-owned utility and a cornerstone of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Scott and the team he hastily assembled gathered massive evidence of threats against workers; retaliatory firings; disregarded safety precautions; and test results, either hidden or altered, that would have revealed harmful levels of arsenic, lead, and radioactive materials at the cleanup site. At every stage, Scott—outmanned and nearly broke—had to overcome legal hurdles constructed by TVA and the firm it hired to execute the cleanup, along with the EPA, which refused to aid the sickened workers. Scott grew especially close to one of the victims, whose swift decline only intensified his hunger for justice. As more information leaked out and as the workers�� day in court arrived, they seemed to have everything on their side, including the truth.]]> 384 Jared Sullivan 0593321111 Demo 0 to-read 4.36
author: Jared Sullivan
name: Demo
average rating: 4.36
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]]> 199798785
On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like 9/11 or JFK’s assassination, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th-century history—yet the details of what took place that day, and why, have largely been forgotten. Until now.

Based on extensive archival records and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a tale of optimism and promise undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and ultimately kept from the public.

Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers, and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space.]]> 563 Adam Higginbotham 198217661X Demo 0 to-read 4.52 2024
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Demo
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
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]]> 203644918 A paradigm-shifting global survey of how human history has reshaped the planet, and vice versa

Ever since innovations in agriculture vastly expanded production of the staples of food energy, our remarkable achievements in reshaping nature have brought about an overwhelming expansion in the life chances of billions of people. Yet every technological innovation has also empowered humans to exploit each other and the planet with devastating brutality, twinning the stories of environment and of Empire, genocide and eco-cide, as with Spanish silver mining in Peru and British gold mining in South Africa.

After the age of empire, new nations raced to make up lost ground, expanding human freedom at devastating ecological cost. Amrith’s environmental lens provides an essential new way of understanding as a massive reshaping of the earth through the global mobilization of natural resources, those resources including humans themselves. He also makes clear that migration is often a consequence of environmental harm.

Reinterpreting a history previously seen from a Euro-and-anthropocentric viewpoint, Amrith relates in brilliant prose, and on the largest canvas, a magisterial, mind-altering epic - vibrant with stories, characters, vivid images and rich archival resources.]]> 413 Sunil Amrith 0141993871 Demo 0 to-read 4.02
author: Sunil Amrith
name: Demo
average rating: 4.02
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]]> 199793433
In beautifully wrought prose, Callum tells the story of returning to the workshop and to the wood, to handcrafting furniture for people who will love it and then pass it on to the next generation—an antidote to a culture where everything seems so easily disposable. As he does so, he brings us closer to nature and the physical act of creation—and we begin to understand how he has been shaped, as both a craftsman and a son.

Blending memoir and nature writing at its finest, Ingrained is an uplifting meditation on the challenges of working with your hands in our modern age, on community, consumerism, and the beauty of the natural world—one that asks us to see our local trees, and our own wooden objects, in a new and revelatory light.]]> 320 Callum Robinson 0063350831 Demo 0 to-read 4.20 2024
author: Callum Robinson
name: Demo
average rating: 4.20
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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 Demo 0 3.50 2024
author: Yasmin Zaher
name: Demo
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
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the most hyperlocal novel I’ll ever probably read - so embarrassing to read your neighborhood in print
]]> 205673377 From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.]]> 288 Hiromi Kawakami 1593766114 Demo 0 to-read 3.77 2016
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Demo
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
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]]> 127282246
In 1967, the dancer Marta Becket and her husband were traveling through Death Valley Junction when they came across an abandoned theater. Marta decided it was hers. She painted her ideal audience on its walls and danced her own dances until her death five decades later.

In the present day, Gia has ended a relationship and taken a leave from her job in film studies at a university. She is sleeping fifteen hours a night and ignoring calls from her mother. In a library archive, she comes across a photo of Marta Becket and decides to write her a letter. Soon Marta magically appears in her home.

Gia hopes Marta Becket will guide her out of her despair. But is Marta―the example of her single-minded, solitary life―enough? Through precise, vivid vignettes, Bitter Water Opera follows Gia as she resists the urge to escape into herself and struggles to form a lasting connection to the world. Her search has her reckoning with a set of terrifying charcoal drawings on her garage walls, a corpse in the middle of a pond, a crooked pear sapling, and other mysterious entities before bringing her to Marta’s theater, the Amargosa Opera House. There in the desert, Gia finds one answer.

In this brief, astonishing novel, Nicolette Polek describes an individual awakening to faith while exploring our deepest existential questions. How do we look beyond ourselves? Where do words go? What is art for?]]> 128 Nicolette Polek 1644452839 Demo 0 to-read 3.86 2024
author: Nicolette Polek
name: Demo
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
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]]> 195790626
Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love?

In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichėd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them―chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics.]]> 240 Elisa Gabbert 0374605890 Demo 0 to-read 3.76 2024
author: Elisa Gabbert
name: Demo
average rating: 3.76
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]]> 127278133 An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.]]> 304 Ferdia Lennon 1250893690 Demo 0 to-read 4.15 2024
author: Ferdia Lennon
name: Demo
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
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]]> 603260 Five thousand years out of the Labyrinth, the Minotaur finds himself in the American South, living in a trailer park and working as a line cook at a steakhouse. No longer a devourer of human flesh, the Minotaur is a socially inept, lonely creature with very human needs. But over a two-week period, as his life dissolves into chaos, this broken and alienated immortal awakens to the possibility for happiness and to the capacity for love.
]]> 313 Steven Sherrill 0312308922 Demo 0 to-read 3.72 2000
author: Steven Sherrill
name: Demo
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2000
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]]> 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Demo 0 4.16 2024
author: Richard Powers
name: Demo
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
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]]> 63251764 An award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy �� and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple question: what really happens to what we throw away?

In Wasteland, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on a shocking journey inside the waste industry—the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy, quietly profiting from what we leave behind. In India, he meets the waste-pickers on the front line of the plastic crisis. In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste. In Ghana, he follows the after-life of our technology and explores the global export network that results in goodwill donations clogging African landfills. From an incinerator to an Oklahoma ghost-town, Franklin-Wallis travels in search of the people and companies that really handle waste—and on the way, meets the innovators and campaigners pushing for a cleaner and less wasteful future. ��
��
With this mesmerizing, thought-provoking, and occasionally terrifying investigation, Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells a new story of humanity based on what we leave behind, and along the way, he shares a blueprint for building a healthier, more sustainable world—before we’re all buried in trash.]]> 392 Oliver Franklin-Wallis 0306827115 Demo 0 to-read 4.45 2023
author: Oliver Franklin-Wallis
name: Demo
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> 123979539 446 Helen Czerski 1324006714 Demo 0 to-read 4.17 2023
author: Helen Czerski
name: Demo
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> 48615751
As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted--no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape--she was able to turn to our world's fierce and funny creatures for guidance.

"What the peacock can do," she tells us, "is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life." The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world's gifts.

Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.]]> 165 Aimee Nezhukumatathil 1571313656 Demo 0 to-read 4.05 2020
author: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
name: Demo
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/23
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]]> 78299766
Born and raised in rural West Virginia, Jonathan Corcoran was the youngest and only son of three siblings in a family balanced on the precipice of poverty. His mother, a traditional, evangelical, and insular woman who had survived abuse and abandonment, was often his only ally. Together they navigated a strained homelife dominated by his distant, gambling-addicted father and shared a seemingly unbreakable bond.

When Corcoran left home to attend Brown University, a chasm between his upbringing and his reality began to open. As his horizons and experiences expanded, he formed new bonds beyond bloodlines, and met the upper-middle-class Jewish man who would become his husband. But this authentic life would not be easy, and Corcoran was forever changed when his mother disowned him after discovering his truth. In the ensuing fifteen years, the two would come together only to violently spring apart. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged in 2020, the cycle finally ended when he received the news that his mother had died.

In No Son of Mine , Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost the trees, mountains, and streams that were once his birthright, as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. A biography nestled inside a memoir, No Son of Mine is Corcoran's story of alienation and his attempts to understand his mother's choice to cut him out of her life. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.]]> 248 Jonathan Corcoran 0813198518 Demo 0 to-read 4.37
author: Jonathan Corcoran
name: Demo
average rating: 4.37
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]]> 205363984
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.

Soon a Taiwanese woman―who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name―is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something�� is.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.]]> 320 Yáng Shuāng-zǐ 1644453150 Demo 0 to-read 4.13 2020
author: Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
name: Demo
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/21
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]]> 59875242 A collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster from Chamorro human rights lawyer and organizer Julian Aguon.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon's No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a coming-of-age story and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples.

In bracing poetry and compelling prose, Aguon weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Undertaking the work of bearing witness, wrestling with the most pressing questions of the modern day, and reckoning with the challenge of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences—from losing his father to pancreatic cancer to working for Mother Teresa to an edifying chance encounter with Sherman Alexie—to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness.

A powerful, bold, new voice writing at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice, Julian Aguon is entrenched in the struggles of the people of the Pacific to liberate themselves from colonial rule, defend their sacred sites, and obtain justice for generations of harm. In No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, Aguon shares his wisdom and reflections on love, grief, joy, and triumph and extends an offer to join him in a hard-earned hope for a better world.]]> 128 Julian Aguon 1662601638 Demo 0 to-read 4.24 2022
author: Julian Aguon
name: Demo
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2022
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date added: 2024/11/20
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]]> 28116739
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.

But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves��? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?

By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own.]]> 257 Peter Godfrey-Smith 0374227764 Demo 0 to-read 3.86 2016
author: Peter Godfrey-Smith
name: Demo
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/19
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]]> 210404 A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land.

Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation. As the forerunner of such important books as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and Robert Finch's The Primal Place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was sixty-five years ago.]]> 269 Aldo Leopold 0195007778 Demo 0 to-read 4.31 1949
author: Aldo Leopold
name: Demo
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/18
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]]> 212308757 A new selection of lyrically haunting short stories from a Japanese literary icon.

A writer is seized by apocalyptic visions; a voyeuristic marquis commits a brutal act; and a trio of beatniks dance to modern jazz in the ruins of an abandoned church. Here, stark autobiography contrasts with pure horror, and the tenderness of first love cedes to obsession, heartbreak and deathly beauty. A new selection of Mishima’s short stories from the 1960s, Voices of the Fallen Heroes traces the final decade of Mishima’s career and offers a unique glimpse into the mind of one of Japan’s greatest writers.

In the title story, a séance brings forth the spirits of young officers in the Imperial Army and the kamikaze pilots of the Second World War, who reproach the Emperor and mourn Japan’s modern decline. In another, Mishima recounts the true story of the time a deranged fan broke into his home at dawn, insisting on meeting the author and imploring him to ‘tell the truth��. Elsewhere, a beautiful youth achieves eternal life through violent murder, and an ill-matched couple seal their fate with a pack of cards, tangled in the web of time and unfulfilled desire.

Available in English for the first time, and carefully selected by expert translators, these captivating stories are the perfect introduction to Mishima's work, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.]]> 258 Yukio Mishima 1802067566 Demo 0 to-read 3.91 2025
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Demo
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/16
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]]> 123136728 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Demo 0 3.56 2023
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Demo
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/12
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves:
review:
this totally seemed like something i would enjoy but actually i didn't at all. i love space. i love poetry. i love both the apathy of the universe and its brilliance and the miracle of our existence. i hated so much of this writing that felt like a moralist slog. i'm so sorry. i wanted to love it so badly. it just didn't do it for me at all. i don't get the hype
]]> 148014534 The first history of the notebook, a simple invention that changed the way the world thinks.

We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think?

In this wide-ranging story, Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of medieval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine.

On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world.

In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever.

Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and making us more creative, more productive -- and happier.]]> 416 Roland Allen 1782839151 Demo 0 to-read 4.37 2023
author: Roland Allen
name: Demo
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60149545 An enthralling journey through the history of books and libraries in the ancient world and those who have helped preserve their rich literary traditions

Long before books were mass-produced, those made of reeds from along the Nile were worth fighting and dying for. Journeying along the battlefields of Alexander the Great, beneath the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, at Cleopatra's palaces and the scene of Hypatia's murder, award-winning author Irene Vallejo chronicles the excitement of literary culture in the ancient world, and the heroic efforts that ensured this extraordinary tradition would continue. Weaved throughout are fascinating stories about the spies, scribes, illuminators, librarians, booksellers, authors, and statesmen whose rich and sometimes complicated engagement with the written word bears remarkable similarities to the world today: Aristophanes and the censorship of the humorists, Sappho and the empowerment of women's voices, Seneca and the problem of a post-truth world. Vallejo takes us to mountainous landscapes and the roaring sea, to the capitals where culture flourished and the furthest reaches where knowledge found refuge in chaotic times. In this sweeping tour of the history of books, the wonder of the ancient world comes alive and, along the way, we discover the singular power of the written word.]]> 464 Irene Vallejo 0593318897 Demo 0 to-read 3.96 2019
author: Irene Vallejo
name: Demo
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 208155402 A moving portrayal of a troubled mother–daughter relationship, shortlisted for Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize.

In 2008, the unnamed narrator of Gifted is working as a hostess and living in Tokyo’s nightlife district. One day, her estranged mother, who is seriously ill, suddenly turns up at her door.

As the mother approaches the end of her life, the two women must navigate their strained relationship, while the narrator also reckons with events happening in her own life, including the death of a close friend �� all under the bright lights of Tokyo‘s ‘sleepless town��, Kabukichō.

In sharp, elegant prose, and based on the author’s own experiences as a sex worker, Gifted heralds the breakthrough of an exciting new literary talent.]]> 144 Suzumi Suzuki 1915590787 Demo 0 to-read 3.31 2022
author: Suzumi Suzuki
name: Demo
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: to-read
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