Caroline's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 28 Mar 2025 06:45:58 -0700 60 Caroline's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[What I Ate in One Year (And Related Thoughts)]]> 207298822
“Sharing food is one of the purest human acts.�

Food has always been an integral part of Stanley Tucci’s life: from stracciatella soup served in the shadow of the Pantheon, to marinara sauce cooked between scene rehearsals and costume fittings, to home-made pizza eaten with his children before bedtime.

Now, in What I Ate in One Year Tucci records twelve months of eating—in restaurants, kitchens, film sets, press junkets, at home and abroad, with friends, with family, with strangers, and occasionally just by himself.

Ranging from the mouth-wateringly memorable to the comfortingly domestic and to the infuriatingly inedible, the meals memorialised in this diary are a prism for him to reflect on the ways his life, and his family, are constantly evolving. Through food he marks—and mourns—the passing of time, the loss of loved ones, and steels himself for what is to come.

Whether it’s duck a l’orange eaten with fellow actors and cooked by singing Carmelite nuns, steaks barbequed at a gathering with friends, or meatballs made by his mother and son and shared at the table with three generations of his family, these meals give shape and add emotional richness to his days.

What I Ate in One Year is a funny, poignant, heartfelt, and deeply satisfying serving of memories and meals and an irresistible celebration of the profound role that food plays in all our lives.]]> 368 Stanley Tucci 1668055686 Caroline 3 3.85 2024 What I Ate in One Year (And Related Thoughts)
author: Stanley Tucci
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (Ernest Cunningham, #3)]]> 206005312
My name’s Ernest Cunningham. I used to be a fan of reading Golden Age murder mysteries, until I found myself with a haphazard career getting stuck in the middle of real-life ones. I’d hoped, this Christmas, that any self-respecting murderer would kick their feet up and take it easy over the holidays. I was wrong.

So here I am, backstage at the show of world-famous magician Rylan Blaze, whose benefactor has just been murdered. My suspects are all professional tricksters: masters of the art of misdirection.

THE MAGICIAN

THE ASSISTANT

THE EXECUTIVE

THE HYPNOTIST

THE IDENTICAL TWIN

THE COUNSELLOR

THE TECH

My clues are even more abstract: A suspect covered in blood, without a memory of how it got there. A murder committed without setting foot inside the room where it happens. And an advent calendar. Because, you know, it’s Christmas.

If I can see through the illusions, I know I can solve it.

After all, a good murder is just like a magic trick, isn’t it?]]> 175 Benjamin Stevenson 0063412861 Caroline 0 to-read 3.70 2024 Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (Ernest Cunningham, #3)
author: Benjamin Stevenson
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect (Ernest Cunningham, #2)]]> 167006698
The program is a who’s who of crime writing royalty:

the debut writer (me!)

the forensic science writer

the blockbuster writer

the legal thriller writer

the literary writer

the psychological suspense writer

But when one of us is murdered, the remaining authors quickly turn into five detectives. Together, we should know how to solve a crime.

Of course, we should also know how to commit one.

How can you find a killer when all the suspects know how to get away with murder?]]> 320 Benjamin Stevenson 006327907X Caroline 0 to-read 3.82 2023 Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect (Ernest Cunningham, #2)
author: Benjamin Stevenson
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Ernest Cunningham, #1)]]> 60879779
I'm Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I'd killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it's a little more complicated than that.

Have I killed someone? Yes. I have.

Who was it?

Let's get started.

EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE

My brother

My stepsister

My wife

My father

My mother

My sister-in-law

My uncle

My stepfather

My aunt

Me]]> 371 Benjamin Stevenson 0063279029 Caroline 4 3.75 2022 Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Ernest Cunningham, #1)
author: Benjamin Stevenson
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/24
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

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

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

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Caroline 0 to-read 4.52 2025 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
author: John Green
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> Mutual Interest 211004055 A classic in the making: a mesmerizing novel about marriage and ambition, sexuality and secrecy, and the true costs of building an empire.

At the turn of the 20th century, Vivian Lesperance is determined to flee her origins in Utica, New York, and avoid repeating her parents' dull, limited life. When she meets Oscar Schmidt, a middle manager at a soap company, Vivian finds a partner she can guide to build the life she wants-not least because, more interested in men himself, Oscar will leave Vivian to tend to her own romances with women.

But Vivian's plans require capital, so the two pair up with Squire Clancey, scion of an old American fortune. Together they found Clancey & Schmidt, a preeminent manufacturer of soap, perfume, and candles. When Oscar and Squire fall in love, the trio form a new kind of partnership.

Vivian reaches the pinnacle of her power building Clancey & Schmidt into an empire of personal care products while operating behind the image of both men. But exposure threatens, and all three partners are made aware of how much they have to lose.

For readers of Hernan Diaz's Trust and Colm Tóibín's The Magician, with echoes of Gustave Flaubert and E.M. Forster, Mutual Interest is a beguiling story of queer romance, empire, and power.]]> 336 Olivia Wolfgang-Smith 1639733329 Caroline 0 to-read 3.64 2025 Mutual Interest
author: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> First Time, Long Time 60061812 For readers of Emma Cline and Melissa Broder, the story of an adrift, sardonic young woman falling for an older radio host� and then for his daughter.

When aspiring writer Allison moved to L.A., she expected her life to finally take shape. After years of dwelling in grief over her brother's unexpected and untimely death, and allowing her mercurial parents' feelings and desires to infect her own, she almost feels ready become the main character in her own story again. Yet Allison continues to feel inextricably tied to both her parents, particularly her unpredictable father, and weighed down by her the loss of her brother. In L.A., as with anywhere else, she feels uninspired and lonely, unable to write and barely scraping by as an English teacher, while struggling to connect with her students and fellow instructors.

After a serendipitous run in with famed radio DJ Reid Steinman, an idol of her father’s, Allison is rapidly drawn under his spell, while also developing an unanticipated, tangled relationship with his adult daughter, Maddie. She’s forced to balance her romance with Reid with her gnawing desire for the intoxicatingly charming Maddie, as it becomes increasingly evident that she and Allison's late brother share more than a few qualities. As Allison's relationships with the equally self-possessed father and daughter deepens, she struggles to establish the boundaries of her own identity.

Through candid self-awareness, keen observations, and deliciously wry humor, FIRST TIME, LONG TIME asks, what happens to a young woman’s goals when she becomes involved with a famous man? And how might she move forward when so much in her past remains unresolved?]]> Amy Silverberg Caroline 0 to-read 3.91 First Time, Long Time
author: Amy Silverberg
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> Hot Air 214986266 A joyfully unhinged story of money, marriage, sex, and revenge unspools when a billionaire crashes his hot air balloon into the middle of a post-pandemic first date.

Joannie hasn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash lands his hot air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.

Soon she finds herself alighting on a lost weekend with Johnny the bad kisser, Jonathan the billionaire, and Julia his smart, stunning wife. Does Joannie want Jonathan? Does Julia want her husband? Or Joannie? Or Joannie’s beautiful little girl? Does Johnny want Julia? Does Jonathan want Joannie, or Julia, or maybe, his much younger personal assistant, Vivian, who is tasked to fix it all? A tale of lust and money and lust for money, Hot Air is as astonishing as it is blisteringly funny, a delirious, delicious story for our billionaire era.]]> 208 Marcy Dermansky 0593320905 Caroline 0 to-read 3.39 2025 Hot Air
author: Marcy Dermansky
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> A Confederacy of Dunces 310612
His mother thinks he needs to go to work. He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has, like Don Quixote's, its own eerie logic.

His girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx, thinks he needs sex.

Ignatius is an intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt, and one-man war against everybody: Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times.

A tragicomedy, set in New Orleans.]]> 394 John Kennedy Toole 0802130208 Caroline 0 3.89 1980 A Confederacy of Dunces
author: John Kennedy Toole
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> Private Rites 203579085 From the award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world

It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.

More estranged than ever, the sisters� lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams; Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling; and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters� lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.]]> 291 Julia Armfield 125034431X Caroline 0 to-read 3.58 2024 Private Rites
author: Julia Armfield
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> Our Wives Under the Sea 58659343
Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.]]> 240 Julia Armfield 152901722X Caroline 0 to-read 3.75 2022 Our Wives Under the Sea
author: Julia Armfield
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> Colored Television 220572119 An alternative cover edition can be found here

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

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

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 287 Danzy Senna Caroline 0 to-read 3.75 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> Homeseeking 211025407 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593712993.

An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

A single choice can define an entire life.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.

Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.]]> 512 Karissa Chen Caroline 0 to-read 4.24 2025 Homeseeking
author: Karissa Chen
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> The Three Lives of Cate Kay 214152244 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781668076217.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets First Lie Wins in this electric, voice-driven debut novel about an elusive bestselling author who decides to finally confess her true identity after years of hiding from her past.

Cate Kay knows how to craft a story. As the creator of a bestselling book trilogy that struck box office gold as a film series, she’s one of the most successful authors of her generation. The thing is, Cate Kay doesn’t really exist. She’s never attended author events or granted any interviews. Her real identity had been a closely guarded secret, until now.

As a young adult, she and her best friend Amanda dreamed of escaping their difficult homes and moving to California to become movie stars. But the day before their grand adventure, a tragedy shattered their dreams and Cate has been on the run ever since, taking on different names and charting a new future. But after a shocking revelation, Cate understands that returning home is the only way she’ll be a whole person again.]]> 304 Kate Fagan Caroline 0 to-read 3.75 2025 The Three Lives of Cate Kay
author: Kate Fagan
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> <![CDATA[When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day]]> 199797834
D-Day is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military and human triumphs. Though the full campaign lasted just over a month, the surprise landing of over 150,000 Allied troops on the morning of June 6, 1944, is understood to be the moment that turned the tide for the Allied forces and ultimately led to the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. Now, a new book from bestselling author and historian Garrett M. Graff explores the full impact of this world-changing event—from the secret creation of landing plans by top government and military officials and organization of troops, to the moment the boat doors opened to reveal the beach where men fought for their lives and the future of the free world.

Fascinating, action-packed, and filled with impressive detail, When the Sea Came Alive captures a human drama like no other, and offers a fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.]]> 608 Garrett M. Graff 166802781X Caroline 0 to-read 4.49 2024 When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day
author: Garrett M. Graff
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology]]> 60321447
You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything� from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market � runs on chips. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower. Now, America's edge isslipping, undermined by competitors in Taiwan, Korea,Europe, and, above all, China. Today, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more money each year importing chips than it spends importing oil,is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US. At stake is America's military superiority and economic prosperity.

Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the U.S. become dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems. America's victory in the Cold War and its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power. But here, too, China is catching up, with its chip-building ambitions and military modernization going hand in hand.America has let key components of the chip-building process slip out of its grasp, contributing not only to a worldwide chip shortage but also a new Cold War with a superpower adversary that is desperate to bridge the gap.

Illuminating, timely, and fascinating, Chip War shows that, to make sense of the current state of politics, economics, and technology, we must first understand the vital role played by chips.]]> 464 Chris Miller 1982172002 Caroline 0 to-read 4.38 2022 Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
author: Chris Miller
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> How to Sleep at Night 212421041 A sharply observed comedy of manners about straight marriage, gay marriage, and family ties stretched thin by politics,How to Sleep at Nightis a witty and whip-smart debut reminiscent ofFleishman Is in Troubleand Emma Straub, by the New York Timesbook reporter.

Meet Ethan and Gabe. A devoted couple since their early twenties, they have successful careers, an adorable daughter, and a house in the New Jersey suburbs. Sure, they may have slowly drifted to different ends of the political spectrum, but their marriage still has its spark. Then one night Ethan makes a shocking he wants to run for Congress as a Republican � but only if he has progressive Gabe’s blessing. For weeks a slightly queasy Gabe struggles between supporting his husband’s dream and maintaining his own lefty ideals.He can feel himself slowly pulled under the tide of Ethan’s political ambitions, even as he becomes widely known as a conservative spouse.

In a nearby town, suburban mom Nicole wonders what happened to her younger self—living in New York City, freely dating men and women, and on a path to a career in the art world. Bored and frustrated, Nicole feels like an accessory in husband’s life and she yearns for something of her own.She finds it one fateful morning when an old flame re-enters her life unexpectedly. That woman is Ethan’s sister Kate.

A political reporter at a major newspaper, Kate has reached the top of her profession, and her career is at the very center of her life.But the adrenaline rush of chasing a story has lost its thrill.When Nicole—the woman who broke her heart—slides into her DMs just as her brother starts his controversial congressional run, Kate’s life is thrown into a tailspin that threatens to derail the success she’s worked so hard to achieve.

A witty and knowing novel about romantic and sibling love, ambition, monogamy, and the ways in which our identities evolve over time,How to Sleep at Nightmarks the debut of an accomplished novelist with the verve of Jennifer Close, J. Courtney Sullivan, Nick Hornby, and Emma Straub.


]]> 304 Elizabeth Harris 0063353237 Caroline 0 to-read 3.46 2025 How to Sleep at Night
author: Elizabeth Harris
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> Martyr! 139401966 ęԲԾ! Kavego Akbara to opowieść o tym, jak niestrudzenie przez całe życie próbujemy odnaleźć sens � w wierze, sztuce, w nas samych i w innych ludziach. W tej historii osierocony syn irańskich imigrantów, od niedawna niepijący, wiedziony głosami artystów, poetów i władców, podejmuje poszukiwania, które prowadzą go do śmiertelnie chorej malarki, dożywającej swych dni w Muzeum Brooklyńskim.

Cyrus Shams jest młodym mężczyzną, zmagającym się z bagażem przemocy i straty: wskutek bezsensownego wypadku zestrzelono nad Teheranem samolot z jego matką na pokładzie; z kolei życie ojca w Ameryce określała praca na farmie drobiu na Środkowym Zachodzie. Cyrus jest alkoholikiem, narkomanem i poetą, którego obsesja na punkcie męczenników popycha go do zgłębienia tajemnic własnej przeszłości � kluczem do rodzinnego sekretu jest wujek, który przed laty galopował po irańskich polach bitwy, przebrany za Anioła Śmierci, by dodawać otuchy i nieść pocieszenie umierającym, oraz pewien obraz z brooklyńskiej galerii sztuki.

Ta elektryzująca, zabawna, całkowicie oryginalna i głęboka powieść zapowiada pojawienie się nowego głosu na literackiej scenie.]]> 352 Kaveh Akbar 0593537629 Caroline 0 to-read 4.15 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis]]> 145624514
Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. An overwhelming share of them come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, although many migrants come from farther away. Some are fleeing persecution, others crime or hunger. Very often it will not be their first attempt to cross. They may have already been deported from the United States, but it remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. Their homes have become uninhabitable. They will take their chances.

This vast and unremitting crisis did not spring up overnight. Indeed, as Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, it is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture for the first time.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is an odyssey of struggle and resilience. With astonishing nuance and detail, Blitzer tells an epic story about the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, and in doing so, he delves into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future.]]> 544 Jonathan Blitzer 1984880802 Caroline 0 to-read 4.47 2024 Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
author: Jonathan Blitzer
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Form and Emptiness]]> 57004637 A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being

After the tragic death of his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house--a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.

At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where "things happen." He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.

And he meets his very own Book--a talking thing--who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.

With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.]]> 548 Ruth Ozeki 0399563644 Caroline 0 to-read 4.01 2021 The Book of Form and Emptiness
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> Housemates 198137722 Two young housemates embark on a road trip to discover themselves in a fractured America in this sparkling novel of love, friendship and chosen family, by the award-winning author of The Third Rainbow Girl.

What does it feel like, standing in the moments that will mark your life?


When Bernie replies to Leah's ad for a new housemate in Philadelphia, the two begin an intense and defiantly uncategorizable friendship based on a mutual belief in their art, and one another. Both aspire to capture the world around them: Leah through her writing; Bernie through her photography.

After Bernie's former photography professor, the renowned yet tarnished Daniel Dunn, dies and leaves her a complicated inheritance, Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie to his home in rural Pennsylvania, turning the jaunt into a road trip with an ambitious mission: to document America through words and photographs.

What ensues is a three-week journey into the heart of the nation, bringing the aritsts into conversation with people from all walks of life—“the absurd dreamers and failures of this wide, wide country”—as they try to make sense of the times they are living in. Along the way, Leah and Bernie discover what it means to to pursue their own ideas and dreams, and to embrace what they are capable of both romantically and artistically.

Housemates is a warm and insightful coming-of-age story of youth and freedom, a glorious celebration of queer life, and how art and love might save us all.]]> 352 Emma Copley Eisenberg 0593242238 Caroline 4 3.52 2024 Housemates
author: Emma Copley Eisenberg
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
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review:

]]> Playworld 211025439
“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.�

Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse.

Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.

Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.]]> 528 Adam Ross 0385351291 Caroline 0 to-read 3.79 2025 Playworld
author: Adam Ross
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> Bright Dead Things 24945396
A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact—tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker’s sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine� striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,� the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.]]> 105 Ada Limon 1571314717 Caroline 0 to-read 4.21 2015 Bright Dead Things
author: Ada Limon
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)]]> 204811915 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?�

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,� Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 326 Elizabeth Strout 0593446097 Caroline 4 3.98 2024 Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> <![CDATA[The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York]]> 1111 The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today.

In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.]]> 1246 Robert A. Caro 0394720245 Caroline 0 to-read 4.51 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> Lucy by the Sea (Amgash #4) 60657583
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we're apart--the pain of a beloved daughter's suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.]]> 291 Elizabeth Strout 0593446062 Caroline 4 3.80 2022 Lucy by the Sea (Amgash #4)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/01
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]]> The Pairing 199440249 definitely not.

Theo and Kit have been a lot of things: childhood best friends, crushes, in love, and now estranged exes. After a brutal breakup on the transatlantic flight to their dream European food and wine tour, they exited each other's lives once and for all.

Time apart has done them good. Theo has found confidence as a hustling bartender by night and aspiring sommelier by day, with a long roster of casual lovers. Kit, who never returned to America, graduated as the reigning sex god of his pastry school class and now bakes at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. Sure, nothing really compares to what they had, and life stretches out long and lonely ahead of them, but—yeah. It's in the past.

All that remains is the unused voucher for the European tour that never happened, good for 48 months after its original date and about to expire. Four years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip. Solo. Separately.

It's not until they board the tour bus that they discover they've both accidentally had the exact same idea, and now they're trapped with each other for three weeks of stunning views, luscious flavors, and the most romantic cities of France, Spain, and Italy. It's fine. There's nothing left between them. So much nothing that, when Theo suggests a friendly wager to see who can sleep with their hot Italian tour guide first, Kit is totally game. And why stop there? Why not a full-on European hookup competition?

But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can't have.]]> 432 Casey McQuiston 1250862744 Caroline 3 3.70 2024 The Pairing
author: Casey McQuiston
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> <![CDATA[A Court of Frost and Starlight (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3.5)]]> 50659471
Yet even the festive atmosphere can't keep the shadows of the past from looming. As Feyre navigates her first Winter Solstice as High Lady, her concern for those dearest to her deepens. They have more wounds than she anticipated-scars that will have a far-reaching impact on the future of their court.

Bridging the events of A Court of Wings and Ruin with the later books in the series, A Court of Frost and Starlight explores the far-reaching effects of a devastating war and the fierce love between friends.]]> 272 Sarah J. Maas 1635575621 Caroline 0 2024 3.69 2019 A Court of Frost and Starlight (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3.5)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3)]]> 50659472 The epic third novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas.

Feyre has returned to the Spring Court, determined to gather information on Tamlin's actions and learn what she can about the invading king threatening to bring her land to its knees. But to do so she must play a deadly game of deceit. One slip could bring doom not only for Feyre, but for everything-and everyone-she holds dear.

As war bears down upon them all, Feyre endeavors to take her place amongst the High Fae of the land, balancing her struggle to master her powers-both magical and political-and her love for her court and family. Amidst these struggles, Feyre and Rhysand must decide whom to trust amongst the cunning and lethal High Lords, and hunt for allies in unexpected places.

In this thrilling third book in the #1 New York Times bestselling series from Sarah J. Maas, the fate of Feyre's world is at stake as armies grapple for power over the one thing that could destroy it.]]> 699 Sarah J. Maas 1635575605 Caroline 0 2024 4.47 2017 A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook]]> 191746386
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution . Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?

Hampton Sides� bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. In fact, his stated mission was to return a Tahitian man, Mai, who had become the toast of London, to his home islands. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well, and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.

Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.

At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.]]> 408 Hampton Sides 0385544766 Caroline 0 to-read 4.47 2024 The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
author: Hampton Sides
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> Oh William! (Amgash, #3) 56294820
So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.� There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart.

At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,� Lucy says: “the many things we do not know until it is too late.”]]> 240 Elizabeth Strout 0812989430 Caroline 4 2024 3.79 2021 Oh William! (Amgash, #3)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: 2024
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]]> Wandering Stars 174147294
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.]]> 315 Tommy Orange 0593318250 Caroline 0 to-read 3.83 2024 Wandering Stars
author: Tommy Orange
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> The Midnight Feast 199743738 Secrets. Lies. Murder. Let the festivities begin...

It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests� healing have been placed in the Seaside Cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule� cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen.

But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. Just outside the Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. And the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. Something’s not right with the guests. There’s been a fire. A body’s been discovered.

THE FOUNDER * THE HUSBAND * THE MYSTERY GUEST * THE KITCHEN HELP

It all began with a secret, fifteen years ago. Now the past has crashed the party. And it’ll end in murder at� The Midnight Feast.]]> 354 Lucy Foley 0063003104 Caroline 0 to-read 3.55 2024 The Midnight Feast
author: Lucy Foley
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> <![CDATA[In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)]]> 2459785
Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a 12-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox (his partner and closest friend) find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.

A gorgeously written novel that marks the debut of an astonishing new voice in psychological suspense.]]> 448 Tana French Caroline 4 2024 3.82 2007 In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)
author: Tana French
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Damascus Station (Damascus Station #1)]]> 56769571
But the cat and mouse chase for the killer soon leads to a trail of high-profile assassinations and the discovery of a dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime, bringing the pair under the all-seeing eyes of Assad’s spy catcher, Ali Hassan, and his brother Rustum, the head of the feared Republican Guard. Set against the backdrop of a Syria pulsing with fear and rebellion, Damascus Station is a gripping thriller that offers a textured portrayal of espionage, love, loyalty, and betrayal in one of the most difficult CIA assignments on the planet.]]> 432 David McCloskey 0393881040 Caroline 0 to-read 4.08 2021 Damascus Station (Damascus Station #1)
author: David McCloskey
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War]]> 195607632
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Fort Sumter.

Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.�

At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.

Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.]]> 559 Erik Larson 0385348754 Caroline 0 to-read 4.37 2024 The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
author: Erik Larson
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/25
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]]> <![CDATA[The Guncle Abroad (The Guncle, #2)]]> 197511201 Patrick O'Hara is called back to his guncle duties . . . This time for a big family wedding in Italy.

Patrick O’Hara is back. It’s been five years since his summer as his niece Maisie and nephew Grant’s caretaker after their mother’s passing. The kids are back in Connecticut with their dad, and Patrick has relocated to New York to remain close by and relaunch his dormant acting career. After the run of his second successful sit-com comes to a close, Patrick feels on top of the world . . . professionally. But some things have had to take a back seat. Looking down both barrels at fifty, Patrick is single again after breaking things off with Emory. But at least he has a family to lean on. Until that family needs to again lean on him.

When Patrick's brother, Greg, announces he’s getting remarried in Italy, Maisie and Grant are not thrilled. Patrick feels drawn to take the two back under his wing. As they travel through Europe on their way to the wedding, Patrick tries his best to help them understand love, much as he once helped them comprehend grief. But when they arrive in Italy, Patrick is overextended managing a groom with cold feet; his sister, Clara, flirting with guests left and right; a growing rivalry with the kids� charming soon-to-be-launt (lesbian aunt), and two moody young teens trying to adjust to a new normal, all culminating in a disastrous rehearsal dinner.

Can Patrick save the day? Will teaching the kids about love help him repair his own love life? Can the change of scenery help Patrick come to terms with finally growing up?

Gracing the work with his signature blend of humor and heart, Steven Rowley charms with a beloved story about the complicated bonds of family, love, and what it takes to rediscover yourself, even at the ripe age of fifty.]]> 320 Steven Rowley 0593540468 Caroline 4 2024 3.90 2024 The Guncle Abroad (The Guncle, #2)
author: Steven Rowley
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: 2024
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]]> Bear 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 Caroline 4 2024 3.21 2024 Bear
author: Julia Phillips
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right]]> 206303798 In her first book since the widely acclaimedStrangers in Their Own Land,the National Book Award finalist and bestselling author Arlie Russell Hochschild now ventures to Appalachia, uncovering the “pride paradox� that has given the right’s appeals such resonance. For all the efforts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we’ve ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. In Stolen Pride, Arlie Russell Hochschild argues that Donald Trump has turned lost pride into stolen pride and shame into blame, and that the result of his rhetorical alchemy has been to weaponize that shame and introduce a potent blend of anger and often violent rhetoric—undermining democracy and highlighting revenge.

Hochschild’s research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, where its residents faced the perfect storm. The city was coal jobs had left, crushing poverty arrived, and a deadly drug crisis struck the region more powerfully than anywhere else in the nation. Although Pikeville had been in the political center thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district’s population voted for Donald Trump. Hochschild’s brilliant exploration of how the town responded in 2017, when a white nationalist march came to town—a rehearsal for the deadly “unite the right� march that would take place in Charlottesville, Virginia, just four months later—takes us deep inside a community that defies stereotypes.

In Stolen Pride, Hochschild—whose previous book,Strangers in Their Own Land, was heralded by theNew York Timesas one of a small handful of books to read to understand Trump and the 2016 election—focuses on a group at the center of the shifting political blue-collar men. Long conversations over six years with mayors and felons, clerks and shopkeepers, road workers and teachers, ex-coal miners, and recovering addicts form the core of the book, movingly introducing readers to real people living deep within the political storm.

Hochschild’s great gift is to decode the emotional narratives that demagogues can speak to and lay bare the pain that lies beneath the rage. And in some of the voices she listens to, Hochschild hears an alternative to the inchoate anger, as she and her subjects imagine a way we might build bridges and move forward.]]> 400 Arlie Russell Hochschild 1620976463 Caroline 0 to-read 4.05 2024 Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
author: Arlie Russell Hochschild
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/19
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Caroline 5 2024 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Caroline 4 2024 3.52 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory]]> 201751384 New York Times reporter and San Francisco Bureau Chief, Thomas Fuller.

In November 2021, an obscure email from the California Department of Education landed in New York Times reporter Thomas Fuller’s inbox. The football team at the California School for the Deaf in Riverside, a state-run school with only 168 high school students, was having an undefeated season. After years of covering wildfires, war, pandemic, and mass shootings, Fuller was captivated by the story about this deaf football team. It was uplifting. During the pandemic’s gloom, it was a happy story. It was a sports story but not an ordinary one, built on the chemistry between a group of underestimated boys and their superhero advocate coach, Keith Adams, a deaf former athlete himself. The team, and Adams, tackled the many stereotypes and seemed to be succeeding. Fuller packed his bags and drove seven hours to the Riverside campus just in time to see them trounce their opponent in the second game of the playoffs.

The Boys of Riverside looks back at the historic 2021 and 2022 seasons in which the California School for the Deaf chased history, following the personal journeys of Keith Adams (their dynamic deaf head coach), a student who spent the majority of the season sleeping in his father’s car parked in the Target lot, a fiercely committed player who literally played through a broken leg in order not to miss a crucial game, and myriad heart-wrenching and uplifting stories of the players who had found common purpose. Through their eyes, Fuller reveals a portrait of high school athletics, and deafness in America.]]> 256 Thomas Fuller 0385549873 Caroline 0 to-read 3.90 2024 The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory
author: Thomas Fuller
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
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date added: 2024/12/18
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]]> What You Make of Me 213870113 In this mesmerizing debut from a bright new talent, two enigmatic and unforgettable siblings confront what � and who � they’re willing to sacrifice for their art

On the eve of her first solo show, Ava is feeling defiant. The art gallery acolytes have insisted on writing “explanations� of her paintings for an accompanying catalog, but what do they know of her work? What do they know of her brother, Demetri, whose face echoes across every canvas?

After all, Ava and Demetri have only ever had each other. Abandoned first by their mother, who drowned in the Long Island Sound, and then again by their father, who couldn’t see beyond his grief, each sibling has always been the other’s most ardent supporter: Demetri encouraged Ava’s raw talent as a painter, while Ava pushed Demetri to pursue filmmaking. But as they make their way in New York, the codependency that once sustained them soon threatens to be their undoing. Betrayals mount, fueled by Ava’s reckless acts and her disdain for Demetri’s last-ditch efforts to make something of consequence, but what ultimately and irreversibly tips the scales won’t be found on canvas or film. Because now, at thirty-one, Demetri is dying.

As Ava reckons with the meaning of her portraits, what soon emerges from her intimate, offhanded, and mischievous meditations is a stunning and unsettling confession of secrets, epiphanies, rivalry, and infidelity. Vaulting between childhood and the days leading up to Demetri’s death, here is a searing portrait of two remarkable siblings reckoning with the limits of loyalty. Heralding the arrival of an impressive new talent, What You Make of Me lays bare the thin line between success and sacrifice.]]> 288 Sophie Madeline Dess 0593830822 Caroline 0 to-read 3.71 2025 What You Make of Me
author: Sophie Madeline Dess
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/14
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]]> You Should Be So Lucky 196774347 We Could Be So Good.

The 1960 baseball season is shaping up to be the worst year of Eddie O’Leary’s life. He can’t manage to hit the ball, his new teammates hate him, he’s living out of a suitcase, and he’s homesick. When the team’s owner orders him to give a bunch of interviews to some snobby reporter, he’s ready to call it quits. He can barely manage to behave himself for the length of a game, let alone an entire season. But he’s already on thin ice, so he has no choice but to agree.

Mark Bailey is not a sports reporter. He writes for the arts page, and these days he’s barely even managing to do that much. He’s had a rough year and just wants to be left alone in his too-empty apartment, mourning a partner he’d never been able to be public about. The last thing he needs is to spend a season writing about New York’s obnoxious new shortstop in a stunt to get the struggling newspaper more readers.

Isolated together within the crush of an anonymous city, these two lonely souls orbit each other as they slowly give in to the inevitable gravity of their attraction. But Mark has vowed that he’ll never be someone’s secret ever again, and Eddie can’t be out as a professional athlete. It’s just them against the world, and they’ll both have to decide if that’s enough.]]> 400 Cat Sebastian 0063272806 Caroline 0 to-read 4.26 2024 You Should Be So Lucky
author: Cat Sebastian
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/14
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]]> We Could Be So Good 62365905 Casey McQuiston meets The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo in this mid-century romdram about a scrappy reporter and a newspaper mogul's son--perfect for Newsies shippers.

Nick Russo has worked his way from a rough Brooklyn neighborhood to a reporting job at one of the city's biggest newspapers. But the late 1950s are a hostile time for gay men, and Nick knows that he can't let anyone into his life. He just never counted on meeting someone as impossible to say no to as Andy.

Andy Fleming's newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper. He's barely able to run his life--he's never paid a bill on time, routinely gets lost on the way to work, and would rather gouge out his own eyes than deal with office politics. Andy agrees to work for a year in the newsroom, knowing he'll make an ass of himself and hate every second of it.

Except, Nick Russo keeps rescuing Andy: showing him the ropes, tracking down his keys, freeing his tie when it gets stuck in the ancient filing cabinets. Their unlikely friendship soon sharpens into feelings they can't deny. But what feels possible in secret--this fragile, tender thing between them--seems doomed in the light of day. Now Nick and Andy have to decide if, for the first time, they're willing to fight.]]> 384 Cat Sebastian 0063272768 Caroline 0 to-read 4.25 2023 We Could Be So Good
author: Cat Sebastian
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/14
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]]> Whiskey Tender: A Memoir 158649919 An Oprah Daily "Best New Book" and "Riveting Nonfiction and Memoir You Need to Read" * A New York Times "New Book to Read" * A The New Yorker "Best Book out now" * An Esquire "Best Book (so far)" * A Zibby Mag "Most Anticipated Book" * An Elle "Best Book" * A Washington Post "Book to Read this Summer" * Publishers Weekly "Top 10 Memoir and Biography" * A San Francisco Chronicle "New Book to Cozy Up With" * A Publishers Weekly "Memoirs & Biographies: Top 10" * The Millions "Most Anticipated" * An Electric Lit “Books By Women of Color to Read" * An Amazon Editors "Best Book of the Month"

“We have more Native stories now, but we have not heard one like this. Whiskey Tender is unexpected and propulsive, indeed tender, but also bold, and beautifully told, like a drink you didn’t know you were thirsty for. This book, never anything less than mesmerizing, is full of family stories and vital Native history. It pulses and it aches, and it lifts, consistently. It threads together so much truth by the time we are done, what has been woven together equals a kind of completeness from brokenness, and a hope from knowing love and loss and love again by naming it so.� � Tommy Orange, National Bestselling Author of There There

Reminiscent of the works of Mary Karr and Terese Marie Mailhot, a memoir of family and survival, coming-of-age on and off the reservation, and of the frictions between mainstream American culture and Native inheritance; assimilation and reverence for tradition.

Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.�

Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian� status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation.

Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot� of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.]]> 304 Deborah Jackson Taffa 0063288516 Caroline 0 to-read 4.11 2024 Whiskey Tender: A Memoir
author: Deborah Jackson Taffa
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI]]> 204927599 From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite allour discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.]]> 528 Yuval Noah Harari 059373422X Caroline 0 to-read 4.14 2024 Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Caroline 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Be Ready When the Luck Happens]]> 209192698 In her long-awaited memoir, Ina Garten—aka the Barefoot Contessa, author of thirteen bestselling cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and cultural icon—shares her personal story with readers hungry for a seat at her table.

Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining, and inspiring account of her remarkable journey. Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices, and exquisite attention to detail. In her unmistakable voice (no one tells a story like Ina), she brings her past and her process to life in a high-spirited and no-holds-barred memoir that chronicles decades of personal challenges, adventures (and misadventures) and unexpected career twists, all delivered with her signature combination of playfulness and purpose.

From a difficult childhood to meeting the love of her life, Jeffrey, and marrying him while still in college, from a boring bureaucratic job in Washington, D.C., to answering an ad for a specialty food store in the Hamptons, from the owner of one Barefoot Contessa shop to author of bestselling cookbooks and celebrated television host, Ina has blazed her own trail and, in the meantime, taught millions of people how to cook and entertain. Now, she invites them to come closer to experience her story in vivid detail and to share the important life lessons she learned along the way: do what you love because if you love it you’ll be really good at it, swing for the fences, and always Be Ready When the Luck Happens.]]> 320 Ina Garten 0593799895 Caroline 4 2024 4.25 2024 Be Ready When the Luck Happens
author: Ina Garten
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir]]> 203708995 400 Griffin Dunne 0593652827 Caroline 0 to-read 4.01 2024 The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir
author: Griffin Dunne
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
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date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> Playground 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 Caroline 0 to-read 4.16 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> The God of the Woods 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 Caroline 5 2024 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs]]> 210963085 The formerheadof the Pentagon program responsible for the investigation of UFOs�now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)�reveals long-hidden truths with profound implications for not only national security but our understanding of the universe.

Luis “Lue� Elizondo is a former senior intelligence official and special agent who was recruited into a strange and highly sensitive US government program to investigate UAP incursions into sensitive military installations and air space. To accomplish his mission, Elizondo had to rely on decades of experience gained working some of America’s most sensitive and classified programs.Even then, he was not prepared for what he would learn, and the truth about the government’s long shadowy involvement in UAP investigations, and the lengths officials would take to keep them a secret.

The stakes could not be higher. Imminent is a first-hand, revelatory account inside the Pentagon’s most closely guarded secret and a call to action to confront humanity’s greatest existential questions.]]> 275 Luis Elizondo 0063235560 Caroline 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs
author: Luis Elizondo
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Simple Church: Returning to God's Process for Making Disciples]]> 36437283

The simple revolution is here. From thedesign of Apple productsto Google's uncluttered homepage, simple ideas are changing the world.

Now in paperback, multi-awarded #1 national bestseller Simple Church guides Christians back to the simple gospel-sharing methods of Jesus. No bells or whistles required. With insights based on case studies of400 American churches, Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger prove the disciple-making process is often too complex. Simple churches thrive by taking four ideas to heart:

Clarity. Movement. Alignment. Focus.

Simple Church examines each idea, clearly showing why it is time to simplify. This updated trade paper edition includes a new chapter with further insights the authors have gained through hundreds of conversations with church leaders since this landmark book's original release.

]]> 211 Thom S. Rainer 1433673533 Caroline 0 to-read 4.08 2006 Simple Church: Returning to God's Process for Making Disciples
author: Thom S. Rainer
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Clout: Discover and Unleash Your God-Given Influence]]> 19920171 You have clout. Have you discovered it yet?

It is easy to believe that power, influence, and leadership are gifts given to a special few. But the Bible says otherwise.

We all long for significance, even as we fear we will never be good enough. We listen for God, but hear only voices of doubt and practicality. Listen again. There is a call that only you can answer.

Clout is power and influence. It is an undeniable trait that opens doors and moves mountains. You have it, and you can use it to change the world around you. With Scripture and stories from her own life, Jenni Catron maps out the pitfalls and clear paths on the way toward discovering and unleashing your very own clout.

This is not a quest of power for power’s sake. Influence is not a guarantee of fame or fortune. It is an opportunity to use your gifts to do the extraordinary. This is a journey toward dismantling what stands in the way of your influence and leadership, discovering your God-given clout, and using it to answer God’s calling on your life.

Learn about Jesus and others who sought to lead like him. Stop dreaming and start planning. Define your direction, set your goals, and confront the challenges that stand between you and the person God made you to be. Step into your sphere of influence with the humble confidence of Christ.

Don’t hide. We need you. Discover your clout here.]]> 194 Jenni Catron 1400205697 Caroline 5 2014 4.22 2014 Clout: Discover and Unleash Your God-Given Influence
author: Jenni Catron
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2014/01/06
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: 2014
review:
A great new book from Jenni Catron on discovering the influence God has given you.
]]> <![CDATA[Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet]]> 13036199 —Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times bestselling author of Traffic When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go?Almost everything about our day-to-day lives—and the broader scheme of human culture—can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Until now. In Tubes , journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet's physical infrastructure and flips on the lights, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. It is a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, populated by a special caste of engineer who pieces together our networks by hand; where glass fibers pulse with light and creaky telegraph buildings, tortuously rewired, become communication hubs once again. From the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan where new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where a ten-thousand-mile undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa, to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers—Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet's development, explains how it all works, and takes the first-ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments. This is a book about real places on the their sounds and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there.For all the talk of the "placelessness" of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical spaces as the railroad or telephone. You can map it and touch it, and you can visit it. Is the Internet in fact "a series of tubes" as Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet's possibilities if we don't know its parts? Like Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machine or Tom Vanderbilt's recent bestseller Traffic , Tubes combines on-the-ground reporting and lucid explanation into an engaging, mind-bending narrative to help us understand the physical world that underlies our digital lives.]]> 294 Andrew Blum 0061994936 Caroline 0 2024 3.44 2012 Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
author: Andrew Blum
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

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

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Caroline 0 to-read 4.21 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
author: Naomi Klein
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/03
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]]> <![CDATA[The Truths We Hold: An American Journey]]> 40861864 From one of America's most inspiring political leaders, a book about the core truths that unite us, and the long struggle to discern what those truths are and how best to act upon them, in her own life and across the life of our country.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris's commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents--an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India--met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a prosecutor out of law school, a deputy district attorney, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. She progressed rapidly to become the elected District Attorney for San Francisco, and then the chief law enforcement officer of the state of California as a whole. Known for bringing a voice to the voiceless, she took on the big banks during the foreclosure crisis, winning a historic settlement for California's working families. Her hallmarks were applying a holistic, data-driven approach to many of California's thorniest issues, always eschewing stale "tough on crime" rhetoric as presenting a series of false choices. Neither "tough" nor "soft" but smart on crime became her mantra. Being smart means learning the truths that can make us better as a community, and supporting those truths with all our might. That has been the pole star that guided Harris to a transformational career as the top law enforcement official in California, and it is guiding her now as a transformational United States Senator, grappling with an array of complex issues that affect her state, our country, and the world, from health care and the new economy to immigration, national security, the opioid crisis, and accelerating inequality.

By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in The Truths We Hold a master class in problem-solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times. Through the arc of her own life, on into the great work of our day, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values. In a book rich in many home truths, not least is that a relatively small number of people work very hard to convince a great many of us that we have less in common than we actually do, but it falls to us to look past them and get on with the good work of living our common truth. When we do, our shared effort will continue to sustain us and this great nation, now and in the years to come.]]> 336 Kamala Harris Caroline 0 4.05 2019 The Truths We Hold: An American Journey
author: Kamala Harris
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> Prophet Song 195492969
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

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

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

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 320 Paul Lynch 0861546458 Caroline 0 to-read 4.07 2023 Prophet Song
author: Paul Lynch
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/24
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]]> Sandwich 200028726 From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and—thanks to the cottage’s ancient plumbing—septic too.

This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

It's one precious week: everything is in balance; everything is in flux. And when Rocky comes face to face with her family’s history and future, she is forced to accept that she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.]]> 240 Catherine Newman 0063345161 Caroline 0 to-read 3.55 2024 Sandwich
author: Catherine Newman
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/17
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]]> Dear Edward 45294613
Edward's story captures the attention of the nation, but he struggles to find a place for himself in a world without his family. He continues to feel that a piece of him has been left in the sky, forever tied to the plane and all of his fellow passengers. But then he makes an unexpected discovery--one that will lead him to the answers of some of life's most profound questions: When you've lost everything, how do find yourself? How do you discover your purpose? What does it mean not just to survive, but to truly live?

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.]]> 340 Ann Napolitano 198485478X Caroline 4 2024 4.03 2020 Dear Edward
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/12
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> I Kissed Shara Wheeler 58756420 From the New York Times bestselling author of One Last Stop and Red, White & Royal Blue comes a debut YA romantic comedy about chasing down what you want, only to find what you need...

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

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

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

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

Fierce, funny, and frank, Casey McQuiston's I Kissed Shara Wheeler is about breaking the rules, getting messy, and finding love in unexpected places.]]> 356 Casey McQuiston 1250244455 Caroline 4 3.87 2022 I Kissed Shara Wheeler
author: Casey McQuiston
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/13
date added: 2024/06/14
shelves:
review:

]]> Coming Home 206571264 From the nine-time women’s basketball icon and two-time Olympic gold medalist—a raw, revelatory account of her unfathomable detainment in Russia and her journey home.

On February 17, 2022, Brittney Griner arrived in Moscow ready to spend the WNBA offseason playing for the Russian women’s basketball team where she had been the centerpiece of previous championship seasons. Instead, a security checkpoint became her gateway to hell when she was arrested for mistakenly carrying under one gram of medically prescribed hash oil. Brittney’s world was violently upended in a crisis she has never spoken in detail about publicly—until now.

In Coming Home, Brittney finally shares the harrowing details of her sudden arrest days before Russia invaded Ukraine; her bewilderment and isolation while navigating a foreign legal system amid her trial and sentencing; her emotional and physical anguish as the first American woman ever to endure a Russian penal colony while the #WeAreBG movement rallied for her release; the chilling prisoner swap with Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout; and her remarkable rise from hostage to global spokesperson on behalf of America’s forgotten. In haunting and vivid detail, Brittney takes listeners inside the horrors of a geopolitical nightmare spanning ten months.

And yet Coming Home is more than Brittney’s journey from captivity to freedom. In an account as gripping as it is poignant, she shares how her deep love for Cherelle, her college sweetheart and wife of six years, anchored her during their greatest storm; how her family’s support pulled her back from the brink; and how hundreds of letters from friends and neighbors lent her resolve to keep fighting. Coming Home is both a story of survival and a testament to love—the bonds that brought Brittney home to her family, and at last, to herself.]]> 320 Brittney Griner 0593801342 Caroline 5 2024 4.36 2024 Coming Home
author: Brittney Griner
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/06/14
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports]]> 195790616
In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.]]> 368 Michael Waters 0374609810 Caroline 5 2024 4.43 2024 The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports
author: Michael Waters
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/11
date added: 2024/06/14
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> Small Joys 61612872 An unexpected friendship saves a young man's life in this moving, utterly charming debut about chosen family, the winding road to happiness, and the grace of second chances.

Could I one day inspire happiness in others, the same way he seemed to do in me?

It's 2005 and Harley has dropped out of college to move home, back to rural England, where he works a dead-end job at a movie theater. Estranged from his father and finding every attempt at happiness futile, Harley is on the verge of making a devastating final decision. Fortunately for him, things don't go according to plan, and his attempt on his own life is interrupted by his new roommate, Muddy.

Muddy is everything Harley is not: ostensibly heterosexual, freewheeling, confident in his masculinity. Despite their differences, a deep friendship blossoms between them when Muddy takes Harley under his wing and shows him everything that, in his eyes, makes life worth living: bird-watching, karaoke, rugby, and the band Oasis.

But this newfound friendship is complicated. It has enormous repercussions for the pair's romantically entangled friend group--for Chelsea, an overbearing striver whose generosity they begrudgingly rely on; for Finlay, her raffish and uncouth boyfriend; and for Noria, who despite her simmering confidence is smarting from a series of unreturned affections. And then there's the violent affair with an older man that Harley finds himself slipping back into . . .

As secrets and jealousies endanger all that Harley has come to depend on, he finds himself faltering once again, even though he finally has something--and someone--to live for. Soul-stirring and witty, full of hope and peopled with characters who feel like close friends, Small Joys explores a young man's turbulent journey toward happiness and announces the arrival of an exciting voice in fiction.]]> 320 Elvin James Mensah 0593499964 Caroline 0 to-read 3.91 2023 Small Joys
author: Elvin James Mensah
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Bellies 63028672 I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. Butshortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funnyas the cast of characters it centers,Belliesis an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.]]> 368 Nicola Dinan 1335490884 Caroline 4 2024 4.02 2023 Bellies
author: Nicola Dinan
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/05
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> Hurricane Girl 58065398
Allison Brody is thirty and newly arrived on the east coast after just managing to flee her movie producer boyfriend. She has some money, saved up from years of writing and waitressing, and so she spends it, buying a house on the beach. But then a Category Three hurricane makes landfall and scatters her home up and down the shore, leaving Allison adrift. Should she follow the strange camera man home from the bar and stay in his guest room? Is that a glass vase he smashed on her skull? Can she wipe the blood from her eyes, get in her car and drive to her mother’s? Does she really love the brain surgeon who saved her, or is she just using him for his swimming pool? And is it possible to ever truly heal emotionally without seeking some measure of revenge? A gripping, provocative novel that walks a knife’s edge of comedy and horror, Hurricane Girl is the work of singular talent, a novelist unafraid to explore the intersection of love, sex, violence, and freedom--while celebrating the true joy that can be found in a great swim and a good turkey sandwich.]]> 240 Marcy Dermansky 0593320883 Caroline 4 2024 3.63 2022 Hurricane Girl
author: Marcy Dermansky
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/23
date added: 2024/05/23
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space]]> 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 Caroline 0 to-read 4.52 2024 Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide]]> 57693593 From preeminent LGBTQ scholar, social critic, and journalist Steven W. Thrasher comes a powerful and crucial exploration of one of the most pressing issues of our times: how viruses expose the fault lines of society.

Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone.

Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, The Viral Underclass helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.]]> 352 Steven W. Thrasher 1250796636 Caroline 0 to-read 4.24 2022 The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
author: Steven W. Thrasher
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Paris Novel 195430688
Stella reached for an oyster, tipped her head and tossed it back. It was cool and slippery, the flavor so briny it was like diving into the ocean... Oysters, she thought, where have they been all my life?

When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual a one-way plane ticket and a note reading Go to Paris . But Stella is hardly cut out for adventure; a childhood trauma has kept her confined to the strict routines of her comfort zone. When her boss encourages her to take time off, Stella resigns herself to honoring her mother’s last wishes.

Alone in a foreign city, Stella falls into old habits, living cautiously and frugally. Then she stumbles across a vintage store where she tries on a fabulous Dior dress. The shopkeeper insists that this dress was meant for Stella and, for the first time in her life, Stella does something impulsive. She buys the dress and together they embark on an adventure.

Her first iconic brasserie Les Deux Magots, where Stella tastes her first oysters, and then meets an octogenarian art collector who decides to take her under his wing. As Jules introduces her to a veritable who’s who of the 1980s Paris literary, art, and culinary worlds, Stella begins to understand what it might mean to live a larger life.

As weeks—and many decadent meals—go by, Stella ends up living as a “tumbleweed� at famed bookstore Shakespeare & Company, uncovers a hundred-year-old mystery in a Manet painting, and discovers a passion for food that may be connected to her past. A feast for the senses, this novel is a testament to living deliciously, taking chances, and finding your true home.]]> 288 Ruth Reichl 0812996305 Caroline 0 to-read 3.67 2024 The Paris Novel
author: Ruth Reichl
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil]]> 386187
The story is peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the "soul of pampered self-absorption"; the uproarious black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else.]]> 386 John Berendt 0679751521 Caroline 4 2024 3.91 1994 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
author: John Berendt
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/10
date added: 2024/05/16
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> The Peacock and the Sparrow 62919887
During the Arab Spring, an American spy's final mission goes dangerously awry in this "crackling debut thriller" (The New Yorker) written by a former CIA officer and hailed as "an instant classic" (Paul Vidich, author of Beirut Station).

Shane Collins, a world-weary CIA spy, is ready to come in from the cold. Stationed in Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia for his final tour, he's anxious to dispense with his mission—uncovering Iranian support for the insurgency against the monarchy. But then he meets Almaisa, a beautiful and enigmatic artist, and his eyes are opened to a side of Bahrain most expats never experience, to questions he never thought to ask.

When his trusted informant becomes embroiled in a murder, Collins finds himself drawn deep into the conflict. His budding romance with Almaisa—and his loyalties—are upended; in an instant, he's caught in the crosswinds of a revolution. Drawing on all his skills as a spymaster, he sets out to learn the truth behind the Arab Spring, win Almaisa's love, and uncover the murky border where Bahrain's secrets end and America's begin.]]> 308 I.S. Berry 1982194545 Caroline 0 to-read 3.60 2023 The Peacock and the Sparrow
author: I.S. Berry
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Chamber Divers: The Untold Story of the D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever]]> 192761614
On the beaches of Normandy in France two summers before D-Day on June 6 1944, the Allies attempted an all but forgotten invasion. Of the nearly 7000 allied troops sent ashore, only a few hundred survived an unbelievably terrible massacre. The reason for the debacle was a lack of reconnaissance. Was the beach sand firm enough for tanks? How shallow was the offshore water? How soft and steep were the surrounding cliffs? How deadly were the fortifications? The Allies knew they could not afford another disaster like that. The emerging technology of mini-submarines was already being pursued in the Pacific by the Japanese and in the Mediterranean by the Italians. But a small group of extremely eccentric scientists, researching in pressure tanks in the middle of the London Blitz air raids, would devise the critical reconnaissance vessels that would enable the Allies dramatic, history-making success on D-Day.

Based on secret documents only recently declassified and hunted down in England by Rachel Lance, this is the story of a band of maverick, hard-drinking submarine researchers, led by the controversial, brilliant biologist and communist sympathizer JBS Haldane and the intrepid, courageous Dr. Helen Spurway. Who fell in love...]]> 448 Rachel Lance 0593184939 Caroline 0 to-read 3.97 2024 Chamber Divers: The Untold Story of the D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever
author: Rachel Lance
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Life, on the Line: A Chef's Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat]]> 8667490 "One of America's great chefs" (Vogue) shares how his drive to cook immaculate food won him international renown-and fueled his miraculous triumph over tongue cancer.

In 2007, chef Grant Achatz seemingly had it made. He had been named one of the best new chefs in America by Food & Wine in 2002, received the James Beard Foundation Rising Star Chef of the Year Award in 2003, and in 2005 he and Nick Kokonas opened the conceptually radical restaurant Alinea, which was named Best Restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine. Then, positioned firmly in the world's culinary spotlight, Achatz was diagnosed with stage IV squamous cell carcinoma-tongue cancer.

The prognosis was grim, and doctors agreed the only course of action was to remove the cancerous tissue, which included his entire tongue. Desperate to preserve his quality of life, Grant undertook an alternative treatment of aggressive chemotherapy and radiation. But the choice came at a cost. Skin peeled from the inside of Grant's mouth and throat, he rapidly lost weight, and most alarmingly, he lost his sense of taste. Tapping into the discipline, passion, and focus of being a chef, Grant rarely missed a day of work. He trained his chefs to mimic his palate and learned how to cook with his other senses. As Kokonas was able to attest: The food was never better. Five months later, Grant was declared cancer-free, and just a few months following, he received the James Beard Foundation Outstanding Chef in America Award.

Life, on the Line tells the story of a culinary trailblazer's love affair with cooking, but it is also a book about survival, about nurturing creativity, and about profound friendship. Already much- anticipated by followers of progressive cuisine, Grant and Nick's gripping narrative is filled with stories from the world's most renowned kitchens-The French Laundry, Charlie Trotter's, el Bulli- and sure to expand the audience that made Alinea the number-one selling restaurant cookbook in America last year.]]> 400 Grant Achatz 1592406017 Caroline 0 to-read 4.10 2011 Life, on the Line: A Chef's Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat
author: Grant Achatz
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> They're Going to Love You 59721793 A magnetic tale of betrayal, art, and ambition, set in the world of professional ballet, New York City during the AIDS crisis, and present-day Los Angeles

Carlisle Martin dreams of becoming a professional ballet dancer just like her mother, Isabel, a former Balanchine ballerina. Since they live in Ohio, she only gets to see her father Robert for a few precious weeks a year when she visits Greenwich Village, where he lives in an enchanting apartment on Bank Street with his partner, James.

Brilliant but troubled, James gives Carlisle an education in all that he holds dear in life--literature, music, and most of all, dance. Seduced by the heady pull of mentorship and the sophistication of their lives, Carlisle's aspiration to become a dancer herself blooms, born of her desire to be asked to stay at Bank Street, to be included in Robert and James' world even as AIDS brings devastation to their community. Instead, a passionate love affair creates a rift between them, with devastating consequences that reverberate for decades to come.

Nineteen years later, Carlisle receives a phone call which unravels the fateful events of her life, causing her to see with new eyes how her younger self has informed the woman she's become. They're Going to Love You is a gripping and gorgeously written novel of heartbreaking intensity. With psychological precision and a masterfully revealed secret at its heart, it asks what it takes to be an artist in America, and the price of forgiveness, of ambition, and of love.]]> 288 Meg Howrey 038554877X Caroline 4 2024 4.07 2022 They're Going to Love You
author: Meg Howrey
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/22
date added: 2024/01/22
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> The Berry Pickers 123036004 A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.]]> 307 Amanda Peters 1646221958 Caroline 4 2024 4.04 2023 The Berry Pickers
author: Amanda Peters
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/16
date added: 2024/01/16
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522131 Caroline 0 to-read 3.62 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Birnam Wood 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Caroline 5 3.79 2023 Birnam Wood
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
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]]> Wellness 65650229 A witty and poignant novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture and the bonds that keep people together

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit.Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.]]> 611 Nathan Hill 0593536118 Caroline 0 to-read 3.97 2023 Wellness
author: Nathan Hill
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men]]> 126262032 Librarian's Note: This is the entry for the short story collection. Please don't combine it with the short story of the same name.


A triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, misogyny, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men. Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.

In “So Late in the Day,� Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently.

In “The Long and Painful Death,� a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions.

And in “Antarctica,� a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.

Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802160859 Caroline 0 to-read 3.98 2022 So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men
author: Claire Keegan
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Caroline 0 to-read 4.13 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Rabbit Hutch 122769174
São vizinhos, e vivem num complexo habitacional de baixo custo em Vacca Vale, cidade em decadência. É a partir deste lugar inóspito que Tess Gunty conduz o leitor numa invulgar viagem pelo desconcerto do espírito humano, pelas grandes doenças sociais e pelo alcance incomensurável da imaginação. Uma estreia literária arrebatadora, que inscreve Tess Gunty na linhagem do Grande Romance Americano.]]> 399 Tess Gunty 0593467876 Caroline 0 to-read 3.51 2022 The Rabbit Hutch
author: Tess Gunty
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 85148114
As these characters� stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.]]> 400 James McBride 0593422961 Caroline 0 to-read 4.25 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Woman in Me 63133205 The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 288 Britney Spears 1668009048 Caroline 4 2023 3.83 2023 The Woman in Me
author: Britney Spears
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/21
date added: 2023/12/27
shelves: 2023
review:

]]> Long Bright River 43834909 Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn't be more different. Then, one of them goes missing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit--and her sister--before it's too late.

Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.]]> 482 Liz Moore 0525540679 Caroline 5 4.03 2020 Long Bright River
author: Liz Moore
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/22
date added: 2023/12/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Lucky Red 61387980 The heart wants what it wants. Saddle up, ride out, and claim it.

A vibrant and cinematic debut set in the American West about a scrappy orphan who finds friendship, romance, and her true calling as a revenge-seeking gunslinger.

It's the spring of 1877 and sixteen-year-old Bridget is already disillusioned. She's exhausted from caring for her ne'er-do-well alcoholic father, but when he's killed by a snakebite as they cross the Kansas prairie, she knows she has only her wits to keep her alive. She arrives penniless in Dodge City, and, thanks to the allure of her bright red hair and country-girl beauty, is soon recruited to work at the Buffalo Queen, the only brothel in town run by women. Bridget takes to brothel life, appreciating the good food, good pay, and good friendships she forms with her fellow "sporting women."

Then Spartan Lee, the legendary female gunfighter in the region, rides into town, and Bridget falls in love. Hard. Before long, though, a series of shocking double-crosses shatter the Buffalo Queen's tenuous peace and safety. Desperate for vengeance and autonomy, Bridget resolves to claim her own destiny.

A thoroughly modern reimagining of the Western genre, Lucky Red is a masterfully crafted, propulsive tale of adventure, loyalty, desire, and love.]]> 304 Claudia Cravens 0593498240 Caroline 4 2023 3.89 2023 Lucky Red
author: Claudia Cravens
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/19
date added: 2023/12/19
shelves: 2023
review:

]]> Chain-Gang All-Stars 61190770
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.]]> 367 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 0593317335 Caroline 0 2023 4.13 2023 Chain-Gang All-Stars
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2023/12/03
shelves: 2023
review:

]]> Solito 62560596 A young poet tells the story of his harrowing migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this memoir.

Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago--"one day, you'll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure."

Javier's adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone except for a group of strangers and a coyote hired to lead them to safety, Javier's trip is supposed to last two short weeks.

At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents' arms, snuggling in bed between them, living under the same roof again. He does not see the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside a group of strangers who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family.]]> 492 Javier Zamora Caroline 5 2023 4.42 2022 Solito
author: Javier Zamora
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/29
date added: 2023/11/29
shelves: 2023
review:

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

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

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Caroline 0 to-read 3.92 2023 The Bee Sting
author: Paul Murray
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Heart That Works 171985149
New York Times  Bestseller *� The New Yorker � Best Books of 2022 *� Entertainment Weekly� Best Books of 2022 *� USA Today � Best Books of 2022 * � Time �100 Must-Read Books of 2022 *� Mother Jones  Books We Needed in 2022 * � People � Fall Must Read *�2022� BuzzFeed � Fall Reading Pick * New York Post Best Books of 2022 * New York Times Editors� Choice]]> 192 Rob Delaney 1954118562 Caroline 5 2023 4.62 2022 A Heart That Works
author: Rob Delaney
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/25
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: 2023
review:

]]> These Silent Woods 56268973
The only people who know they exist are a mysterious local hermit named Scotland, and Cooper's old friend, Jake, who visits each winter to bring them food and supplies. But this year, Jake doesn't show up, setting off an irreversible chain of events that reveals just how precarious their situation really is. Suddenly, the boundaries of their safe haven have blurred—and when a stranger wanders into their woods, Finch’s growing obsession with her could put them all in danger. After a shocking disappearance threatens to upend the only life Finch has ever known, Cooper is forced to decide whether to keep hiding—or finally face the sins of his past.

Vividly atmospheric and masterfully tense, These Silent Woods is a poignant story of survival, sacrifice, and how far a father will go when faced with losing it all.]]> 288 Kimi Cunningham Grant 1250793394 Caroline 0 to-read 4.01 2021 These Silent Woods
author: Kimi Cunningham Grant
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Let Us Descend 87556695
“‘Let us descend,� the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’� � Inferno, Dante Alighieri

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

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

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.]]> 305 Jesmyn Ward 198210449X Caroline 0 to-read 3.68 2023 Let Us Descend
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Amina al-Sirafi, #1)]]> 61294937 Shannon Chakraborty, the bestselling author of The City of Brass, spins a new trilogy of magic and mayhem on the high seas in this tale of pirates and sorcerers, forbidden artifacts and ancient mysteries, in one woman’s determined quest to seize a final chance at glory—and write her own legend.

Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, she’s survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural.

But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse: retrieve her comrade’s kidnapped daughter for a kingly sum. The chance to have one last adventure with her crew, do right by an old friend, and win a fortune that will secure her family’s future forever? It seems like such an obvious choice that it must be God’s will.

Yet the deeper Amina dives, the more it becomes alarmingly clear there’s more to this job, and the girl’s disappearance, than she was led to believe. For there’s always risk in wanting to become a legend, to seize one last chance at glory, to savor just a bit more power…and the price might be your very soul.]]> 483 Shannon Chakraborty Caroline 0 to-read 4.25 2023 The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Amina al-Sirafi, #1)
author: Shannon Chakraborty
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #2)]]> 50659468
Feyre has undergone more trials than one human woman can carry in her heart. Though she's now been granted the powers and lifespan of the High Fae, she is haunted by her time Under the Mountain and the terrible deeds she performed to save the lives of Tamlin and his people.

As her marriage to Tamlin approaches, Feyre's hollowness and nightmares consume her. She finds herself split into two different one who upholds her bargain with Rhysand, High Lord of the feared Night Court, and one who lives out her life in the Spring Court with Tamlin. While Feyre navigates a dark web of politics, passion, and dazzling power, a greater evil looms. She might just be the key to stopping it, but only if she can harness her harrowing gifts, heal her fractured soul, and decide how she wishes to shape her future-and the future of a world in turmoil.

Bestselling author Sarah J. Maas's masterful storytelling brings this second book in her dazzling, sexy, action-packed series to new heights.]]> 626 Sarah J. Maas 1635575583 Caroline 4 2023 4.65 2016 A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #2)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/01
date added: 2023/10/25
shelves: 2023
review:

]]> My Murder 62952152 What if the murder you had to solve was your own?

Lou is a happily married mother of an adorable toddler. She's also the victim of a local serial killer. Recently brought back to life and returned to her grieving family by a government project, she is grateful for this second chance. But as the new Lou re-adapts to her old routines, and as she bonds with other female victims, she realizes that disturbing questions remain about what exactly preceded her death and how much she can really trust those around her.

Now it's not enough to care for her child, love her husband, and work the job she's always enjoyed--she must also figure out the circumstances of her death. Darkly comic, tautly paced, and full of surprises, My Murder is a devour-in-one-sitting, clever twist on the classic thriller.]]> 304 Katie Williams 0593543769 Caroline 4 2023 3.61 2023 My Murder
author: Katie Williams
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/25
date added: 2023/10/25
shelves: 2023
review:

]]> Do Tell 62560783
Now on a new side of the entertainment business, Edie’s second act career grants her more control on the page than she ever commanded in front of the camera. But Edie quickly learns that publishing the secrets of those former colleagues she considers friends has repercussions. And when she finds herself in the middle of the trial of the decade, Edie is forced to make an impossible choice with the potential to ruin more than one life.

Debut novelist Lindsay Lynch brings the golden age of Hollywood to glittering life, from star-studded opening nights to backlot brawls, on-location Westerns to the Hollywood Canteen. Through Edie's wry observations, Lynch maps the intricate networks of power that manufacture the magic of the movies, and interrogates who actually gets to tell women's stories.]]> 352 Lindsay Lynch 0385549377 Caroline 3 2023 3.16 2023 Do Tell
author: Lindsay Lynch
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.16
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/15
date added: 2023/10/22
shelves: 2023
review:
I wanted to like this but it fell flat for me.
]]> Maame 60784605 Shortlisted for the TikTok Book Awards in the Book of the Year, 2023 and the ŷ Debut and Fiction Book of the Year, 2023.

It’s fair to say that Maddie’s life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson’s. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting.

When her mum returns from her latest trip to Ghana, Maddie leaps at the chance to get out of the family home and finally start living. A self-acknowledged late bloomer, she’s ready to experience some important “firsts�: She finds a flat share, says yes to after-work drinks, pushes for more recognition in her career, and throws herself into the bewildering world of internet dating. But it's not long before tragedy strikes, forcing Maddie to face the true nature of her unconventional family, and the perils—and rewards—of putting her life on the line.

Smart, funny, and deeply affecting, Jessica George's Maame deals with the themes of our time with humor and poignancy: from familial duty and racism, to female pleasure, the complexity of love, and the life-saving power of friendship. Most important, it explores what it feels like to be torn between two homes and cultures―and it celebrates finally being able to find where you belong.]]> 320 Jessica George Caroline 5 2023 4.03 2023 Maame
author: Jessica George
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/29
date added: 2023/09/29
shelves: 2023
review:

]]> Tom Lake 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Caroline 0 2023 3.92 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/19
date added: 2023/08/19
shelves: 2023
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up]]> 59519684
'Funny and frank, a chance to spend time with a brave and big-hearted woman who's grown up to be not so mean, after all' JENNIFER LARUE, WASHINGTON POST

'Grabs you by the collar and says listen to all that I have to say: about love, pain, motherhood, illness, celebrity and the tidal ferocity that pours through all our lives. Read it and be caught in the voice of one of our luminous stars' ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG

The first story Selma Blair Beitner ever heard about herself is that she was a mean, mean baby. Although Selma went on to become a celebrated Hollywood actress and model, she could never quite shake the periods of darkness that overtook her, the certainty that there was a great mystery at the heart of her life. Over the course of this beautiful and, at times, shocking memoir, Selma lays bare her addiction to alcohol, her devotion to her brilliant and complicated mother, and the moments she flirted with death. There is violence, love, true friendship, the gift of motherhood and, finally, the simultaneous devastation and surprising salvation of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis.

'A fascinating exploration about the power of prophecy, of labels, and of one woman's determination to defy them all. Blair is a rebel, an artist, and it turns out: a writer' GLENNON DOYLE

'I laughed out loud more than I cried' FRANCES RYAN, GUARDIAN]]> 299 Selma Blair 0525659501 Caroline 0 2023 3.92 2022 Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up
author: Selma Blair
name: Caroline
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/10
date added: 2023/08/10
shelves: 2023
review:

]]> The Covenant of Water 180357146 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 715 Abraham Verghese 0802162177 Caroline 0 to-read 4.34 2023 The Covenant of Water
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Caroline
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>