en-US Mon, 14 Apr 2025 10:00:26 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 53340905 Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.]]> 190 Dashiell Hammett ��ü���� 4 4.17 1929
author: Dashiell Hammett
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/14
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 34802642 The crucial sequel to the New York Times bestselling The Secret History of Twin Peaks, this novel bridges the two series, and takes you deeper into the mysteries raised by the new series.

The return of Twin Peaks this May is one of the most anticipated events in the history of television. The subject of endless speculation, shrouded in mystery, fans will come flocking to see Mark Frost and David Lynch's inimitable vision once again grace the screen. Featuring all the characters we know and love from the first series, as well as a list of high-powered actors in new roles, the show will be endlessly debated, discussed, and dissected.

While The Secret History of Twin Peaks served to expand the mysteries of the town and place the unexplained phenomena that unfolded there into a vastly layered, wide-ranging history, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier tells us what happened to key characters in the twenty-five years in between the events of the first series and the second, offering details and insights fans will be clamoring for. The novel also adds context and commentary to the strange and cosmic happenings of the new series. For fans around the world begging for more, Mark Frost's final take laid out in this novel will be required listening.]]> 145 Mark Frost 1250163307 ��ü���� 0 3.87 2017
author: Mark Frost
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 2407343 Alternative cover edition - ISBN10: 0140017321 - ISBN13: 9780140017328

It is the Day of Death, and a fiesta is in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepetl ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate...and the ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Firmin, H.M. ex-consul, is drowning himself in liquor and mescal, while his ex-wife and half-brother look on, powerless to help him. As the day wears on, it becomes apparent that Geoffrey must die. It is his only escape from a world he cannot understand.]]> 376 Malcolm Lowry ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 3.84 1947
author: Malcolm Lowry
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1947
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 859240
Part of a series of Penguin Classics editions of Henry James's works, this edition contains a chronology, further reading, notes and an introduction by Philip Horne, exploring the sources in life and fiction from which James determined to make his Portrait.]]> 718 Henry James 0141441267 ��ü���� 5 4.07 1881
author: Henry James
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1881
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 23365270 244 Nathanael West 0811224619 ��ü���� 4 3.54 1939
author: Nathanael West
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1939
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 3230480 480 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz 0704334836 ��ü���� 0 to-read 4.00 1930
author: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1930
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 11702 398 Octavio Paz 080215042X ��ü���� 0 4.18 1950
author: Octavio Paz
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1950
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 22591141 311 Brad Dukes 061596883X ��ü���� 0 4.11 2014
author: Brad Dukes
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves:
review:

]]> 184598214 160 Manya Wilkinson 1913505944 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.93
author: Manya Wilkinson
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 395616 Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule. In August 1942, his Seventh Symphony, written as a protest against fascism, was performed in Nazi-besieged Leningrad by the city's surviving musicians, and was triumphantly broadcast to the German troops, who had been bombarded beforehand to silence them. Alone among his artistic peers, he survived successive Stalinist cultural purges and won the Stalin Prize five times, yet in 1948 he was dismissed from his conservatory teaching positions, and many of his works were banned from performance. He prudently censored himself, in one case putting aside a work based on Jewish folk poems. Under later regimes he balanced a career as a model Soviet, holding government positions and acting as an international ambassador with his unflagging artistic ambitions.
In the years since his death in 1975, many have embraced a view of Shostakovich as a lifelong dissident who encoded anti-Communist messages in his music. This lucid and fascinating biography demonstrates that the reality was much more complex. Laurel Fay's book includes a detailed list of works, a glossary of names, and an extensive bibliography, making it an indispensable resource for future studies of Shostakovich.]]> 488 Laurel E. Fay 0195182510 ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 4.16 1995
author: Laurel E. Fay
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 395617
�� Testimony changed the perception of Shostakovich's life and work dramatically, and influenced innumerable performances of his music.��

�� New Grove Dictionary]]> 350 Dmitri Shostakovich 087910998X ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 4.09 1979
author: Dmitri Shostakovich
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 240023 126 Henry James 0140432620 ��ü���� 4 3.26 1879
author: Henry James
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.26
book published: 1879
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/03
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review:

]]> 517570 The Beast in the Jungle was first published in London by Henry James in 1903 by Methuen Publishing in the collection "The Better Sort".
It is the story of John Marcher, a man who, for as long as he can remember, has been obsessed by the feeling that some life-changing - even catastrophic - event lies in wait for him like a jungle animal. Then the tragic day arrives on which the terrible true nature of the beast is revealed.

Excerpt:
speech that startled him in the course of their encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by himself quite without intention—spoken as they lingered and slowly moved together after their renewal of acquaintance. He had been conveyed by friends an hour or two before to the house at which she was staying; the party of visitors at the other house, of whom he was one, and thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that he was lost in the crowd, had been invited over to luncheon. There had been after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of the original motive, a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts, that made the place almost famous; and the great rooms were so numerous that guests could wander at their will, hang back from the principal group and in cases where they took such matters with the last seriousness give themselves up to mysterious appreciations and measurements.]]> 48 Henry James 1419153765 ��ü���� 0 3.63 1903
author: Henry James
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1903
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 198812387 353 Lydia Davis 1805301896 ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 3.74 2023
author: Lydia Davis
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 775366 The Ambassadors is a novel by Henry James, originally published as a serial in the North American Review (NAR).

Story:
Concerned that her son Chad may have become involved with a woman of dubious reputation, the formidable Mrs. Newsome sends her 'ambassador' Strether from Massachusetts to Paris to extricate him. Strether's mission, however, is gradually undermined as he falls under the spell of the city and finds Chad refined rather than corrupted by its influence and that of his charming companion, the comtesse de Vionnet. As the summer wears on, Mrs. Newsome comes to the conclusion that she must send another envoy to Paris to confront the errant Chad, and a Strether whose view of the world has changed profoundly.
The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether's point of view.

Extract:
After the opera, Strether tells Chad why he has come to Paris. However, as he speaks, Strether finds himself less certain of his stance. Chad, once callow and juvenile, now seems confident and restrained. His new personality impresses Strether, who wonders what—or who—has caused Chad’s transformation. Chad asks Strether to stay and meet his close friends, a mother and a daughter, who are arriving in a few days time. Strether, wondering if one of these women has been the impetus for Chad’s improvement, and assuming the daughter to be Chad’s lover, agrees to stay. Meanwhile, Bilham convinces Strether that Chad has a “virtuous attachment”—and that Chad’s relationship with the mysterious woman is innocent. Strether eventually meets the women, Madame de Vionnet and her daughter, Jeanne, at a high society party, but he does not see them long enough to cement an impression. After the brief introduction to Madame de Vionnet, Strether finds himself alone with little Bilham. Strether takes the opportunity to offer Bilham some sage advice: live all you can before it is too late. This advice exposes Strether’s own change since coming to Europe. In Paris, he feels renewed, young again, doubly alive. Over...]]> 528 Henry James 0140432337 ��ü���� 4 currently-reading 3.66 1903
author: Henry James
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1903
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 61105682 239 Joshua Cohen 1804270202 ��ü���� 4 3.87 2021
author: Joshua Cohen
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 223455 487 Guillermo Cabrera Infante 1564783790 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.96 2008
author: Guillermo Cabrera Infante
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 816085
For Ned and his family, Cornwall Coombe was to become a place of ultimate horror.]]> 401 Thomas Tryon 0394485289 ��ü���� 0 3.82 1973
author: Thomas Tryon
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 1134032 238 P.G. Wodehouse 0140009353 ��ü���� 4
wodehouse is hard to review because so much of his writing is in the narration itself, so skillfully descriptive, so very elegant yet understated, that one gets caught up in the idyll of the perfect country manor dollhouses that make up his world. he’s such a charming writer that it becomes very easy to forget that over half of the code of the woosters takes place over a single night, being narrated from bertie’s bedroom at totleigh towers while characters rush in and out. one of my personal delights with wodehouse is that he was a master of the recurring joke - the phrase ‘modern dutch�� and the name ‘eulalie�� are deployed so beautifully that reading them each time feels like a new update in some personal story, and the steadily dwindling number of mantelpiece ornaments in bertie’s room is the subtlest way of reminding the reader that the novel actually IS taking place almost totally confined to that space.

there’s also the matter of the goods being narrated - there’s a 16th century cream jug shaped like a cow, a notebook of hideous insults that gets misplaced, hidden, stolen, then misplaced again, the rip-roaring parody of empty machismo that is roderick spode, an incredibly aggressive scottie dog, a thieved policeman’s helmet (stolen in the name of - what else? - love!); all these building into a climax that is basically wealthy people stealing about a country house in the dead of night stealing things from one another. that is just the apex of what farce should be. ]]> 4.39 1938
author: P.G. Wodehouse
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1938
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves:
review:
by all accounts, bertie wooster should be as reprehensible to readers as he is to his aunt agatha. he’s a dandy drunkard with too much money, a proclivity for petty theft, and a total inability to understand women - but his narration is so delightful and fleet-footed, his escapades so joyously delirious, and his rightfully iconic valet (or rather, gentleman’s personal gentleman) jeeves so deviously resourceful at untangling these escapades, that he very rightly is one of the most heinously likeable characters in the history of literature.

wodehouse is hard to review because so much of his writing is in the narration itself, so skillfully descriptive, so very elegant yet understated, that one gets caught up in the idyll of the perfect country manor dollhouses that make up his world. he’s such a charming writer that it becomes very easy to forget that over half of the code of the woosters takes place over a single night, being narrated from bertie’s bedroom at totleigh towers while characters rush in and out. one of my personal delights with wodehouse is that he was a master of the recurring joke - the phrase ‘modern dutch�� and the name ‘eulalie�� are deployed so beautifully that reading them each time feels like a new update in some personal story, and the steadily dwindling number of mantelpiece ornaments in bertie’s room is the subtlest way of reminding the reader that the novel actually IS taking place almost totally confined to that space.

there’s also the matter of the goods being narrated - there’s a 16th century cream jug shaped like a cow, a notebook of hideous insults that gets misplaced, hidden, stolen, then misplaced again, the rip-roaring parody of empty machismo that is roderick spode, an incredibly aggressive scottie dog, a thieved policeman’s helmet (stolen in the name of - what else? - love!); all these building into a climax that is basically wealthy people stealing about a country house in the dead of night stealing things from one another. that is just the apex of what farce should be.
]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in��Görbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 ��ü���� 0 3.66 2022
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/15
date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> 1576188 The collected fiction of "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe" (Cynthia Ozick)

Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.]]> 368 Bruno Schulz 0143105140 ��ü���� 5 4.16 2005
author: Bruno Schulz
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves:
review:

]]> 50728018
Inspired by a real event of the murder of a woman in rural Mexico, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with superstitions and violence—violence that poisons everything around.

The Witch is dead. After a group of children playing in the murky waters of the irrigation canals discover her decomposing corpse, the village is rife with rumours and suspicions about the murder of this feared and respected woman, who had carried out the community’s ritual shamanic customs. In dazzling, visceral language, Melchor extracts humanity from otherwise irredeemably brutal characters, and spins a terrifying and heartrending tale of dark suspense in a Mexican village that seems damned.]]> 238 Fernanda Melchor 1922268003 ��ü���� 4 3.85 2017
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves:
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]]> 12948
A very young woman's first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate... An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls. But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.

Excerpt:
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days - found myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house.]]> 121 Henry James 0140620613 ��ü���� 5 3.42 1898
author: Henry James
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1898
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/02
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 3446138 Self-Help, her first collection of stories, Lorrie Moore has been hailed as one of the greatest and most influential voices in American fiction. Her ferociously funny, soulful stories tell of the gulf between men and women, the loneliness of the broken-hearted and the yearned-for, impossible intimacies we crave. Gathered here for the first time in a beautiful hardback edition is the complete stories along with three new and previously unpublished in book form: "Paper Losses", "The Juniper Tree", and "Debarking".]]> 656 Lorrie Moore 057123934X ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 4.45 2008
author: Lorrie Moore
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 856165 128 Dennis Cooper 0802132898 ��ü���� 5 3.67 1991
author: Dennis Cooper
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/07
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 11650060

Alternate cover for ISBN: 0679725768, 978-0679725763]]> 135 Nicholson Baker ��ü���� 5 4.06 1988
author: Nicholson Baker
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/24
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 214474
This is a title in an inexpensive range of classics in the "Penguin Popular Classics" series.]]> 144 Henry James 0140620974 ��ü���� 0 3.66 1888
author: Henry James
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1888
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 25866 528 Iraj Pezeshkzad 0812974433 ��ü���� 0 to-read 4.04 1970
author: Iraj Pezeshkzad
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15487334
La otra historia es la de un amor que hace de esos tormentos su alimento. Un amor acechado por los enemigos: el deterioro fisico, la vejez, la muerte, pero que es capaz, no solo de resistirlos, sino tambien de transformarlos en el impetu del deseo. Una muchacha de dieciocho años rechaza al hombre de quien ha estado enamorada y con quien le han impedido unirse.

Mas de cincuenta años despues, cuando ha muerto otro hombre con quien se ha casado para vivir un lapso de sucedaneos desdeñables, se reune con aquel primer amor suyo a bordo de un barco que se llama Nueva Fidelidad.

La exacerbacion del deseo se alia a la muerte y a la enfermedad porque se les parece: "Los sintomas del amor son los mismos del colera."

En este relato infinitamente seductor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez narra la obsesion del deseo con un arrebato que lo aparta de sus grandes novelas anteriores y a la vez lo acerca a ellas.

A la circularidad del tiempo en Macondo, al enclaustramiento del tirano aislado en su poder demencial, sucede ahora la vigencia imbatible del deseo ahincado en si mismo. Un deseo que avanza hacia su origen en un movimiento que no cesa. Como el movimiento del barco Nueva Fidelidad, que seguira yendo y viniendo "toda la vida". Son las palabras que cierran, reanudandola, esta historia de amor.]]> 348 Gabriel García Márquez ��ü���� 5 4.00 1985
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 38787
As one enters Juan Rulfo's legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo - lover, overlord, murderer.

Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.]]> 124 Juan Rulfo 0802133908 ��ü���� 0 4.06 1955
author: Juan Rulfo
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/09/03
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]]> 56760363 The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth’s odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa’s flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea.

Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy’s austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues—with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion’s garden full of intoxicated snails)—delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.]]> 96 Fleur Jaeggy 0811229750 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.55 1980
author: Fleur Jaeggy
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 2066735 Quartet in Autumn.]]> 224 Barbara Pym 0452269342 ��ü���� 0 to-read 4.01 1978
author: Barbara Pym
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6287597 720 Fernando del Paso 1564785335 ��ü���� 0 to-read 4.33 1986
author: Fernando del Paso
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55688770
Woven into this coming-of-age saga is the terribly intense love Carlos cherishes for his friend’s young mother, which has the effect of driving the general cruelties further under the reader’s skin. The acclaimed translator Katherine Silver has greatly revised her original translation, enlivening afresh this remarkable work.]]> 80 José Emilio Pacheco 0811230953 ��ü���� 0 to-read 4.14 1981
author: José Emilio Pacheco
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25147101 Alternative cover edition of ISBN 0370309006

"How wonderful to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century," Fleur Talbot rejoices. Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with intent to gather material for her writing, Fleur finds a job "on the grubby edge of the literary world," as secretary to the peculiar Autobiographial Association. Mad egomaniacs, hilariously writing their memoirs in advance; or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? Rich material, in any case. But when its pompous director, Sir Quentin Oliver, steals the manuscript of Fleur's new novel, fiction begins to appropriate life. The association's members begin to act out scenes exactly as Fleur herself has already written them in her missing manuscript. And as they meet darkly funny, pre-visioned fates, where does art start or reality end?]]> 221 Muriel Spark ��ü���� 4 3.84 1981
author: Muriel Spark
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/02
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves:
review:

]]> 195790675
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.]]> 198 Rachel Cusk 0374610045 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.55 2024
author: Rachel Cusk
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 873921 234 Angela Carter 0099981106 ��ü���� 5 3.87 1991
author: Angela Carter
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/13
date added: 2024/06/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 42646501 A Dance to the Music of Time �� his brilliant 12-novel sequence, which chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and others, as they negotiate the intellectual, cultural and social hurdles that stand between them and the “Acceptance World.”]]> 254 Anthony Powell ��ü���� 5 4.40 1962
author: Anthony Powell
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2021/03/26
date added: 2024/06/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 551470 Book by Lebowitz, Fran 191 Fran Lebowitz 0452260698 ��ü���� 0 3.73 1978
author: Fran Lebowitz
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/09
date added: 2024/06/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 21533844 760 Thomas Pynchon ��ü���� 5 currently-reading 4.52 1973
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves: currently-reading
review:
900 magnificent pages of drug-fuelled cookery
]]> 857703
The death of her ex-lover sets Oedipa on a trail of delirious weirdness which leads from her husband, Mucho Mass (who is fond of Sick Dick and the Volkswagens, but doesn’t believe in them), through Dr Hilarius, Freudian shrink and ex-Buchenwald intem (‘If I’d been a real Nazi, I’d have chosen Jung, nicht wahr?��), the bizarre postal network of outcasts called W.A.S.T.E, Genghis Cohen, the most eminent philatelist in L.A., Yoyodyne Inc. (��High above the L.A. freeways/And the traffick's whine/Stands the well—known Galactronics/Branch of Yoyodyne��), not to mention Randolph Driblette and Messrs Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, Attorneys...

Until, finally, Oedipa stands alone, awaiting the final revelation �� the Crying of Lot 49.

Cover illustration by Candida Amsden

]]> 127 Thomas Pynchon 0330258702 ��ü���� 4 She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time amongst the beasts in a zoo - any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity’s pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike ‘clues�� were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. (pg. 95)

maybe real life doesn’t exist at all. i decided to read all of pynchon’s novels out of what i can easily articulate as a masochistic streak that exists in me, but the issue with this novel - at least, as i personally interpret it - is that there’s no such gem, all that exists is the terror - œdipa (if i may call her that) and her justified terror at knowing the real. each pynchon novel seems a rorschach test for what the reader understands. we will never know what TRISTERO and W.A.S.T.E. really are. While I still work oh a dreadful review of V., I’m happy to say that this one remains inscrutable and terrifying.]]> 3.66 1966
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/15
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves:
review:
She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time amongst the beasts in a zoo - any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity’s pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike ‘clues�� were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. (pg. 95)

maybe real life doesn’t exist at all. i decided to read all of pynchon’s novels out of what i can easily articulate as a masochistic streak that exists in me, but the issue with this novel - at least, as i personally interpret it - is that there’s no such gem, all that exists is the terror - œdipa (if i may call her that) and her justified terror at knowing the real. each pynchon novel seems a rorschach test for what the reader understands. we will never know what TRISTERO and W.A.S.T.E. really are. While I still work oh a dreadful review of V., I’m happy to say that this one remains inscrutable and terrifying.
]]> 1162117 463 Thomas Pynchon 0553246860 ��ü���� 4 4.07 1963
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/09
date added: 2024/05/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 60582780
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and history�� the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript―Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.]]> 639 Mircea Cărtărescu 1646052021 ��ü���� 0 to-read 4.32 2015
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1457975 Washington Post reporters who broke the story. This is “the work that brought down a presidency�� perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history�� (Time, All-Time 100 Best Nonfiction Books).

This is the book that changed America. Published just two months before President Nixon’s resignation, All the President’s Men revealed the full scope of the Watergate scandal and introduced for the first time the mysterious “Deep Throat.�� Beginning with the story of a simple burglary at Democratic headquarters and then continuing through headline after headline, Bernstein and Woodward deliver the stunning revelations and pieces in the Watergate puzzle that brought about Nixon’s shocking downfall. Their explosive reports won a Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post, toppled the president, and have since inspired generations of reporters.

All the President’s Men is a riveting detective story, capturing the exhilarating rush of the biggest presidential scandal in U.S. history as it unfolded in real time. It is, as former New York Times managing editor Gene Roberts has called it, “maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time.”]]> 382 Carl Bernstein 0446890936 ��ü���� 0 4.00 1974
author: Carl Bernstein
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/04
date added: 2024/05/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 157975976
Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author’s books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines.

The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese—peppered with ample neologisms—and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process�� is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write.

This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers?

Blue Lard is a stylistically acrobatic book, translated by Max Lawton into an English idiom just as bizarre as the Russian original. Evoking both Pulp Fiction and the masterpieces of Marquis de Sade,��Sorokin’s novel is a brutal, heady trip that annihilates all of its twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century competition in the Russian canon—and that annihilates Russia itself in a resounding act of heavy-metal dissidence.]]> 422 Vladimir Sorokin 1681378191 ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 3.90 1999
author: Vladimir Sorokin
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 148204 384 Thomas Pynchon 0436398664 ��ü���� 4 3.69 1990
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/14
date added: 2024/04/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 204471536 Winner of the 2023 Queensland Award for Literary Fiction

In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both ecological disaster and a gathering of the ancestors, Cause Man Steel is chasing a mad vision: a national donkey transport scheme that will guarantee his people’s independence forever. He finds, however, as he bundles feral donkeys into his Ford Falcon and dumps them en masse in the cemetery, that not all of Praiseworthy agrees. Outrage ferments at his desecration of traditional land, while Cause’s wife Dance seeks refuge with butterflies and dreams of moving their family to China. Bad feelings reach fever pitch when citizens catch wind of the suicide of Aboriginal Sovereignty, Cause’s eldest son. All are distraught �� all, that is, except eight-year-old Tommyhawk Steel, who, with his brother gone, gleefully pursues his dream of becoming white and powerful. Told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned, Praiseworthy is a marvel of explosive sentences, a shock to allegory, an outraged cry against oppression, and a biting satire for the end of days.]]> 736 Alexis Wright 1913505928 ��ü���� 0 to-read 4.35 2023
author: Alexis Wright
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62043762 Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying inability to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that make up a life confined to the home, where both everything and nothing happens.

With shades of Clarice Lispector, Mavis Gallant and Lucy Ellman, this late-period novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist, and film and literary critic Mieko Kanai - whose often dark and cynical work occupies something of a cult place within the Japanese canon - is a disconcerting and astute portrait of life in late-stage capitalist society.]]> 176 Mieko Kanai 1804270385 ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 3.52 1997
author: Mieko Kanai
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 1869006 The Ogre is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to "ogre" of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, taking us deeper into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since The Tin Drum. Until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich, it shocks us, dazzles us, and above all holds us spellbound.]]> 318 Michel Tournier 0413533603 ��ü���� 4 4.24 1970
author: Michel Tournier
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2024/03/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 3094891 250 Felice Picano ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.84 1981
author: Felice Picano
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1519682 The Garden of Eden is the last uncompleted novel of Ernest Hemingway, which he worked on intermittently from 1946 until his death in 1961. Set on the Côte d'Azur in the 1920s, it is the story of a young American writer, David Bourne, his glamorous wife, Catherine, and the dangerous, erotic game they play when they fall in love with the same woman. "A lean, sensuous narrative...taut, chic, and strangely contemporary," The Garden of Eden represents vintage Hemingway, the master "doing what nobody did better" (R. Z. Sheppard, Time).]]> 247 Ernest Hemingway 0684188716 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.53 1986
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 163117 544 Klaus Theweleit 0816614490 ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 4.24 1979
author: Klaus Theweleit
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/19
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 14743257 The House of Mirth shocked the New York society it so deftly chronicles, portraying the moral, social and economic restraints on a woman who dared to claim the privileges of marriage without assuming the responsibilities.

Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something—fastidiousness or integrity—prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.]]> 400 Edith Wharton 0141199024 ��ü���� 5
though it’s very clearly a ruthless melodrama of its time, with all the beats - though, at the same time, is it not fair to say that wharton was one of the primary architects of such narrative cruelty? - it is always clear, and concise, and beautiful. a phrase i continually repeat in my mind:

Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda?

and then, in a stark opposition, a NoMeansNo lyric, from their album 0 + 2 = 1:

every day
every day
every day i start to lose]]> 3.93 1905
author: Edith Wharton
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1905
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/17
date added: 2024/02/17
shelves:
review:
as others have repeatedly said, utterly mirthless - though to pretend that wharton is without humour is to undervalue her - but the fact remains that lily bart’s meteoric descent into disgrace is one of the most compelling and tragic narratives i have ever read. part of my own slow going with this novel lay in the fact that i simply could not bear to face what she had to endure next.

though it’s very clearly a ruthless melodrama of its time, with all the beats - though, at the same time, is it not fair to say that wharton was one of the primary architects of such narrative cruelty? - it is always clear, and concise, and beautiful. a phrase i continually repeat in my mind:

Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda?

and then, in a stark opposition, a NoMeansNo lyric, from their album 0 + 2 = 1:

every day
every day
every day i start to lose
]]> 1401048 454 J.G. Farrell 1857990188 ��ü���� 3 reviewed ‘It was one of those nights, he had the feeling, when everything isn’t (as it usually seems to be) already settled; when one doesn’t have to say to oneself: given my character and your character what harmony shall we ever be able to achieve?��

there are few memetic stories i loathe more than the one about the english teacher and the author. the one where the teacher to their student is all like ‘the author said ‘the curtains were blue�� to signify the character’s depression et. al.�� when the author was just stating that the curtains were blue��. it’s lazy as fuck and it’s a dull, uninspired slap in the face to interpretive reading. especially insulting on the back of a book like this, where the labyrinthian majestic hotel is obviously a spatial equivalent of the rotting carcass of british-ruled ireland at the end of its life, where angela represents the unionists while sarah represents the republicans, and where constantly around the corner there are the sinister symbols of rot, sheep’s heads in chamber pots and killed chickens affixed to dog’s necks.

and yeah, in the light of both history and the interpretive skills our literature teachers gave us, farrell’s symbolism is maybe a bit obvious, but the limitation of the review format is that i can tell you about those symbollogies without even scratching the surface of how surreal and disturbing he makes them seem. much of the beauty of troubles lies in the fact that it exists in an utterly haunted world (one is tempted to say kafkaesque but would be spat at by onlookers) in which the living and the present are ghosts, with only our doe-eyed blue-blooded english innocent of a protagonist (despite the fact that he is obviously recovering from WWI-related ptsd; let’s not call it shellshock) can blindly look through and see nothing. everything boils around major archer while he feels nothing, hears nothing, and does nothing. this book has really increased my vitriol towards that little story because this novel is a masterwork of symbol, placed in front of the reader so blindingly that to deny it is to engage in willing stupidity.

farrell evokes his narrative with a deft hand - using gently flowing prose that often uses an unexpectedly gorgeous simile or an allusive bit of foreshadowing at the turn of a plot note, so that reading troubles is indeed similar to the act of wandering the majestic’s bewildering halls. it’s interspersed with an acidic sense of humour that mixes tim & eric with grand guignol, one of the most disarmingly powerful characteristics this novel has, gradually accelerating and ramping up in intensity as the war itself draws to a close but the troubles themselves bubble further to their beginning.

it’s also, on a radically different note, worth mentioning farrell’s evocation of the major’s inevitably doomed obsession with sarah - one of the most exquisite descriptions of selfish love i’ve ever read in a novel, and once again one that lends itself immaculately to the larger symbolic texture. he desires her as a child desires a toy that isn’t theirs; farrell setting up both a sense of sympathy for his feelings and a sense of unashamed critique for his unthinking selfishness. when a book uses its interpersonal relationships to evoke both a universality of feeling as well as a political metaphor you really know it’s excelled.]]> 3.68 1970
author: J.G. Farrell
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1970
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/05
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves: reviewed
review:
‘It was one of those nights, he had the feeling, when everything isn’t (as it usually seems to be) already settled; when one doesn’t have to say to oneself: given my character and your character what harmony shall we ever be able to achieve?��

there are few memetic stories i loathe more than the one about the english teacher and the author. the one where the teacher to their student is all like ‘the author said ‘the curtains were blue�� to signify the character’s depression et. al.�� when the author was just stating that the curtains were blue��. it’s lazy as fuck and it’s a dull, uninspired slap in the face to interpretive reading. especially insulting on the back of a book like this, where the labyrinthian majestic hotel is obviously a spatial equivalent of the rotting carcass of british-ruled ireland at the end of its life, where angela represents the unionists while sarah represents the republicans, and where constantly around the corner there are the sinister symbols of rot, sheep’s heads in chamber pots and killed chickens affixed to dog’s necks.

and yeah, in the light of both history and the interpretive skills our literature teachers gave us, farrell’s symbolism is maybe a bit obvious, but the limitation of the review format is that i can tell you about those symbollogies without even scratching the surface of how surreal and disturbing he makes them seem. much of the beauty of troubles lies in the fact that it exists in an utterly haunted world (one is tempted to say kafkaesque but would be spat at by onlookers) in which the living and the present are ghosts, with only our doe-eyed blue-blooded english innocent of a protagonist (despite the fact that he is obviously recovering from WWI-related ptsd; let’s not call it shellshock) can blindly look through and see nothing. everything boils around major archer while he feels nothing, hears nothing, and does nothing. this book has really increased my vitriol towards that little story because this novel is a masterwork of symbol, placed in front of the reader so blindingly that to deny it is to engage in willing stupidity.

farrell evokes his narrative with a deft hand - using gently flowing prose that often uses an unexpectedly gorgeous simile or an allusive bit of foreshadowing at the turn of a plot note, so that reading troubles is indeed similar to the act of wandering the majestic’s bewildering halls. it’s interspersed with an acidic sense of humour that mixes tim & eric with grand guignol, one of the most disarmingly powerful characteristics this novel has, gradually accelerating and ramping up in intensity as the war itself draws to a close but the troubles themselves bubble further to their beginning.

it’s also, on a radically different note, worth mentioning farrell’s evocation of the major’s inevitably doomed obsession with sarah - one of the most exquisite descriptions of selfish love i’ve ever read in a novel, and once again one that lends itself immaculately to the larger symbolic texture. he desires her as a child desires a toy that isn’t theirs; farrell setting up both a sense of sympathy for his feelings and a sense of unashamed critique for his unthinking selfishness. when a book uses its interpersonal relationships to evoke both a universality of feeling as well as a political metaphor you really know it’s excelled.
]]> 11324 Jake Donaghue, garrulous artist, meets Hugo Belfounder, silent philosopher.

Jake, hack writer and sponger, now penniless flat-hunter, seeks out an old girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her glamorous actress sister, Sadie. He resumes acquaintance with formidable Hugo, whose ‘philosophy�� he once presumptuously dared to interpret. These meetings involve Jake and his eccentric servant-companion, Finn, in a series of adventures that include the kidnapping of a film-star dog, and a political riot in a film-set of ancient Rome. Jake, fascinated, longs to learn Hugo’s secret. Perhaps Hugo’s secret is Hugo himself? Admonished, enlightened, Jake hopes at last to become a real writer.]]> 252 Iris Murdoch 0140014454 ��ü���� 5 3.78 1954
author: Iris Murdoch
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1954
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/04
date added: 2024/02/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 62978911
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 240 Edith Wharton 0241630819 ��ü���� 4 3.65 1917
author: Edith Wharton
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1917
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/29
date added: 2024/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 61966683 199 Ian Penman 1804270423 ��ü���� 4 3.97 2023
author: Ian Penman
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 83017 198 Dino Buzzati 1567923046 ��ü���� 0 to-read 4.24 1940
author: Dino Buzzati
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1940
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 742868
This book provides the first serious account of the way in which Nazism was influenced by powerful millenarian and occult sects that thrived in Germany and Austria almost fifty years before the rise to power of Adolf Hitler.

These millenarian sects (principally the Ariosophists) espoused a mixture of popular nationalism, Aryan racism, and occultism to support their advocacy of German world-rule. Over time their ideas and symbols, filtered through nationalist-racist groups associated with the infant Nazi party, came to exert a strong influence on Himmler's SS.

The fantasies thus fueled were played out with terrifying consequences in the realities structured into the Third Reich: Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the hellish museums of Nazi apocalypse, had psychic roots reaching back to millenial visions of occult sects. Beyond what the TImes Literary Supplement calls an intriguing study of apocalyptic fantasies, this bizarre and fascinating story contains lessons we cannot afford to ignore.]]> 293 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke 0814730604 ��ü���� 0 3.88 1982
author: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/09
date added: 2023/11/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 53054943 The hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- backed by the United States.

In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.

In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.]]> 320 Vincent Bevins 1541742400 ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 4.62 2020
author: Vincent Bevins
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/09
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 6495110
The lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others—is the subject of this, Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson takes a darker look at the subjects that animate the best of her work, from her sensitive tale of island life, The Summer Book, to her famous Moomin stories: solitude and community, art and life, love and hate.
��
Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, appears to be Katri’s opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna’s life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions.]]> 181 Tove Jansson 1590173295 ��ü���� 4 3.90 1982
author: Tove Jansson
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/08
date added: 2023/11/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 8658434 608 Georges Perec ��ü���� 5 3.95 1978
author: Georges Perec
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1978
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/04
date added: 2023/11/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 30285138 what’s shared can never be unshared.

An allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a fervent cult following in Italy for forty years. Now, in a fretful new age of "lone-wolf" terrorism fueled by social media, we can find uncanny resonances in Giorgio De Maria’s vision of mass fear: a mute, palpitating dread that seeps into every moment of daily existence. With its stunning anticipation of the Internet—and the apocalyptic repercussions of oversharing—this bleak, prescient story is more disturbingly pertinent than ever.

Brilliantly translated into English for the first time by Ramon Glazov, The Twenty Days of Turin establishes De Maria’s place among the literary ranks of Italo Calvino and beside classic horror masters such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Hauntingly imaginative, with visceral prose that chills to the marrow, the novel is an eerily clairvoyant magnum opus, long overdue but ever timely.]]> 224 Giorgio De Maria 1631492292 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.72 1977
author: Giorgio De Maria
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29406 To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, critically acclaimed French writer Hervé Guibert has created an unnervingly intimate novel about an imaginative and vital young man confronting the ominous spectre of AIDS in his life. Le Nouvel Observateur calls it "a masterpiece."

Written in the form of a journal, this novel offen both an unflinchingly honest examination of daily life under a death sentence, and the impact of the disease on a group of gifted and artistic people—a circle of French artists and intellectuals spinning out of control in shared fear and uncertainty, discovering that talent and genus offer little solace: Muzil, the brilliant young philosopher whose dangerous underground exploits have life-and-death consequences; Marine, the eccentric and unreliable movie star who uses her jet-set life as an escape from reality; Muzil's friends and lovers, who attempt to salvage the groundbreaking texts that Muzil is both furiously churning out and trying to destroy before his death; and the narrator himself, who, upon discovering that he is also infected with the virus, runs from doctor to doctor, searching for answers, terrified and yet fascinated by the changes he and his friends are undergoing.

The world of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life is not merely one in which AIDS has suddenly appeared, it is a place where intellect and creativity, sexuality and friendship, responsibility and continuity—whether they ultimately help or fail—are the only things worth fighting for.]]> 240 Hervé Guibert 1852423285 ��ü���� 3 4.01 1990
author: Hervé Guibert
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/10
date added: 2023/10/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 53308766 352 Mircea Cărtărescu 0241448913 ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 4.09 1989
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/10
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 36001031 276 Ken Greenhall 1943910871 ��ü���� 3 3.48 1981
author: Ken Greenhall
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1981
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/05
date added: 2023/10/05
shelves:
review:

]]> 65923975

Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language, presided over by the village mayor.
Brimming with Mathias Enard's characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger's Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess - and a paradoxically macabre paean to life's inexhaustible richness.]]> 496 Mathias Énard 1804270598 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.75 2020
author: Mathias Énard
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 20821221 A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding��of Stalin and his world

It has the quality of myth: A poor cobbler’s son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a revolutionary and finds a leadership role within a small group of marginal zealots. When the old world is unexpectedly brought down in a total war, the band seizes control of the country, and the new regime it founds as the vanguard of a new world order is ruthlessly dominated from within by the former seminarian until he stands as the absolute ruler of a vast and terrible state apparatus, with dominion over Eurasia. But the largest country in the world is also a poor and backward one, far behind the great capitalist countries in industrial and military power, encircled on all sides. Shortly after seizing total power, Stalin conceives of the largest program of social reengineering ever attempted: the root-and-branch uprooting and collectivization of agriculture and industry across the entire Soviet Union. To stand up to the capitalists he will force into being an industrialized, militarized, collectivized great power is an act of will. Millions will die, and many more will suffer, but Stalin will push through to the end against all resistance and doubts. Where did such power come from? We think we know the story well. Remarkably, Stephen Kotkin’s epic new biography shows us how much we still have to learn.

The product of a decade of scrupulous and intrepid research, Stalin contains a host of astonishing revelations. Kotkin gives an intimate first-ever view of the Bolshevik regime’s inner geography, bringing to the fore materials from Soviet military intelligence and the secret police. He details Stalin’s invention of a fabricated trial and mass executions as early as 1918, the technique he would later impose across the whole country. The book places Stalin’s momentous decision for collectivization more deeply than ever in the tragic history of imperial Russia. Above all, Kotkin offers a convincing portrait and explanation of Stalin’s monstrous power and of Russian power in the world. Stalin restores a sense of surprise to the way we think about the former Soviet Union, revolution, dictatorship, the twentieth century, and indeed the art of history itself.
]]> 976 Stephen Kotkin 1594203792 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.94
author: Stephen Kotkin
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 25853040 Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love is one of the funniest, sharpest novels about love and growing up ever written.

“Obsessed with sex!�� said Jassy, “there’s nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I’m a pygmalionist.��

In the end we got more information out of a book called Ducks and Duck Breeding.

“Ducks can only copulate,�� said Linda, after studying this for a while, “in running water. Good luck to them.��

Oh, the tedium of waiting to grow up! Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny are on the lookout for the perfect lover.

But finding Mr Right is much harder than any of the sisters had thought. Linda must suffer marriage first to a stuffy Tory MP and then to a handsome and humourless communist, before finding real love in war-torn Paris…]]> 205 Nancy Mitford 0241974682 ��ü���� 5 upper-class-twits 3.99 1945
author: Nancy Mitford
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1945
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/23
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves: upper-class-twits
review:

]]> 51595 176 Dennis Cooper 0802135803 ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 4.04 1997
author: Dennis Cooper
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/13
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 2195121 208 Dennis Cooper 1852423730 ��ü���� 5 3.39 1994
author: Dennis Cooper
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/11
date added: 2023/09/11
shelves:
review:

]]> 17675316
This visually exciting musical genre, known for its extreme views and actions, have finally breached the mainstream in televised parodies and bestselling publications by Vice and Feral House. Despite a history of criminal actions, black metal has become Norway’s biggest cultural export, earning it support from the government itself.

Spanning 600 pages, Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult traces the progress of the genre, from its infancy in the early 1980s to today’s scene. Combining dozens of interviews with iconic photographs, this epic tome examines the artistic, musical, spiritual development of this controversial genre. Included are interviews with:

Venom �� Mercyful Fate �� Bathory �� Hellhammer �� Celtic Frost �� Sodom �� Slayer �� Kreator �� Destruction �� Vulcano �� Sarcofago �� Blasphemy �� Samael �� Rotting Christ �� Necromantia �� VON �� Tormentor �� Master’s Hammer �� Beherit �� Mayhem �� Vomit �� Thorns �� Darkthrone �� Burzum �� Thou Shalt Suffer �� Emperor �� Gehenna �� Gorgoroth �� Trelldom �� Cradle of Filth �� Dimmu Borgir �� Mütiilation �� Vlad Tepes �� Belketre and the Black Legions �� Dissection �� Watain �� Marduk and Funeral Mist �� Shining �� Graveland �� Infernum �� Behemoth �� Enslaved �� Satryricon �� Isengard/Storm �� Ulver �� Windir �� Negura Bunget �� Hades �� Primordial �� Arcturus �� Manes �� In the Woods �� Ved Buens Ende �� Fleurety �� Sigh �� Dødheimsgard �� Mysticum �� Aborym �� Blacklodge �� Amesoeurs/Alcest �� Fen �� Wolves in the Throne Room, Lifelover

Alongside band interviews, Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult includes exclusive interviews with:

Adam ‘Nergal�� Darski (Behemoth)
Alan ‘AA Nemtheanga�� Averill (Primordial)
Attila Csihar (Mayhem / Tormentor)
Benny ‘Cerastes�� (Mysticum)
Christophe Szpajdel (Designer for Emperor, Graveland etc)
Conrad ‘Cronos�� Lant (Venom)
Dani Filth (Cradle Of Filth)
Edmond ‘Hupogrammos�� Karban (Negura Bunget)
Eirik ‘Pytten�� Hundvin (Producer for Emperor, Gorgoroth, Mayhem)
Fabban ‘Malfeitor�� (Aborym)
Frank ‘The Watcher�� Allain (Fen)
František Štorm (Master’s Hammer)
George ‘Magus Daoloth�� Zacharopoulos (Rotting Christ / Necromantia)
Gerald ‘Black Winds�� (Blasphemy)
Greg ‘Damien�� Moffit (Cradle Of Filth)
Gylve ‘Fenriz�� Nagell (Darkthrone / Dødheimsgard / Isengard / Storm)
Hans ‘Mortuus�� Rostén (Marduk / Funeral Mist)
Håvard ‘Mortiis�� Ellefsen(Emperor)
Ian ‘Tjodalv�� Åkesson (Dimmu Borgir)
Ivar Bjørnson (Enslaved)
Jarle ‘Hvall�� Kvåle (Windir / Vreid)
Jason ‘Venien�� Ventura (VON)
Jon ‘Metallion�� Kristiansen (Slayer Mag / Head Not Found Records)
Jonas ‘B�� Bergqvist (Lifelover)
Jonas Åkerlund (Bathory)
Jørn ‘Necrobutcher�� Stubberud (Mayhem / Kvikksølvguttene)
Jorn Tunsberg (Old Funeral / Immortal / Hades)
Kai ‘Trym�� Mosaker (Emperor / Enslaved)
Kim ��( )�� Carlsson(Lifelover)
Kim ‘King Diamond�� Petersen (Mercyful Fate)
Kjetil ‘Manheim�� (Mayhem)
Kjetil Grutle (Enslaved)
Kristian ‘Gaahl�� Espedal (Trelldom / Gorgoroth / Gaahlskag)
Kristoffer ‘Garm�� Rygg (Arcturus / Ulver)
Lee Barrett (Candlelight Records)
Marko ‘Holocausto�� Laiho (Beherit)
Michael ‘Vorph�� Locher (Samael)
Mikko Aspa (Clandestine Blaze)
Mirai Kawashima (Sigh)
Morgan ‘Evil�� Hakkansson (Marduk / Abruptum)
Niklas Kvarforth (Shining)
Ole ‘Apollyon�� Moe (Aura Noir / Dødheimsgard / Immortal)
Paul Ryan (Cradle Of Filth)
Peter Tagtgren (Producer for Dimmu Borgir, Marduk)
Preben ‘Prime Evil�� (Mysticum, Aborym)
Rob ‘Darken�� Fudali (Graveland / Infernum)
Robin ‘Graves�� Eaglestone (Cradle Of Filth)
Robin ‘Mean�� Malmberg (Mysticum)
Roger ‘Infernus�� Tiegs (Gorgoroth / Borknagar)
Rune ‘Blasphemer�� Eriksen (Mayhem / Aura Noir)
Saint Vincent (Blacklodge)
Sakis Tolis (Rotting Christ)
Shawn ‘Goat�� Calizo (VON)
Simen ‘ICS Vortex�� Hestnæs (Arcturus / Dimmu Borgir)
Snorre Ruch (Stigma Diabolicum / Thorns / Mayhem)
Steffen ‘Dolgar�� Simestad (Gehenna)
Svein Egil Hatlevik (Fleurety / Dødheimsgard)
Sven ‘Silenoz�� Kopperud (Dimmu Borgir)
Sven-Erik ‘Maniac�� Kristiansen (Mayhem)
Terje ‘Tchort�� Vik Schei (Emperor / Carpathian Forest)
Thomas ‘Pest�� Kronenes (Gorgoroth)
Tom ‘King�� Visnes (Gorgoroth / Ov Hell)
Tom ‘Warrior�� Fischer (Hellhammer / Celtic Frost)
Tomas ‘Samoth�� Haugen (Thou Shalt Suffer / Emperor)
Tor-Helge ‘Cernunnus�� Skei (Manes)
Vegard ‘Ihsahn�� Tveiten (Emperor / Thou Shalt Suffer)
Ville ‘Shatraug�� Pystynen (Horna / Behexen)
Willy ‘Meyhna’ch�� Rousell (Mutiilation)
Yusaf ‘Vicotnik�� Parvez (Dødheimsgard)
Zhema Rodero (Vulcano)

Dayal Patterson has been following the black metal scene since the mid-1990s and writes and photographs for Metal Hammer and Record Collector magazines, and also contributes to The Quietus, Terrorizer and Classic Rock Presents, as well as writing biographies and liner notes for Marduk and Killing Joke.]]> 560 Dayal Patterson 1936239752 ��ü���� 4 4.28 2013
author: Dayal Patterson
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/06
date added: 2023/09/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 19243059
Spanning the decades from the 1940s onward, this collection of vibrant writing documents the many eras and shifts of attitude that have affected the gay and lesbian leather underground, and its influence on the society beyond.]]> 0 Mark Thompson 1938884000 ��ü���� 0 currently-reading 4.34 1991
author: Mark Thompson
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 227254 336 James Greer 0802170137 ��ü���� 4 3.89 2005
author: James Greer
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/06
date added: 2023/09/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 563730 131 Dennis Cooper 080213212X ��ü���� 5 3.65 1989
author: Dennis Cooper
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/05
date added: 2023/09/05
shelves:
review:

]]> 1147025
Maurice is heartbroken over unrequited love, which opened his heart and mind to his own sexual identity. In order to be true to himself, he goes against the grain of society’s often unspoken rules of class, wealth, and politics.
Forster understood that his homage to same-sex love, if published when he completed it in 1914, would probably end his career. Thus, Maurice languished in a drawer for fifty-seven years, the author requesting it be published only after his death (along with his stories about homosexuality later collected in The Life to Come).
Since its release in 1971, Maurice has been widely read and praised. It has been, and continues to be, adapted for major stage productions, including the 1987 Oscar-nominated film adaptation starring Hugh Grant and James Wilby.]]> 222 E.M. Forster 0140180826 ��ü���� 4 4.13 1971
author: E.M. Forster
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 17790249 Librarian's Note: this is an alternate cover edition - ISBN 13: 9780141180311

Since the original pre-war translation, there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic and lucid Proust. "In Search of Lost Time" is one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is the Penguin Proust that makes Proust accessible to a new generation. Each volume is translated by a different, superb translator working under the general editorship of Professor Christopher Prendergast, University of Cambridge.]]> 489 Marcel Proust ��ü���� 5 4.28 1913
author: Marcel Proust
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1913
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/30
date added: 2023/08/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 23345063 96 Muriel Spark ��ü���� 3 3.27 1971
author: Muriel Spark
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.27
book published: 1971
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/30
date added: 2023/08/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 37506059
Robert Pollard has been a staple of the indie rock scene since the early '80s, along with his band Guided By Voices. Pollard was a longtime grade school teacher who toiled endlessly on his music, finding success only after adopting a do-it-yourself approach, relying on lo-fi home recordings for much of his and his band's career. A prolific artist, Pollard continues to churn out album after album, much to the acclaim of critics and his obsessive and devoted fans. But his story has never been faithfully told in its entirety. Until now.

Author Matthew Cutter is a longtime friend of Pollard and, with Pollard's blessing, he's set out to tell the whole, true story of Guided By Voices. Closer You Are is the first book to take an in-depth look at the man behind it all, with interviews conducted by the author with Pollard's friends, family, and bandmates, along with unfettered access to Pollard himself and his extensive archives.

Robert Pollard has had an amazing and seemingly endless career in rock music, but he's also established himself as a consummate artist who works on his own terms. Now fans can at long last learn the full story behind one of America's greatest living songwriters.]]> 368 Matthew Cutter 0306825767 ��ü���� 0 4.04
author: Matthew Cutter
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/02
date added: 2023/08/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 57223333 Variations is the debut short story collection from one of Britain's most compelling voices, Juliet Jacques. Using fiction inspired by found material and real-life events, Variations explores the history of transgender Britain with lyrical, acerbic wit. Variations travels from Oscar Wilde's London to austerity-era Belfast via inter-war Cardiff, a drag bar in Liverpool just after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, Manchester's protests against Clause 28, and Brighton in the 2000s. Through diary entries of an illicit love affair, an oral history of a contemporary political collective; a 1920s academic paper to a 1990s film script; a 1950s memoir to a series of 2014 blog posts, Jacques rewrites and reinvigorates a history so often relegated to stale police records and sensationalist news headlines. Innovative and fresh, Variations is a bold and beautiful book of stories unheard; until now.]]> 323 Juliet Jacques 1910312770 ��ü���� 0 to-read 4.03 2021
author: Juliet Jacques
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28377 245 Boris Vian 1564782999 ��ü���� 4 4.07 1953
author: Boris Vian
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/07/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 35272896 "On the Edge of Reason is one of the great European novels of the first half of the twentieth century �� and Krleza's themes, his seriousness, his protest against the normality of delusion and cruelty, could hardly be more relevant to the century's��end."��
—Susan Sontag

During his long and distinguished career, the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza (1893-1981) battled against many forms of tyranny. In��On the Edge of Reason, his protagonist is a middle-aged lawyer whose life and career have been eminently respectable and respected. One evening, at a party attended by the local elite, he inadvertently blurts out an honest thought. From this moment, all hell breaks loose....��On the Edge of Reason��reveals the fundamental chasm between conformity and individuality. As folly piles on folly, hypocrisy on hypocrisy, reason itself begins to give way, and the edge between reality and unreality disappears.]]> 168 Miroslav Krleža 0811226484 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.76 1938
author: Miroslav Krleža
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 9484 Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention—Albertine, “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.��

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).]]> 749 Marcel Proust 0375752196 ��ü���� 0 4.39 1919
author: Marcel Proust
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1919
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 13614619
Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story of life on the plains. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, 'a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself'.]]> 174 Gerald Murnane 1921922273 ��ü���� 5 3.85 1982
author: Gerald Murnane
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/03
date added: 2023/05/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 8249770 ��
Mahler’s coming-of-age began with such 1960s phenomena as Leonard Bernstein’s boxed set of his symphonies and Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, which used Mahler’s music in its sound track. But that was just the first in a series of waves that established Mahler not just as a great composer but also as an oracle with a personal message for every listener. There are now almost two thousand recordings of his music, which has become an irresistible launchpad for young maestros such as Gustavo Dudamel.
��
Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does?
��
Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life. Pacing out his every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times. Mahler was—along with Picasso, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce—a maker of our modern world.
��
“Mahler dealt with issues I could recognize,�� writes Lebrecht, “with racism, workplace�� chaos, social conflict, relationship breakdown, alienation, depression, and the limitations of medical knowledge.�� Why Mahler? is a book that shows how music can change our lives.]]> 336 Norman Lebrecht 0375423818 ��ü���� 3 3.66 2010
author: Norman Lebrecht
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/01
date added: 2023/05/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 42427799
Gerald Murnane, now in his eightieth year, began his writing career as a poet. After many years as a writer of fiction, he only returned to poetry a few years ago when he moved to Goroke, in the Western Districts of Victoria, after the death of his wife. The forty-five poems collected here are in a strikingly different mode to his fiction �� without framing or digressions, and with very few images, they speak openly to the reader of the author’s memories, beliefs and experiences. They are for this reason an important addition to his internationally recognised body of fiction, most recently Border Districts and Collected Short Fiction, published by Giramondo.

The poems include tributes to his mother and father and to his family, and to places that have played a formative role in his life, like Gippsland, Bendigo, Warrnambool, the Western Districts, and of course Goroke. Especially moving are his poems dedicated to authors who have influenced him �� Lesbia Harford and Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Henry Handel Richardson, Marcel Proust, and with particular force, the eighteenth-century poet John Clare, who gives the collection its title, revered ‘not only for his writings / but for his losing his reason when / he was forced from the district he had wanted as his for life.’]]> 104 Gerald Murnane 1925336980 ��ü���� 3 3.53
author: Gerald Murnane
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.53
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/10
date added: 2023/04/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 25037529 272 Vladimir Nabokov 0140187324 ��ü���� 5 3.67 1929
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/06
date added: 2023/04/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 28086071 93 Muriel Spark 178211761X ��ü���� 4 3.48 1974
author: Muriel Spark
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/27
date added: 2023/03/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 45481131 Stories of a young man finding his place among family and community in Houston, from a powerful, emerging American voice.

In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.

This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston's myriad neighborhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman's affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.]]> 222 Bryan Washington 1786497840 ��ü���� 3 3.72 2019
author: Bryan Washington
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/23
date added: 2023/03/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 14555355 205 Gerald Murnane 1920882855 ��ü���� 5 3.96 2012
author: Gerald Murnane
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/23
date added: 2023/03/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 1602620 342 Fernando Pessoa 0802116949 ��ü���� 4 4.29
author: Fernando Pessoa
name: ��ü����
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/04
date added: 2023/03/04
shelves:
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]]> 36474119
Conceived as Gerald Murnane’s last work of fiction, Border Districts was written after the author moved from Melbourne to a small town on the western edge of the Wimmera plains, near the border with South Australia. The narrator of this fiction has made a similar move, from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is a time for exploring the enduring elements of his experience, as these exist in his mind, images whose persistence is assured, but whose significance needs to be rediscovered.

Readers of Murnane’s earlier work will recognise some of these images: the dark-haired young woman at a window; the ancestral house set in grasslands; coloured glass, marbles, goldfish, the outfits of jockeys. Murnane’s images often draw their power from the light that falls upon them from a distant or mysterious source. But he also considers the possibility that the mind casts its own light, imbuing the images in the observer’s mind with the colours of his soul.

As Murnane’s narrator declares, ‘the mind is a place best viewed from borderlands��. In this work, Border Districts also refers to the border country between life and death; and there is another meaning, in the narrator’s discovery of others who might share his world, even though they enter it from a different direction, across the border districts which separate, or unite, two human beings.]]> 164 Gerald Murnane 1925336549 ��ü���� 5 3.71 2017
author: Gerald Murnane
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/04
date added: 2023/03/04
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]]> 61889840
Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier's The Birthday Party is a deft unravelling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.]]> 504 Laurent Mauvignier 1804270229 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.75 2020
author: Laurent Mauvignier
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 17674987 Eminent Hipsters, musician and songwriter Donald Fagen, best known as the co-founder of the rock band Steely Dan, presents an autobiographical portrait that touches on everything from the cultural figures that mattered the most to him as a teenager, to his years in the late 1960s at Bard College, to a hilarious account of a recent tour he made with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald.





Fagen begins by introducing the 'eminent hipsters' that spoke to him as he was growing up (and desperately yearning to be hip) in suburban New Jersey in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The figures who influenced him most were not the typical ones �� Miles Davis, say, or Jack Kerouac �� but rather people like Jean Shepherd, whose manic, acidic nightly radio broadcasts out of WOR-Radio had a tough realism about life and ‘enthralled a generation of alienated young people��; Henry Mancini, whose chilled-out, nourish soundtracks, especially to films by Blake Edwards utilised the unconventional, spare instrumentation associated with the cool jazz school; and Mort Fega, the laid back, knowledgeable all night jazz man at WEVD, who was like ‘the cool uncle you always wished you had��. He writes of how, growing up as a Cold War baby, one of his primary doors of escape became reading science fiction by such authors as Philip K. Dick, and of his regular trips into New York City to hear jazz. Other emblematic musical heroes Fagen writes about include Ray Charles, Ike Turner, and the Boswell Sisters, a trio from the 1920s and 30s whose subversive musical genius included trick phrasing and way out harmony.





‘Class of ��69�� recounts Fagen’s colourful tumultuous years at Bard College, the progressive university north of New York City that attracted a strange mix of applicants, including ‘desperate suburban misfits with impressive verbal skills but appalling high school records�� (like himself). It was at Bard that Fagen first met Walter Becker, with whom he would later form Steely Dan. The final section of the book, ‘With the Dukes of September��, offers a day-by-day account of a tour Fagen undertook last summer across America with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald, performing a programme of old R&B and soul tunes as well as some of each of their own hits. Told in a weary, cranky, occasionally biting and always entertaining voice, Fagen brings to life the ups and downs and various indignities and anxieties of being on the road �� The Dukes were an admittedly ‘low-rent operation�� compared to a Steely Dan tour �� as well as communicating the challenges and joy of playing every night to a different crowd in a different city.]]> 176 Donald Fagen 0670025518 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.48 2013
author: Donald Fagen
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6526505 192 Muriel Spark 0094696608 ��ü���� 4 3.81 1990
author: Muriel Spark
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/23
date added: 2023/01/23
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]]> 51587 The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.]]> 263 Dennis Cooper 0786716746 ��ü���� 5 3.79 2004
author: Dennis Cooper
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/22
date added: 2023/01/22
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]]> 57951419
But Father, Juichiro, is worried about the bomb. He writes letters to Krushev, trying to warn everyone he can of the terrible threat. After all, humans may be terribly flawed, but aren't they worth saving? He sends out a coded message in the newspaper to find other aliens. But there are other extra-terrestrials out there, ones who do not look so kindly on the flaws and foibles of humans. And a charming young man, who claims to be from Venus too, tempts the daughter Akiko away from the family...]]> 234 Yukio Mishima 0241545560 ��ü���� 3 3.18 1962
author: Yukio Mishima
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.18
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/22
date added: 2023/01/22
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]]> 1292015 236 Manuel Puig 0394746643 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.79 1979
author: Manuel Puig
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59793324 Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.

In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader’s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In “A First-Rate Material��, Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can’t stand the conventional use of deceased people’s bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. “Lovers on the Breeze�� is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child’s bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. “Eating the City�� explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while “Hatchling�� closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in.

In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.]]> 256 Sayaka Murata 0802159583 ��ü���� 0 to-read 3.76 2019
author: Sayaka Murata
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 178572 252 Barbara Pym 1559212640 ��ü���� 3 3.95 1950
author: Barbara Pym
name: ��ü����
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1950
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/07
date added: 2023/01/07
shelves:
review:

]]>