Guada's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 25 Apr 2025 11:18:57 -0700 60 Guada's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Wild Dark Shore 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Guada 0 to-read 4.27 2025 Wild Dark Shore
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Guada
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> All the Water in the World 211003759 In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

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

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most � love and work, community and knowledge � will survive.]]> 304 Eiren Caffall 1250353521 Guada 0 to-read 3.56 2025 All the Water in the World
author: Eiren Caffall
name: Guada
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3)]]> 7260188 My name is Katniss Everdeen.
Why am I not dead?
I should be dead.

Katniss Everdeen, girl on fire, has survived, even though her home has been destroyed. Gale has escaped. Katniss's family is safe. Peeta has been captured by the Capitol. District 13 really does exist. There are rebels. There are new leaders. A revolution is unfolding.

It is by design that Katniss was rescued from the arena in the cruel and haunting Quarter Quell, and it is by design that she has long been part of the revolution without knowing it. District 13 has come out of the shadows and is plotting to overthrow the Capitol. Everyone, it seems, has had a hand in the carefully laid plans—except Katniss.

The success of the rebellion hinges on Katniss's willingness to be a pawn, to accept responsibility for countless lives, and to change the course of the future of Panem. To do this, she must put aside her feelings of anger and distrust. She must become the rebels' Mockingjay—no matter what the personal cost.]]> 390 Suzanne Collins 0439023513 Guada 5 4.10 2010 Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Guada
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/17
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: 2021-reads, favorites, to-buy, currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)]]> 6148028 Sparks are igniting.
Flames are spreading.
And the Capitol wants revenge.

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the Hunger Games. She and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark are miraculously still alive. Katniss should be relieved, happy even. After all, she has returned to her family and her longtime friend, Gale. Yet nothing is the way Katniss wishes it to be. Gale holds her at an icy distance. Peeta has turned his back on her completely. And there are whispers of a rebellion against the Capitol—a rebellion that Katniss and Peeta may have helped create.

Much to her shock, Katniss has fueled an unrest that she's afraid she cannot stop. And what scares her even more is that she's not entirely convinced she should try. As time draws near for Katniss and Peeta to visit the districts on the Capitol's cruel Victory Tour, the stakes are higher than ever. If they can't prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are lost in their love for each other, the consequences will be horrifying.

In Catching Fire, the second novel of the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins continues the story of Katniss Everdeen, testing her more than ever before . . . and surprising readers at every turn.]]> 391 Suzanne Collins 0439023491 Guada 5 4.34 2009 Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Guada
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: 2021-reads, favorites, to-buy, 2025-reads
review:

]]> <![CDATA[SMiLE: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Brian Wilson]]> 208678400 352 David Leaf 1915841313 Guada 0 to-read 4.17 SMiLE: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Brian Wilson
author: David Leaf
name: Guada
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Talent 214151429 Hollywood Wives meets A Visit from the Goon Squad in this emotional debut novel from Variety chief correspondent and a moderator of the Actors on Actors series about a group of actresses confronting their careers, their secrets, and each other throughout one turbulent awards season.

As Hollywood prepares for its most glamorous evening, five actresses compete to see who will claim the top prize.

Adria, a dignified and highly regarded grand dame of the movie industry, is intent on cementing her legacy as one of the greatest thespians of all time, even as the younger generation creeps up quickly behind her. Bitty must keep a nervous breakdown—and an increasingly debilitating alcohol addiction—at bay, as she searches for genuine closeness in an unforgiving landscape. Contessa, a former child star, is determined to make the world, and her leading man, take her seriously. Davina attempts to find her footing in superficial Los Angeles, a far cry from her roots as a serious London stage actress. And Jenny—always the underdog to her rival, Adria—sees this awards season as her personal redemption, a chance to atone for past mistakes and make up for missed opportunities.

With humor, wit, and an insider’s insight, The Talent peels back the layers of women who are in the business of being perceived. And while they work to push their careers forward and maintain the public’s goodwill, all five are forced to confront truths about themselves that they would rather Could Adria and Jenny have been a team all these years, rather than bitter enemies? Is it their responsibility to offer a lifeline to poor Bitty, who is clearly teetering on the edge? Should Contessa and Davina dim their own rising stars to make those around them more comfortable? What do women in the spotlight owe each other, and themselves?]]> 336 Daniel D'Addario 1668075474 Guada 0 to-read 3.07 2025 The Talent
author: Daniel D'Addario
name: Guada
average rating: 3.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)]]> 2767052
Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun. . . .

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.]]> 374 Suzanne Collins Guada 5 4.34 2008 The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Guada
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: 2021-reads, favorites, to-buy, 2025-reads
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)]]> 195820807
Emma hadn't planned that her next assignment as a traveling nurse would be in Minnesota, but she and her best friend agree that dating Justin is too good of an opportunity to pass up, especially when they get to rent an adorable cottage on a private island on Lake Minnetonka.

It's supposed to be a quick fling, just for the summer. But when Emma's toxic mother shows up and Justin has to assume guardianship of his three siblings, they're suddenly navigating a lot more than they expected--including catching real feelings for each other. What if this time Fate has actually brought the perfect pair together?]]> 432 Abby Jimenez 1538704439 Guada 3 2025-reads *2.5 maybe 4.35 2024 Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Guada
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: 2025-reads
review:
*2.5 maybe
]]> The Mismeasure of Man 54218 The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve.

How smart are you? If that question doesn't spark a dozen more questions in your mind (like "What do you mean by 'smart,'" "How do I measure it" and "Who's asking?"), then The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould's masterful demolition of the IQ industry, should be required reading. Gould's brilliant, funny, engaging prose dissects the motivations behind those who would judge intelligence, and hence worth, by cranial size, convolutions, or score on extremely narrow tests. How did scientists decide that intelligence was unipolar and quantifiable? Why did the standard keep changing over time? Gould's answer is clear and simple: power maintains itself. European men of the 19th century, even before Darwin, saw themselves as the pinnacle of creation and sought to prove this assertion through hard measurement. When one measure was found to place members of some "inferior" group such as women or Southeast Asians over the supposedly rightful champions, it would be discarded and replaced with a new, more comfortable measure. The 20th-century obsession with numbers led to the institutionalization of IQ testing and subsequent assignment to work (and rewards) commensurate with the score, shown by Gould to be not simply misguided--for surely intelligence is multifactorial--but also regressive, creating a feedback loop rewarding the rich and powerful. The revised edition includes a scathing critique of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, taking them to task for rehashing old arguments to exploit a new political wave of uncaring belt tightening. It might not make you any smarter, but The Mismeasure of Man will certainly make you think.--Rob Lightner

This edition is revised and expanded, with a new introduction]]> 446 Stephen Jay Gould 0393314251 Guada 0 to-read 4.06 1982 The Mismeasure of Man
author: Stephen Jay Gould
name: Guada
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Library at Mount Char 26892110
After all, she was a normal American herself, once.

That was a long time ago, of course—before the time she calls “adoption day,� when she and a dozen other children found themselves being raised by a man they learned to call Father.

Father could do strange things. He could call light from darkness. Sometimes he raised the dead. And when he was disobeyed, the consequences were terrible.

In the years since Father took her in, Carolyn hasn't gotten out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father's ancient Pelapi customs. They've studied the books in his library and learned some of the secrets behind his equally ancient power.

Sometimes, they've wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God.

Now, Father is missing. And if God truly is dead, the only thing that matters is who will inherit his library—and with it, power over all of creation.

As Carolyn gathers the tools she needs for the battle to come, fierce competitors for this prize align against her.

But Carolyn can win. She's sure of it. What she doesn't realize is that her victory may come at an unacceptable price—because in becoming a God, she's forgotten a great deal about being human.]]> 390 Scott Hawkins 0553418629 Guada 3 2025-reads 4.06 2015 The Library at Mount Char
author: Scott Hawkins
name: Guada
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: 2025-reads
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Say You'll Remember Me (Say You'll Remember Me, #1)]]> 216437557 disastrously close. A gorgeous veterinarian giving Greek god vibes—all while cuddling a tiny kitten? Immediately yes. That is until Xavier opens his mouth and proves that even sculpted gods can say the absolute wrong thing. Like, really wrong. Of course, there’s nothing Samantha loves more than proving an asshole wrong�

. . . unless, of course, he can admit he made a mistake. But after one incredible and seemingly endless date—possibly the best in living history—Samantha is forced to admit the truth, that her family is in crisis and any kind of relationship would be impossible. Samantha begs Xavier to forget her. To remember their night together as a perfect moment, as crushing as that may be.

Only no amount of distance or time is nearly enough to forget that something between them. And the only thing better than one single perfect memory is to make a life—and even a love—worth remembering.]]> 416 Abby Jimenez 0349442827 Guada 0 to-read 4.12 2025 Say You'll Remember Me (Say You'll Remember Me, #1)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Guada
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma]]> 18693771 A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world's foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers' capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain's natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk's own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.]]> 464 Bessel van der Kolk 0670785938 Guada 0 4.36 2014 The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
author: Bessel van der Kolk
name: Guada
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: psych-true-crime-criminology, currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Under the Storm (Hallandssviten, #1)]]> 165940203 A farmhouse mysteriously goes up in flames with someone trapped inside and a community is never the same in the aftermath—both a page-turning whodunit and a deeply touching coming-of-age story by one of Sweden’s top criminologists and “a rising star in Scandinavian crime fiction� ( Reviews)

On a cold November night in rural Sweden, a farmhouse burns to the ground. Inside, a young woman is found dead—murdered. To the people of Marbäck, the fire becomes a before and after. For ten-year-old Isak, it sets in motion something he cannot control, igniting his future into an inferno.

The police immediately focus their attention on Edvard, the boyfriend of the murdered woman and Isak’s beloved uncle. After a quick investigation, Edvard is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, and Marbäck believes it can return to its innocence. Vidar, the rookie officer who first responded to the fire, prides himself on having helped solve the murder. Little does he know this will become the defining case of his career and that it will drive him to the brink of professional and personal disaster—and link his fate to young Isak’s.

A celebrated professor of criminology, Christoffer Carlsson digs deep into the psyches of ordinary people and shows how one crime can haunt a community for decades. A #1 international bestseller, Under the Storm is already a modern classic of Scandinavian crime fiction and shows why many regard Carlsson as one of the great crime writers of his generation.]]> 416 Christoffer Carlsson 059344938X Guada 0 to-read 3.65 2019 Under the Storm (Hallandssviten, #1)
author: Christoffer Carlsson
name: Guada
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Sisters 217387701 An addictively entertaining, internationally bestselling family saga by a National Book Award finalist.

Meet the Mikkola Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger.

Ina meets her future husband when she’s dragged to a New Year’s rave by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress. And Anastasia runs off to Tunisia, where she falls in love with a woman who, years later, will transform her life.

Following the sisters from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. Over the course of three decades, his life intersects with the sisters, from a chance encounter in Tunis to the scene of a fighter jet crash in Stockholm. When Evelyn disappears on a trip to New York, Jonas manages to track her down—and helps her to break the curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for decades. In the process, a shocking revelation changes everything about who they think they are.

Narrated in six parts, each spanning a period ranging from a year to a day to a single minute, Jonas Hassen Khemiri's The Sisters is a big, vivid family saga of the highest order and an addictively entertaining tour de force.]]> 656 Jonas Hassen Khemiri 0374618895 Guada 0 to-read 4.20 2023 The Sisters
author: Jonas Hassen Khemiri
name: Guada
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Colony 214203940 A mega best-seller in Sweden, with rights sold to over a dozen countries and a TV adaptation underway, Annika Norlin’s debut novel The Colony is the biggest Swedish literary phenomenon since Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove. Ěý

Winner of the Vi Literature Award and Swedish Radio’s Novel Prize, two of Sweden’s biggest literary awards, The Colony is a gripping portrayal of contemporary society and its alternatives.Ěý

Burnt-out from a demanding job and a bustling life in the city, Emelie has left town to spend a few days in the country. Once there, in the peaceful, verdant hills, down by the river she encounters a mysterious group of seven people, each with personal stories full of pain, alienation, and the longing to live differently. They are misfits, each in their own way, and all led by the enigmatic and charismatic Sara.Ěý

How did they end up there? Are they content with the rigid roles they’ve been assigned? And what happens when an outsider appears and is initially drawn to their alternative lifestyle but cannot help but stir things up?Ěý

A masterful blend of humor, emotion, unforgettable characters, and sharp social commentary, The Colony is a magnetic and deeply touching story about love, community, and the unfathomable power we other others and that others have over us.Ěý±Ő±Ő> 464 Annika Norlin Guada 0 to-read 4.04 2023 The Colony
author: Annika Norlin
name: Guada
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace]]> 6916961 ±á˛ą°ů±č±đ°ů’s magazine in the â€�90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.â€�

°Őłó±đ˛ÔĚýRolling StoneĚýsent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour forĚýInfinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectationâ€�). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt aboutĚýInfinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.

A biography in five days,ĚýAlthough Of Course You End Up Becoming YourselfĚýis David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace.

Ěý±Ő±Ő> 320 David Lipsky 030759243X Guada 0 to-read 3.93 2010 Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
author: David Lipsky
name: Guada
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Golden Raven (All for the Game, #5)]]> 213726350 I do not care what they think of me. I can’t. It only matters that I play.

Jeremy Knox is no stranger to damage control, but his last season on an Exy court is off to a disastrous start. The relentless crusade against his newest teammate threatens the haven he and his friends have worked so hard to build. He promised Jean a fun senior year, but tragedy and ugly truths make every step forward an uphill fight.

Jean Moreau promised the USC Trojans a championship trophy, and he intends to deliver. Granted, it would be significantly easier if they’d slide off their high horses and throw a few elbows on the court. Their steadfast refusal to do things his way is nearly as aggravating as their unwanted affection, but maybe they’re not the ones that need to change.

With so many ready to drag him down, how can he learn to fly?]]> 484 Nora Sakavic Guada 4 2025-reads, favorites, to-buy 4.59 2025 The Golden Raven (All for the Game, #5)
author: Nora Sakavic
name: Guada
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: 2025-reads, favorites, to-buy
review:

]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

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

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Guada 4 2025-reads, favorites, to-buy 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Guada
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: 2025-reads, favorites, to-buy
review:
*4.5 or whatever the equivalent of a 5 star movie on letterboxd without a heart is
]]> <![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume I]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

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

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]> 160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 Guada 0 to-read 3.89 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I
author: Solvej Balle
name: Guada
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Vita Nostra (Vita Nostra, #1) 38633526
Our life is brief . . .

While vacationing at the beach with her mother, Sasha Samokhina meets the mysterious Farit Kozhennikov under the most peculiar circumstances. The teenage girl is powerless to refuse when this strange and unusual man with an air of the sinister directs her to perform a task with potentially scandalous consequences. He rewards her effort with a strange golden coin.

As the days progress, Sasha carries out other acts for which she receives more coins from Kozhennikov. As summer ends, her domineering mentor directs her to move to a remote village and use her gold to enter the Institute of Special Technologies. Though she does not want to go to this unknown town or school, she also feels it’s the only place she should be. Against her mother’s wishes, Sasha leaves behind all that is familiar and begins her education.

As she quickly discovers, the institute’s "special technologies" are unlike anything she has ever encountered. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their transgressions and failures; instead, their families pay a terrible price. Yet despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that defy the dictates of matter and time; experiences which are nothing she has ever dreamed of . . . and suddenly all she could ever want.

A complex blend of adventure, magic, science, and philosophy that probes the mysteries of existence, filtered through a distinct Russian sensibility, this astonishing work of speculative fiction—brilliantly translated by Julia Meitov Hersey—is reminiscent of modern classics such as Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Max Barry’s Lexicon, and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, but will transport them to a place far beyond those fantastical worlds.]]> 408 Marina Dyachenko 0062694596 Guada 0 to-read 4.00 2007 Vita Nostra (Vita Nostra, #1)
author: Marina Dyachenko
name: Guada
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Great Big Beautiful Life 218559595 Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.

Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years--or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.

When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.

One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.

Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication

Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.

But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.

And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.]]> 432 Emily Henry Guada 0 to-read 4.20 2025 Great Big Beautiful Life
author: Emily Henry
name: Guada
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Flowers for Algernon 18373 Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.
Ěý
Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence � a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?]]> 311 Daniel Keyes 015603008X Guada 3 4.19 1966 Flowers for Algernon
author: Daniel Keyes
name: Guada
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1966
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: classics, for-the-2022-rc, 2025-reads
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom]]> 214151420 From eldest daughter Shari Franke, the shocking true story behind the viral 8 Passengers family vlog and the hidden abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother, and how, in the face of unimaginable pain, she found freedom and healing.

Shari Franke’s childhood was a constant battle for survival. Her mother, Ruby Franke, enforced a severe moral code while maintaining a façade of a picture-perfect family for their wildly popular YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which documented the day-to-day life of raising six children for a staggering 2.5 million subscribers. But a darker truth lurked beneath the surface—Ruby’s wholesome online persona masked a more tyrannical parenting style than anyone could have imagined.

As the family’s YouTube notoriety grew, so too did Ruby’s delusions of righteousness. Fueled by the sadistic influence of relationship coach Jodi Hildebrandt, together they implemented an inhumane and merciless disciplinary regime.

Ruby and Jodi were arrested in Utah in 2023 on multiple charges of aggravated child abuse. On that fateful day, Shari shared a photo online of a police car outside their home. Her caption had one word: “Finally.�

For the first time, Shari will reveal the disturbing truth behind 8 Passengers and her family’s devastating involvement with Jodi Hildebrandt’s cultish life coaching program, “ConneXions.� No stone is left unturned as Shari exposes the perils of influencer culture and shares for the first time her battle for truth and survival in the face of her mother’s cruelty.]]> 320 Shari Franke 1668065398 Guada 0 2025-reads, to-buy 4.42 2025 The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom
author: Shari Franke
name: Guada
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025-reads, to-buy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[You Called an Ambulance for What?]]> 149108565
Between the obligatory stories of objects lodged in body cavities and grown men who can't look after themselves when their wives are away, Tim finds that the promised life-saving moments are far outweighed by the trivial, frustrating and bizarre ambulance callouts. He and his colleagues battle fatigue, abuse and burnout - treated with coffee, occasional moments of heroism, and a healthy dose of dark humour.

Told with cutting wit, pathos and disarming insight, You Called an Ambulance for What? is a comedic behind-the-sirens look at the challenges, absurdities and shocking reality of life as an Australian intensive care paramedic.]]> 258 Tim Booth Guada 2 2025-reads *2.5 3.93 You Called an Ambulance for What?
author: Tim Booth
name: Guada
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: 2025-reads
review:
*2.5
]]> Heartburn 225343
Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband, Mark, is in love with another woman. The fact that the other woman has "a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs" is no consolation. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel writes cookbooks for a living. And in between trying to win Mark back and loudly wishing him dead, Ephron's irrepressible heroine offers some of her favorite recipes. "Heartburn" is a sinfully delicious novel, as soul-satisfying as mashed potatoes and as airy as a perfect soufflé.]]> 179 Nora Ephron Guada 3 2025-reads 3.59 1983 Heartburn
author: Nora Ephron
name: Guada
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: 2025-reads
review:

]]> Autobiography of Red 61049 Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

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

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

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

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

National book Critics Circle Award Finalist]]> 160 Anne Carson 037570129X Guada 0 4.28 1998 Autobiography of Red
author: Anne Carson
name: Guada
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read, atw-challenge, classics
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas]]> 87262 The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is written as an autobiography, a chronicle of the erotic misadventures of its narrator, Brás Cubas--who happens to be dead. In pursuit of love and progeny, Cubas rejects the women who want him and aspires to the ones who reject him. In the end, he dies unloved and without heirs, yet he somehow manages to turn this bitter pill into a victory of sorts. What makes Memoirs stand up 100 years after the book was written is Machado's biting humor, brilliant prose, and profound understanding of all the vagaries of human behavior.]]> 240 Machado de Assis 0195101707 Guada 0 to-read, atw-challenge 3.97 1881 The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
author: Machado de Assis
name: Guada
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1881
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read, atw-challenge
review:

]]> Chess Story 59151
Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.

This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.]]> 104 Stefan Zweig 1590171691 Guada 0 to-read, atw-challenge 4.31 1942 Chess Story
author: Stefan Zweig
name: Guada
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1942
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read, atw-challenge
review:

]]> A Small Place 69711 A Small Place magnifies our vision of one small place with Swiftian wit and precision. Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay candidly appraises the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up, and makes palpable the impact of European colonization and tourism. The book is a missive to the traveler, whether American or European, who wants to escape the banality and corruption of some large place. Kincaid, eloquent and resolute, reminds us that the Antiguan people, formerly British subjects, are unable to escape the same drawbacks of their own tiny realm—that behind the benevolent Caribbean scenery are human lives, always complex and often fraught with injustice.]]> 81 Jamaica Kincaid 0374527075 Guada 0 to-read, atw-challenge 4.06 1988 A Small Place
author: Jamaica Kincaid
name: Guada
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read, atw-challenge
review:

]]> Out Stealing Horses 398323
Trond’s friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning would turn out to be different. What began as a joy ride on “borrowed� horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance of grief. Trond soon learns what befell Jon earlier that day—an incident that marks the beginning of a series of vital losses for both boys.

Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.]]> 258 Per Petterson Guada 0 to-read 3.79 2003 Out Stealing Horses
author: Per Petterson
name: Guada
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The A.B.C. Murders (Hercule Poirot, #13)]]> 16322
There's a serial killer on the loose. His macabre calling card is to leave the ABC Railway Guide beside each victim's body. But if A is for Alice Asher, bludgeoned to death in Andover, and B is for Betty Bernard, strangled with her belt on the beach at Bexhill, who will then be Victim C? More importantly, why is this happening?

Often considered to be one of Agatha Christie's best.

Librarian's note: the first fifteen novels in the Hercule Poirot series are 1) The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1920; 2) The Murder on the Links, 1923; 3) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926; 4) The Big Four, 1927; 5) The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928; 6) Peril at End House, 1932; 7) Lord Edgware Dies, 1933; 8) Murder on the Orient Express, 1934; 9) Three Act Tragedy, 1935; 10) Death in the Clouds, 1935; 11) The A.B.C. Murders, 1936; 12) Murder in Mesopotamia, 1936; 13) Cards on the Table, 1936; 14) Dumb Witness, 1937; and 15) Death on the Nile, 1937. These are just the novels; Poirot also appears in this period in a play, Black Coffee, 1930, and two collections of short stories, Poirot Investigates, 1924, and Murder in the Mews, 1937. Each novel, play and short story has its own entry on Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ.]]> 232 Agatha Christie 1579126243 Guada 4 2025-reads, to-buy 4.03 1936 The A.B.C. Murders (Hercule Poirot, #13)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Guada
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1936
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: 2025-reads, to-buy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Daughter of the Forest (Sevenwaters, #1)]]> 13928
But Sorcha's joy is shattered when her father is bewitched by his new wife, an evil enchantress who binds her brothers with a terrible spell, a spell which only Sorcha can lift—by staying silent. If she speaks before she completes the quest set to her by the Fair Folk and their queen, the Lady of the Forest, she will lose her brothers forever.

When Sorcha is kidnapped by the enemies of Sevenwaters and taken to a foreign land, she is torn between the desire to save her beloved brothers, and a love that comes only once. Sorcha despairs at ever being able to complete her task, but the magic of the Fair Folk knows no boundaries, and love is the strongest magic of them all...]]> 554 Juliet Marillier Guada 0 to-read 4.27 1999 Daughter of the Forest (Sevenwaters, #1)
author: Juliet Marillier
name: Guada
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Sunshine Court (All For the Game, #4)]]> 201914164 My name is Jean Moreau. My place is at Evermore. I belong to the Moriyamas.

It is a truth Jean has built his life around, a reminder this is the best he can hope for and all he deserves. But when he is stolen from Edgar Allan University and sold to a more dangerous master, Jean is forced to contend with a life outside of the Nest for the first time in five years. The Foxes call his transfer to California a fresh start; Jean knows it is little more than a golden cage.

Captain Jeremy Knox is facing his final year with the USC Trojans and fifth straight year falling short of the championships trophy he desperately craves. Taking in the nation’s best defenseman is a no-brainer, even if that man is a Raven. But Jean is no monster, just a man with no hope or desire for a future, and when Evermore's collapse starts dragging Jean's hideous secrets to light, Jeremy is forced to contend with the cost of victory.]]> Nora Sakavic Guada 5 4.53 2024 The Sunshine Court (All For the Game, #4)
author: Nora Sakavic
name: Guada
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: 2024-reads, favorites, to-buy, 2025-reads
review:

]]> <![CDATA[First-Time Caller (Heartstrings, #1)]]> 213243908 A hopeless romantic meets a jaded radio host in this cozy, Sleepless in Seattle-inspired love story from beloved author B.K. Borison.

Aiden Valentine has a secret: he's fallen out of love with love. And as the host of Baltimore's romance hotline, that's a bit of a problem. But when a young girl calls in to the station asking for dating advice for her mom, the interview goes viral, thrusting Aiden and Heartstrings into the limelight.

Lucie Stone thought she was doing just fine. She has a good job; an incredible family; and a smart, slightly devious kid. But when all of Baltimore is suddenly scrutinizing her love life-or lack thereof—she begins to question if she's as happy as she thought. Maybe a little more romance wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Everyone wants Lucie to find her happy ending... even the handsome, temperamental man calling the shots. But when sparks start to fly behind the scenes, Lucie must make the final call between the radio-sponsored happily ever after or the man in the headphones next to her.]]> 448 B.K. Borison 0593641191 Guada 3 2025-reads 4.06 2025 First-Time Caller (Heartstrings, #1)
author: B.K. Borison
name: Guada
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: 2025-reads
review:
Oh, how I wanted to love this book so much because of that cover. Alas...
]]> <![CDATA[Snowed In (Fitzpatrick Christmas, #2)]]> 195487194
Christian’s fed up of being on his own every Christmas. He doesn’t mind being alone , but he hates his family’s sad eyes and soft tones as they sit around coupled up. Because he’s actually, totally, fine.

So when Megan literally bumps into Christian in a Dublin pub, they come up with a pact to see them through the holiday season. They’re going to be the very best fake dates for each other, ever .

Rules are drawn up, a contract is signed on a wine-stained napkin. They will sit through each other’s family gatherings and be outrageously in love until freed from their annual obligations. After all, it’s only for a few weeks.

But with everyone home for the holidays, two big families to deal with alongside old friends, old flames and old feelings, things are bound to get messy. And when a snowed-in cabin and a little Christmas magic are added to the mix, anything could happen�

A swoonworthy and utterly gorgeous romantic comedy that will make you laugh out loud and fall completely in love. Fans of Emily Henry, Sophie Kinsella and Abby Jimenez won’t be able to put this down!]]> 384 Catherine Walsh 1837906653 Guada 0 to-read 4.08 2023 Snowed In (Fitzpatrick Christmas, #2)
author: Catherine Walsh
name: Guada
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Katabasis 210223811 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

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

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 400 R.F. Kuang Guada 0 to-read 4.03 2025 Katabasis
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Guada
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Catalina 202907408 A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world with no place for the undocumented. Her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties, and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: She is both fascinated and repulsed.

Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved?]]> 224 Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 0593449096 Guada 0 to-read 3.57 2024 Catalina
author: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
name: Guada
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> We Used to Live Here 199798006
As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.

As soon as the strangers enter their home, inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?

This unputdownable and spine-tingling novel “is like quicksand: the further you delve into its pages, the more immobilized you become by a spiral of terror. We Used to Live Here will haunt you even after you have finished it� (Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender Is the Flesh).]]> 312 Marcus Kliewer 1982198788 Guada 3 2025-reads 3.66 2024 We Used to Live Here
author: Marcus Kliewer
name: Guada
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: 2025-reads
review:
I think this is "objectively" like 4 stars, but aside from how great Kliewer was at making the atmosphere feel scary, the story itself did nothing for me. I'm still figuring out if I even like horror and then what type of horror (loved Monstrilio and really enjoyed The Haunting of Velkwood but before that I never considered horror as a genre I would ever be remotely interested in, and for the most part tbh I'm still not interested in it except for when a premise really catches my attention)
]]> Memorial Days 212806569 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey toĚýpeace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofâ€�Horse

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

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

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

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between soulsĚýthat exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]> 224 Geraldine Brooks 059365398X Guada 0 to-read 4.34 2025 Memorial Days
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Guada
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes, #2)]]> 213075405 Elias and Laia are running for their lives.

After the events of the Fourth Trial, Martial soldiers hunt the two fugitives as they flee the city of Serra and undertake a perilous journey through the heart of the Empire.

Laia is determined to break into Kauf—the Empire’s most secure and dangerous prison—to save her brother, who is the key to the Scholars' survival. And Elias is determined to help Laia succeed, even if it means giving up his last chance at freedom.

But dark forces, human and otherworldly, work against Laia and Elias. The pair must fight every step of the way to outsmart their enemies: the bloodthirsty Emperor Marcus, the merciless Commandant, the sadistic Warden of Kauf, and, most heartbreaking of all, Helene—Elias’s former friend and the Empire’s newest Blood Shrike.

Bound to Marcus's will, Helene faces a torturous mission of her own—one that might destroy her: find the traitor Elias Veturius and the Scholar slave who helped him escape...and kill them both.]]> 460 Sabaa Tahir 110199889X Guada 0 to-read 4.18 2016 A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes, #2)
author: Sabaa Tahir
name: Guada
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Witness: Stories 62039185
What does it mean to take action? To bear witness? What does it cost?

In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters--from children to grandmothers to ghosts--live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect, to remember, to stand up for, and to really see each other, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape not only their own futures but the legacies and prospects of their families and their city.

In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust--doctors, employers, siblings--too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon.

With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.]]> 240 Jamel Brinkley 0374607036 Guada 0 to-read 3.75 2023 Witness: Stories
author: Jamel Brinkley
name: Guada
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer]]> 199601747 A stirring, unsparing debut novel about black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student, from the "extraordinary [and] insightful" author of Sink (New York Times Book Review). After a deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a MD/PhD student at The University of Pennsylvania, and an emergency department tech at a hospital in North Philly, he becomes interested in the Holmesburg Prison Experiments, in which the prison conducted scientific trials on their inmates. Through this curiosity he comes to know his estranged father, who is serving time for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, his best friend Murray, a fellow vet, judges the journey he sets out upon, while simultaneously pushing him towards a ruinous self-discovery. Balancing single fatherhood, his studies, and long shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his more storied friends and colleagues. ĚýGOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.]]> 236 Joseph Earl Thomas 1538741008 Guada 0 to-read 3.49 2024 God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer
author: Joseph Earl Thomas
name: Guada
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Done and Dusted (Rebel Blue Ranch, #1)]]> 123179008
For the first time in her life, Clementine “Emmy� Ryder has no idea what she’s doing. She’s accomplished everything on her to-do list. She left her small hometown of Meadowlark, Wyoming; went to college; and made a career for herself by doing her favorite thing: riding horses. But after an accident makes it impossible for her to get back into the saddle, she has no choice but to return to the hometown she always wanted to escape.

Luke Brooks is Meadowlark’s most notorious bad boy, bar owner, and bachelor. He’s also the unofficial fifth member of the Ryder family. As Emmy’s older brother’s best friend, Luke spent most of his childhood antagonizing her. It’s been years since he’s seen her, but when she walks into his bar and back into his life, he can’t take his eyes off her. Despite his better judgment, he wants to do a whole lot more than just look at her.

Emmy’s got too much on her mind to think about romance. And Luke knows he should stay away from his best friend’s younger sister. But what if Luke is just what Emmy needs to get her spark back? Or will they both go up in flames?]]> 356 Lyla Sage Guada 3 2025-reads Very readable but ultimately just very bland, forgettable and it felt like a cardboard cutout of a story. Also I found the sex scenes so awful that I'm tempted to rate it 1 star solely because of them.]]> 3.82 2023 Done and Dusted (Rebel Blue Ranch, #1)
author: Lyla Sage
name: Guada
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/30
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: 2025-reads
review:
*2.5
Very readable but ultimately just very bland, forgettable and it felt like a cardboard cutout of a story. Also I found the sex scenes so awful that I'm tempted to rate it 1 star solely because of them.
]]> Hamnet 43890641 Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

A New York Times Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR.]]> 372 Maggie O'Farrell 1472223799 Guada 5 2025-reads, favorites, to-buy 4.16 2020 Hamnet
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Guada
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: 2025-reads, favorites, to-buy
review:

]]> Strong Female Character 59903149
1. I'm diagnosed with autism 20 years after telling a doctor I had it.

2. My terrible Catholic childhood.

3. My friendship with an elderly man who runs the corner shop and is definitely not trying to groom me. I get groomed.

4. Homelessness.

5. Stripping.

6. More stripping but with more nervous breakdowns.

7. I hate everyone at uni and live with a psycho etc.

8. REDACTED as too spicy.

9. After everyone tells me I don't look autistic, I try to cure my autism and get addicted to Xanax.

10. REDACTED as too embarrassing.]]> 288 Fern Brady 1914240448 Guada 3 2025-reads *3.5-3.75 4.43 2023 Strong Female Character
author: Fern Brady
name: Guada
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: 2025-reads
review:
*3.5-3.75
]]> <![CDATA[The Seven Dials Mystery (Superintendent Battle #2)]]> 483103
Gerry Wade had proved himself to be a champion sleeper, so the other houseguests decided to play a practical joke on him. Eight alarm clocks were set to go off, one after the other, starting at 6:30 a.m. But when morning arrived, one clock was missing and the prank then backfired, with tragic consequences.

For Jimmy Thesiger in particular, the words "Seven Dials" were to take on a new and chilling significance...]]> 375 Agatha Christie 0007122594 Guada 0 to-read 3.81 1929 The Seven Dials Mystery (Superintendent Battle #2)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Guada
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1929
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Memory Collectors 219401075 Four strangers time travel to the past and find themselves stuck on the day all their lives were changed in this stunning speculative mystery from award-winning film and television producer Dete Meserve, perfect for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Wrong Place Wrong Time and The Paradox Hotel.

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

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

Enter Aeon Expeditions, the groundbreaking time travelĚýinvention of Mark Saunders—which allowsĚýsome lucky clientsĚý the chanceĚýto spend an hour in their past. Even though Aeon’s technology ensures time travel can’t alter the future, all four clients,Ěýincluding Mark’s ex-wife Elizabeth,Ěýyearn to revisit the hour that changed their lives forever.Ěý

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

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

]]> 336 Dete Meserve Guada 0 to-read 4.19 2025 The Memory Collectors
author: Dete Meserve
name: Guada
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> The Unmaking of June Farrow 66087062 A woman risks everything to end her family’s centuries-old curse, solve her mother’s disappearance, and find love in this mesmerizing novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Spells for Forgetting.

In the small mountain town of Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is waiting for fate to find her. The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm—and the mysterious curse that has plagued their family line. The whole town remembers the madness that led to Susanna Farrow’s disappearance, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother and haunted by rumors.

It’s been a year since June started seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. Faint wind chimes, a voice calling her name, and a mysterious door appearing out of nowhere—the signs of what June always knew was coming. But June is determined to end the curse once and for all, even if she must sacrifice finding love and having a family of her own.

After her grandmother’s death, June discovers a series of cryptic clues regarding her mother’s decades-old disappearance, except they only lead to more questions. But could the door she once assumed was a hallucination be the answer she’s been searching for? The next time it appears, June realizes she can touch it and walk past the threshold. And when she does, she embarks on a journey that will not only change both the past and the future, but also uncover the lingering mysteries of her small town and entangle her heart in an epic star-crossed love.

With The Unmaking of June Farrow, Adrienne Young delivers a brilliant novel of romance, mystery, and a touch of the impossible—a story you will never forget.]]> 320 Adrienne Young 0593598679 Guada 0 to-read 4.13 2023 The Unmaking of June Farrow
author: Adrienne Young
name: Guada
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You]]> 60165381 This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. But it’s also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles to became Prince’s chief engineer for Purple Rain, and then create other No. 1 hits (including Barenaked Ladies' "One Week") as one of the most successful female record producers of all time.


Now an award-winning professor of cognitive neuroscience, Susan Rogers leads readers to musical self-awareness. She explains that we each possess a unique “listener profile� based on our brain’s natural response to seven key dimensions of any song. Are you someone who prefers lyrics or melody? Do you like music “above the neck� (intellectually stimulating), or “below the neck� (instinctual and rhythmic)? Whether your taste is esoteric or mainstream, Rogers guides readers to recognize their musical personality, and offers language to describe one's own unique taste. Like most of us, Rogers is not a musician, but she shows that all of us can be musical—simply by being an active, passionate listener.


While exploring the science of music and the brain, Rogers also takes us behind the scenes of record-making, using her insider’s ear to illuminate the music of Prince, Frank Sinatra, Kanye West, Lana Del Rey, and many others. She shares records that changed her life, contrasts them with those that appeal to her coauthor and students, and encourages you to think about the records that define your own identity.


Told in a lively and inclusive style, This Is What It Sounds Like will refresh your playlists, deepen your connection to your favorite artists, and change the way you listen to music.]]> 288 Susan Rogers 0393541258 Guada 0 to-read 3.81 2022 This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You
author: Susan Rogers
name: Guada
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist]]> 214151728 With unprecedented access and unsparing analysis, this is the definitive investigation into Spotify, weaving interviews with incisive cultural criticism, and illuminating how streaming has reshaped music for listeners and artists alike.

Flush with testimony from over a hundred industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us into the inner workings of the highly consolidated modern music business and how it has become personalized, playlisted, autoplayed, and algorithmic.

With an expert’s eye, music journalist Liz Pelly reveals how Spotify’s two-sided marketplace—the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all—has changed music media forever. She also explores how musicians and listeners are coming together to fight this era of musical individualism and advocate for artists� futures.

Amazon Unbound and Weapons of Math Destruction for the music industry, Mood Machine is a timely and unputdownable exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music.]]> 288 Liz Pelly 1668083507 Guada 0 to-read 3.94 2025 Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
author: Liz Pelly
name: Guada
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> This Is Your Brain on Music 141565 This Is Your Brain on Music unravels a host of mysteries that affect everything from pop culture to our understanding of human nature, including:
� Are our musical preferences shaped in utero?
� Is there a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music?
� What do PET scans and MRIs reveal about the brain’s response to music?
� Is musical pleasure different from other kinds of pleasure?

This Is Your Brain on Music explores cultures in which singing is considered an essential human function, patients who have a rare disorder that prevents them from making sense of music, and scientists studying why two people may not have the same definition of pitch. At every turn, this provocative work unlocks deep secrets about how nature and nurture forge a uniquely human obsession.]]> 314 Daniel J. Levitin 0525949690 Guada 0 to-read 3.90 2006 This Is Your Brain on Music
author: Daniel J. Levitin
name: Guada
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres]]> 56912932
Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career's worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music--as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities. He explains the history of slow jams, the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in trouble.

Sanneh shows how these genres have been defined by the tension between mainstream and outsider, between authenticity and phoniness, between good and bad, right and wrong. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there have always been Black audiences and white audiences, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there has been Black music and white music, constantly mixing and separating. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn't transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full.]]> 496 Kelefa Sanneh 0525559590 Guada 0 to-read 4.16 2021 Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres
author: Kelefa Sanneh
name: Guada
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Door-to-Door Bookstore 62192261 The charming international bestseller about an elderly bookseller who delivers his recommendations door-to-door and an unlikely friendship with a nine-year-old girl that changes his life, for fans of The Midnight Library and A Man Called Ove.

The bookseller Carl Christian Kollhoff delivers books to special customers in the evening hours after closing time, walking through the picturesque alleys of the city. These people are almost like friends to him, and he is their most important connection to the world.

When Kollhoff unexpectedly loses his job, it takes the power of books and a nine-year-old girl to make them all find the courage to rebuild their bonds with each other.

A bestselling phenomenon internationally,ĚýCarsten Henn’sĚýThe Door-to-Door BookstoreĚýis a feel-good novel about books and friendship.]]> 239 Carsten Henn 133549085X Guada 0 to-read 4.07 2020 The Door-to-Door Bookstore
author: Carsten Henn
name: Guada
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1)]]> 29588376 ASIN B000JMKNJ2 moved to the more recent edition

An orphan’s life is harsh—and often short—in the mysterious island city of Camorr. But young Locke Lamora dodges death and slavery, becoming a thief under the tutelage of a gifted con artist. As leader of the band of light-fingered brothers known as the Gentleman Bastards, Locke is soon infamous, fooling even the underworld’s most feared ruler. But in the shadows lurks someone still more ambitious and deadly. Faced with a bloody coup that threatens to destroy everyone and everything that holds meaning in his mercenary life, Locke vows to beat the enemy at his own brutal game—or die trying.]]> 752 Scott Lynch Guada 0 to-read 4.32 2006 The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1)
author: Scott Lynch
name: Guada
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Love You, Bunny (Bunny, #2)]]> 223478303
When We Love You, Bunny opens, Sam has just published her first novel to critical acclaim. But at a New England stop on her book tour, her one-time frenemies, furious at the way they’ve been portrayed, kidnap her. Now a captive audience, it’s her (and our) turn to hear the Bunnies� side of the story. One by one, they take turns holding the axe, and recount the birth throes of their unholy alliance, their discovery of their unusual creative powers—and the phantasmagoric adventure of conjuring their first creation. With a bound and gagged Sam, we embark on a wickedly intoxicating journey into the heart of dark academia: a fairy tale slasher that explores the wonder and horror of creation itself. Not to mention the transformative powers of love and friendship, Bunny.

Frankenstein by way of Heathers, We Love You, Bunny is both a prequel and a sequel, and an unabashedly wild and totally complete stand-alone novel. Open your hearts, Bunny, to another dazzlingly original and darkly hilarious romp in the Bunny-verse from the queen of the fever-dream, Mona Awad.]]> Mona Awad Guada 0 to-read 4.57 2025 We Love You, Bunny (Bunny, #2)
author: Mona Awad
name: Guada
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946]]> 39088559
Bing Crosby dominated American popular culture in a way that few artists ever have. From the dizzy era of Prohibition through the dark days of the Second World War, he was a desperate nation's most beloved entertainer. But he was more than just a charismatic crooner: Bing Crosby redefined the very foundations of modern music, from the way it was recorded to the way it was orchestrated and performed.

In this much-anticipated follow-up to the universally acclaimed first volume, NBCC Winner and preeminent cultural critic Gary Giddins now focuses on Crosby's most memorable period, the war years and the origin story of White Christmas . Set against the backdrop of a Europe on the brink of collapse, this groundbreaking work traces Crosby's skyrocketing career as he fully inhabits a new era of American entertainment and culture. While he would go on to reshape both popular music and cinema more comprehensively than any other artist, Crosby's legacy would be forever intertwined with his impact on the home front, a unifying voice for a nation at war. Over a decade in the making and drawing on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to numerous archives, Giddins brings Bing Crosby, his work, and his world to vivid life -- firmly reclaiming Crosby's central role in American cultural history.]]> 736 Gary Giddins 0316887927 Guada 0 to-read 4.33 2018 Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946
author: Gary Giddins
name: Guada
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Victorious (Villains, #3) 44232064 Victoria E. Schwab Guada 0 to-read 4.40 2026 Victorious (Villains, #3)
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Guada
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Old Flame 61272703 A highly anticipated new novel exploring what it means to be a woman in her many forms—daughter, friend, partner, lover, and mother.

Emily writes for women’s catalogs for a living, but she’d rather be writing books. She has a handsome photographer boyfriend, but she actively wonders how and when they will eventually hurt each other. Her best work friend Megan is her lifeline, until Megan is abruptly laid off. When her world is further upended by an unplanned pregnancy, Emily is forced to make tough decisions that will change her life forever.

What will she sacrifice from her old life to make room for a new one? What fires will she be forced to extinguish, and which will keep burning? Old Flame is a story about the essential—and often existential—choices that define a woman’s life at every level, from which dress to wear to when to have a child to how to be in the world.]]> 320 Molly Prentiss 1501121588 Guada 4 2025-reads, to-buy, favorites 3.83 2023 Old Flame
author: Molly Prentiss
name: Guada
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: 2025-reads, to-buy, favorites
review:

]]> Jane Austen at Home 31450766
Worsley examines the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons. She shows readers a passionate Jane Austen who fought for her freedom, a woman who had at least five marriage prospects, but--in the end--a woman who refused to settle for anything less than Mr. Darcy.

Illustrated with two sections of color plates, Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home is a richly entertaining and illuminating new book about one of the world’s favorite novelists and one of the subjects she returned to over and over in her unforgettable novels: home.]]> 387 Lucy Worsley 125013160X Guada 0 to-read 4.26 2017 Jane Austen at Home
author: Lucy Worsley
name: Guada
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> We Met Like This: A Novel 222361681 Beloved author Kasie West's sparkling adult rom-com debut about a hopeless romantic falling for the one man she never expected

Can a swipe right turn into swept away?

Margot Hart is a hopeless romantic. That’s why she wants to be a literary agent—to help bring romance books to the world. It’s also why she hates dating apps with all her romance loving soul. She wants her own love story to be just as much fun as the books she reads—a mixed up coffee order, a mistaken identity. She’s not going to tell the story that she swiped right on future husband’s shirtless pic for the rest of her life.

The problem is that her most consistent relationship over the last several years is with Oliver, a guy she keeps rematching with on the apps. They’ve only been on one date and it was a disaster…well, until the make out session in the car before parting ways. But, she keeps reminding herself, a make out session does not a relationship make. And so there will not be a date two regardless of how witty their app banter is.

When Margot gets fired from her job on the same day she meets Oliver again, her life becomes a veritable shit show. Her dream career is dying right before her eyes, and Oliver thinks she’s interested in only one a repeat of the hot make out session they had three years ago so she can get him out of her system. And maybe that is all she wants from him, because she and Oliver are definitely not compatible—he doesn’t hit the snooze button, he runs five miles every morning, he reads nonfiction, and worst of all, she didn’t meet him in cute way! But in her scramble to keep her dream career alive, by opening her own agency, Oliver is there with his golden retriever energy, more steady and helpful than any man she’s ever dated. Just when she thinks she’s overcome her app bias, she realizes that maybe it’s not her who’s holding back, but him. And his reasons are more than she bargained for.

Kasie West's romantic adult debut is full of witty banter, meet cutes gone awry and, ultimately, true love.]]> Kasie West 125034915X Guada 0 to-read 4.05 2025 We Met Like This: A Novel
author: Kasie West
name: Guada
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Death of a Salesman 12898 'For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.'

Willy Loman has been a salesman for 34 years. At 60, he is cast aside, his usefulness now exhausted. With no future to dream about he must face the crushing disappointments of his past. He takes one final brave action, but is he heroic at last?, or a self-deluding fool?]]> 144 Arthur Miller 0435233076 Guada 0 to-read 3.57 1949 Death of a Salesman
author: Arthur Miller
name: Guada
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Brotherless Night 60324341 In this searing novel, a courageous young woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor as civil war devastates Sri Lanka.

Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K's invitation to work as a medic at the field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever.

Set during the early years of Sri Lanka's three-decade civil war, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman's moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home.]]> 348 V.V. Ganeshananthan 0812997158 Guada 0 to-read 4.45 2023 Brotherless Night
author: V.V. Ganeshananthan
name: Guada
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Mousetrap and Other Plays: A Suspenseful Murder Mystery with a Twisted Plot, Unravel the Mystery Today!]]> 13623862 704 Agatha Christie 0062094467 Guada 0 currently-reading 4.08 1950 The Mousetrap and Other Plays: A Suspenseful Murder Mystery with a Twisted Plot, Unravel the Mystery Today!
author: Agatha Christie
name: Guada
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1950
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[An Ember in the Ashes (An Ember in the Ashes, #1)]]> 27774758 Alternative Cover Edition #1

Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free.
Ěý
Under the Martial Empire, defiance is met with death. Those who do not vow their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk the execution of their loved ones and the destruction of all they hold dear.
Ěý
It is in this brutal world, inspired by ancient Rome, that Laia lives with her grandparents and older brother. The family ekes out an existence in the Empire’s impoverished backstreets. They do not challenge the Empire. They’ve seen what happens to those who do.
Ěý
But when Laia’s brother is arrested for treason, Laia is forced to make a decision. In exchange for help from rebels who promise to rescue her brother, she will risk her life to spy for them from within the Empire’s greatest military academy.
Ěý
There, Laia meets Elias, the school’s finest soldier—and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias wants only to be free of the tyranny he’s being trained to enforce. He and Laia will soon realize that their destinies are intertwined—and that their choices will change the fate of the Empire itself.

From the Hardcover edition.]]> 446 Sabaa Tahir Guada 3 *3.5 4.23 2015 An Ember in the Ashes (An Ember in the Ashes, #1)
author: Sabaa Tahir
name: Guada
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: recommended-audiobooks, for-the-2022-rc, 2025-reads
review:
*3.5
]]> What Does It Feel Like? 214312329
“What Does It Feel Like? is fiction, but it is my most autobiographical work to date. Eve’s story is my story.”—Sophie Kinsella

Eve is a successful novelist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. Her husband, never far from her side, explains that she has had an operation to remove the large, malignant tumor growing in her brain.

As Eve learns to walk, talk, and write again—and as she wrestles with her diagnosis, and how and when to explain it to her beloved children—she begins to recall what’s most important to her: long walks with her husband’s hand clasped firmly around her own, family game nights, and always buying that dress when she sees it.

Recounted in brief anecdotes, each one is an attempt to answer the type of impossible questions recognizable to anyone navigating the labyrinth of grief. This short, extraordinary novel is a celebration of life, shot through with warmth and humor—it will both break your heart and put it back together again.

“Why did I write such a personal book? I have always processed my life through writing. Hiding behind my fictional characters, I have always turned my own life into a narrative. It is my version of therapy, maybe. Writing is my happy place, and writing this book, although tough going at times, was immensely satisfying and therapeutic for me.”—Sophie Kinsella]]> 144 Sophie Kinsella 0593977564 Guada 0 to-read 4.25 2024 What Does It Feel Like?
author: Sophie Kinsella
name: Guada
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Castle in the Clouds 44281041
Way up in the Swiss mountains, there's an old grand hotel steeped in tradition and faded splendor. Once a year, when the famous New Year's Eve Ball takes place and guests from all over the world arrive, excitement returns to the vast hallways.

Sophie, who works at the hotel as an intern, is busy making sure that everything goes according to plan. But unexpected problems keep arising, and some of the guests are not who they pretend to be. Very soon, Sophie finds herself right in the middle of a perilous adventure―and at risk of losing not only her job, but also her heart.]]> 336 Kerstin Gier 1250300193 Guada 0 to-read 3.78 2017 A Castle in the Clouds
author: Kerstin Gier
name: Guada
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Strange Case of Jane O. 213870076
In the first year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. As her psychiatrist struggles to solve the mystery of what is happening to Jane’s mind, she suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

Are Jane’s strange experiences related to the overwhelm of single motherhood, or are they the manifestation of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago, who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever-deeper into the furthest reaches of her mind, and cause him to question everything he thought he knew about so-called reality—including events in his own life.

Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate, a mesmerizing story about the bonds of love between a mother and child, a man and a woman, and those who we’ve lost but may still be alive among us.]]> 288 Karen Thompson Walker 1984853945 Guada 0 to-read 3.91 2025 The Strange Case of Jane O.
author: Karen Thompson Walker
name: Guada
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Guada 0 to-read 3.77 2024 Evenings and Weekends
author: OisĂ­n McKenna
name: Guada
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)]]> 60657589
Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party--or even get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog, and the Fair Folk.

So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. Nor does she care to spend time with another new arrival: her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby, who manages to charm the townsfolk, get in the middle of Emily's research, and utterly confound and frustrate her.

But as Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones--the most elusive of all faeries--lurking in the shadowy forest outside the town, she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want? To find the answer, she'll have to unlock the greatest mystery of all--her own heart.]]> 336 Heather Fawcett 059350013X Guada 0 to-read 3.98 2023 Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)
author: Heather Fawcett
name: Guada
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century]]> 56347680 The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex.

How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.

How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity�its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power�we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.

We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.]]> 241 Amia Srinivasan 0374721033 Guada 0 to-read 4.27 2021 The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
author: Amia Srinivasan
name: Guada
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Faserland 217381 160 Christian Kracht 3423129824 Guada 0 to-read 3.69 1995 Faserland
author: Christian Kracht
name: Guada
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Meditations 30659 Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. While the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation and encouragement, Marcus Aurelius also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a timeless collection that has been consulted and admired by statesmen, thinkers and readers throughout the centuries.]]> 254 Marcus Aurelius 0140449337 Guada 0 to-read 4.29 180 Meditations
author: Marcus Aurelius
name: Guada
average rating: 4.29
book published: 180
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Concierge 195719877
The peaceful setting of Cavengreen Hotel has been shattered by a shocking murder. Hector Harrow, the hotel's concierge, has been accused and is determined to clear his name. Hector enlists the aid of Helen, a retired publisher, to document the shocking crime that has unfolded, with the intention of publishing a truthful account.

Amid interruptions from a nosy journalist and the egotistical antics of the hotel's new owner, American Dave, Helen works tirelessly to keep Hector focused on finishing his book.

As suspicions fall on different guests and one makes a shocking confession, Hector must navigate a web of secrets to uncover the truth.]]> 0 Abby Corson 1761152971 Guada 0 to-read 3.50 2024 The Concierge
author: Abby Corson
name: Guada
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Female of the Species 25812109
Alex Craft knows how to kill someone. And she doesn’t feel bad about it.

Three years ago, when her older sister, Anna, was murdered and the killer walked free, Alex uncaged the language she knows best—the language of violence. While her own crime goes unpunished, Alex knows she can’t be trusted among other people. Not with Jack, the star athlete who wants to really know her but still feels guilty over the role he played the night Anna’s body was discovered. And not with Peekay, the preacher’s kid with a defiant streak who befriends Alex while they volunteer at an animal shelter. Not anyone.

As their senior year unfolds, Alex’s darker nature breaks out, setting these three teens on a collision course that will change their lives forever.]]> 368 Mindy McGinnis Guada 4 4.14 2016 The Female of the Species
author: Mindy McGinnis
name: Guada
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: 2018-reads, favorites, 2022-reads, 2024-reads
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Third Edition: Basics and Beyond]]> 59356051 Since its development in the 1960s as a structured, short-term psychotherapy for depression, cognitive therapy has come of age. Today the approach is successfully applied in the treatment of a broad range of psychological disorders, an evolution reflected in the myriad titles now available. Regardless of the disorder, all these applications are based on core, underlying principles, which are clearly articulated in this volume. Providing readers with a solid foundation for practice, Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond delineates the fundamental building blocks of cognitive conceptualization and treatment.

Written in a clear, step-by-step style, this text helps therapists sharpen their conceptualization skills, plan more effective treatment, expand their repertoire of techniques, and trouble-shoot difficulties. Throughout the volume, the author offers clinical examples and transcripts drawn from one patient's treatment to illuminate the narrative and illustrate cognitive therapy in action.

Introductory chapters describe how to conceptualize clients according to the cognitive model, plan and conduct the first session, identify initial problems and goals, and structure therapy within and across sessions. Then the basic steps for conducting cognitive therapy are presented, with specific instruction on how to identify, evaluate, and respond to a client's automatic thoughts. Effective strategies for modifying underlying assumptions and core beliefs are also explicated.

Methods for increasing homework compliance, preparing for termination, and preventing relapse are laid out. Even experienced cognitive therapists will find new strategies and insights in chapters on planning treatment, diagnosing problems, using imagery, and bringing about behavioral change.

In addition to numerous practical suggestions, this volume features a variety of sample patient worksheets and appendices that detail resource materials and reading lists for both the practitioner and the client. A final chapter offers guidance in progressing as a cognitive therapist.

An important resource for any therapist's shelf, Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond is necessary reading for the practitioner or student new to cognitive therapy who wants to learn about this tested approach, and for the clinician already practicing cognitive therapy who wants to learn the cutting-edge strategies of conceptualization and treatment.
]]> Judith S. Beck Guada 5 3.97 1995 Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Third Edition: Basics and Beyond
author: Judith S. Beck
name: Guada
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-reads, favorites, psych-true-crime-criminology, to-buy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Journey to St Patrick’s Purgatory]]> 59206913 126 Ramon de Perellós 1855663570 Guada 0 2024-reads 0.0 Journey to St Patrick’s Purgatory
author: Ramon de PerellĂłs
name: Guada
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: 2024-reads
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Guada 4 2021-reads, favorites, to-buy *3.75 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Guada
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/24
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: 2021-reads, favorites, to-buy
review:
*3.75
]]> Dear Dickhead 205363943 The French novel taking the world by an ultracontemporary Dangerous Liaisons about sex, feminism, and addiction.

Dear Dickhead, I read the piece you posted on your Insta. You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. you've had your fifteen minutes of fame. The proof? The fact that I bothered to write to you. Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence—at the very moment that Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a no-holds-barred conversation about life under the patriarchy, and above all about addiction—to drugs, to alcohol, to the internet, to rage.

Virginie Despentes, the celebrated author of King Kong Theory, has written her breakthrough a Dangerous Liaisons for our time. We follow Rebecca and Oscar as they develop an unlikely friendship and argue over questions of right and wrong in a city—Paris—where pleasure, excess, and freedom rule the day, or used to. Dear Dickhead is a guns-blazing novel about a culture that makes men and women sick, and about how the search for feeling leaves us addicted to what makes us feel. The result is a provocative and unmissable book.]]> 304 Virginie Despentes 0374611610 Guada 0 to-read 3.64 2022 Dear Dickhead
author: Virginie Despentes
name: Guada
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The House at Pooh Corner (Winnie-the-Pooh, #2)]]> 776407 180 A.A. Milne 0525444440 Guada 5 4.37 1928 The House at Pooh Corner (Winnie-the-Pooh, #2)
author: A.A. Milne
name: Guada
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/09
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: 2022-reads, classics, favorites, to-buy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Neurodiversity Playbook: How Neurodivergent People Can Crack the Code of Living in a Neurotypical World]]> 210528801 252 Matthew Zakreski 195336036X Guada 0 to-read 4.40 Neurodiversity Playbook: How Neurodivergent People Can Crack the Code of Living in a Neurotypical World
author: Matthew Zakreski
name: Guada
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year]]> 199531989 Knives Out gets a rom-com twist in this rivals-to-lovers Christmas romance-mystery from New York Times bestselling author Ally Carter

The bridge is out. The phones are down. And the most famous mystery writer in the world just disappeared out of a locked room three days before Christmas.

Meet Maggie Chase and Ethan Wyatt:
She’s the new Queen of the Cozy Mystery.
He’s Mr. Big-Time Thriller Guy.

She hates his guts.

He thinks her name is Marcie (no matter how many times she’s told him otherwise.)

But when they both accept a cryptic invitation to attend a Christmas house party at the English estate of a reclusive fan, neither is expecting their host to be the most powerful author in the world: Eleanor Ashley, the Duchess of Death herself.

That night, the weather turns, and the next morning Eleanor is gone.

She vanished from a locked room, and Maggie has to wonder: Is Eleanor in danger? Or is it all some kind of test? Is Ethan the competition? Or is he the only person in that snowbound mansion she can trust?

As the snow gets deeper and the stakes get higher, every clue will bring Maggie and Ethan closer to the truth—and each other. Because, this Christmas, these two rivals are going to have to become allies (and maybe more) if they have any hope of saving Eleanor.

Assuming they don’t kill each other first.]]> 293 Ally Carter 0063276682 Guada 3 2024-reads 3.92 2024 The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year
author: Ally Carter
name: Guada
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: 2024-reads
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality]]> 176443264 Cultish and host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, a delicious blend of cultural criticism and personal narrative that explores our cognitive biases and the power, disadvantages, and highlights of magical thinking.

Utilizing the linguistic insights of her “witty and brilliant� first book Wordslut and the sociological explorations of her breakout hit Cultish, Amanda Montell now turns her erudite eye to the inner workings of the human mind and its biases in her most personal and electrifying work yet.

“Magical thinking� can be broadly defined as the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external Think of the conviction that one can manifest their way out of poverty, stave off cancer with positive vibes, thwart the apocalypse by learning to can their own peaches, or transform an unhealthy relationship to a glorious one with loyalty alone. In all its forms, magical thinking works in service of restoring agency amid chaos, but in The Age of Magical Overthinking, Montell argues that in the modern information age, our brain’s coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to an eleven.

In a series of razor sharp, deeply funny chapters, Montell delves into a cornucopia of the cognitive biases that run rampant in our brains, from how the “Halo effect� cultivates worship (and hatred) of larger than life celebrities, to how the “Sunk Cost Fallacy� can keep us in detrimental relationships long after we’ve realized they’re not serving us. As she illuminates these concepts with her signature brilliance and wit, Montell’s prevailing message is one of hope, empathy, and ultimately forgiveness for our anxiety-addled human selves. If you have all but lost faith in our ability to reason, Montell aims to make some sense of the senseless. To crack open a window in our minds, and let a warm breeze in. To help quiet the cacophony for a while, or even hear a melody in it.]]> 259 Amanda Montell 1668007975 Guada 2 2024-reads, did-not-like 3.45 2024 The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality
author: Amanda Montell
name: Guada
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: 2024-reads, did-not-like
review:
*december, 2024: thought about this book some more and decided to remove a star
]]> Madonna in a Fur Coat 27793819 The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.



'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.'

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul.



'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Ă–zkirimli, writer and literary historian]]> 168 Sabahattin Ali 014198127X Guada 4 2024-reads, to-buy, favorites *4.5 4.19 1943 Madonna in a Fur Coat
author: Sabahattin Ali
name: Guada
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: 2024-reads, to-buy, favorites
review:
*4.5
]]> <![CDATA[Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body]]> 214151287 Dr Andrew Huberman, host of the world’s leading health podcast, Huberman Lab, and neuroscientist and tenured professor at Stanford School of Medicine, introduces Protocols, an essential guide to improving brain function, enhancing mood and energy, optimising bodily health and physical performance, and rewiring your nervous system to learn new skills and behaviours that can transform your life.

Protocols provides simple, powerful and evidence-based solutions to life’s most common challenges. Designed to improve your mental health, physical health and performance, these guidelines are customisable, allowing you to adapt them to your specific needs. With his clear and engaging style, Dr Huberman explains the scientific principles behind each protocol and how they can deliver immediate, effective results. Protocols is your essential road map for achieving optimal health.]]> 384 Andrew D. Huberman 1668032147 Guada 0 to-read 4.00 Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body
author: Andrew D. Huberman
name: Guada
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Emperor of Gladness 219848315 Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing � formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness � are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 416 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Guada 0 to-read 4.34 2025 The Emperor of Gladness
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Guada
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

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

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be put into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. As she struggles to decide what to do with this bequest, she embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn the story of how the painting came to be. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more she feels compelled to unleash her own artistic spirit, but happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this fresh testament to the transformative power of friendship and art.]]> 448 Fredrik Backman 1982112824 Guada 0 to-read 4.58 2025 My Friends
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Guada
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Blue Sisters 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]> 342 Coco Mellors 0593723767 Guada 2 2024-reads This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year (after giving Cleopatra and Frankenstein 5 stars despite having some issues with it), but it fell so flat... the characters felt very one-note and shallow (btw I think having a prologue where each sister is described and summarized as if we are reading the character outline was an awful choice when we could've learned about their personalities, history, relationships, etc as we met each character, instead of being told "this is avery, the eldest one, who feels responsible for the rest and who has a fraught relationship with her mother because of x"). This was even more clear with Nicky, who had no complexity at all and, when there was potential for complexity in her characterization, it was just explored at surface level.
The dynamics and relationships between the sisters were also explored in a very superficial/obvious ways, and I felt the book really had nothing interesting to say about sisterhood/the dynamics between female siblings.
As I'm writing this review, i'm getting a bit pissed because throughout the books there were hints of potential, little nuggets of information that could've made for a complex and interesting story, but these were either ignored, brushed upon, or just explored in the most simple, uninteresting way.
I was going to rate it 3 stars because I didn't have the strongest issues with the book while reading it but after thinking about it, this rating feels more accurate.]]> 3.93 2024 Blue Sisters
author: Coco Mellors
name: Guada
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: 2024-reads
review:
*2.5
This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year (after giving Cleopatra and Frankenstein 5 stars despite having some issues with it), but it fell so flat... the characters felt very one-note and shallow (btw I think having a prologue where each sister is described and summarized as if we are reading the character outline was an awful choice when we could've learned about their personalities, history, relationships, etc as we met each character, instead of being told "this is avery, the eldest one, who feels responsible for the rest and who has a fraught relationship with her mother because of x"). This was even more clear with Nicky, who had no complexity at all and, when there was potential for complexity in her characterization, it was just explored at surface level.
The dynamics and relationships between the sisters were also explored in a very superficial/obvious ways, and I felt the book really had nothing interesting to say about sisterhood/the dynamics between female siblings.
As I'm writing this review, i'm getting a bit pissed because throughout the books there were hints of potential, little nuggets of information that could've made for a complex and interesting story, but these were either ignored, brushed upon, or just explored in the most simple, uninteresting way.
I was going to rate it 3 stars because I didn't have the strongest issues with the book while reading it but after thinking about it, this rating feels more accurate.
]]> The Lion Women of Tehran 199798217 A heartfelt novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.

Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming “lion women.�

But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls� high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.

Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.]]> 327 Marjan Kamali 1668036584 Guada 0 to-read 4.47 2024 The Lion Women of Tehran
author: Marjan Kamali
name: Guada
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains]]> 9778945 Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?

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

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

Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.]]> 280 Nicholas Carr 0393339750 Guada 0 to-read 3.90 2010 The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
author: Nicholas Carr
name: Guada
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2010
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]]> Jillian 21535475 227 Halle Butler 1940430291 Guada 0 to-read 3.53 2015 Jillian
author: Halle Butler
name: Guada
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2015
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]]> <![CDATA[Down to Earth: A Guide to Simple Living]]> 19965162 'I was pulled into simple living before I knew what it was. It crept up on me using theĚýsmallest of steps and didn't reveal its true beauty and real power until I was totally hooked. I was searching for a way to live well while spending very little money. What I found was a way of life that also gave me independence, opportunity and freedom.'

Rhonda Hetzel gently encourages readers to find the pleasure and meaning in a simpler life, sharing all the practical information she has gathered on her own journey. Whether you want to learn how to grow tomatoes,Ěýbake bread, make your own soap and preserve fruit, or just be inspired to slow down and live more sustainably,ĚýDown to EarthĚýwill be your guide.

]]> 412 Rhonda Hetzel 1743480148 Guada 0 to-read 4.13 2012 Down to Earth: A Guide to Simple Living
author: Rhonda Hetzel
name: Guada
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2012
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]]> The Wedding People 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

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

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

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Guada 0 to-read 4.11 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Guada
average rating: 4.11
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]]> <![CDATA[There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension]]> 181346634
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it's basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.]]> 334 Hanif Abdurraqib 0593448790 Guada 0 to-read 4.32 2024 There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Guada
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
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]]> Sky Full of Elephants 207293815 In this exquisite speculative novel set in a world where white people no longer exist, college professor Charlie Brunton receives a call from his estranged daughter Sidney, setting off a chain of events as they journey across a truly “post-racial� America in search of answers.

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charles Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old who watched her white mother and step-family drown themselves in the lake behind their house.

Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across America headed for Alabama, where Sidney believes she may still have some family left. But neither Sidney or Charlie is prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

When they enter the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.]]> 304 Cebo Campbell 1668034921 Guada 0 to-read 3.82 2024 Sky Full of Elephants
author: Cebo Campbell
name: Guada
average rating: 3.82
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Guada 0 to-read 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Guada
average rating: 4.46
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]]> <![CDATA[The Bear and the Nightingale (The Winternight Trilogy, #1)]]> 25489134
After Vasilisa's mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa's new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.

And indeed, crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer, and misfortune stalks the village. All the while, Vasilisa's stepmother grows ever harsher in her determination to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for either marriage or confinement in a convent.

As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy even the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed—this, in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse's most frightening tales.

The Bear and the Nightingale is a magical debut novel from a gifted and gorgeous voice. It spins an irresistible spell as it announces the arrival of a singular talent.]]> 319 Katherine Arden 1101885939 Guada 0 to-read 4.07 2017 The Bear and the Nightingale (The Winternight Trilogy, #1)
author: Katherine Arden
name: Guada
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2017
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date added: 2024/12/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter i el pres d'Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3)]]> 2149492 416 J.K. Rowling 8475967760 Guada 5 2024-reads, to-buy 4.59 1999 Harry Potter i el pres d'Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Guada
average rating: 4.59
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2024/12/08
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]]> Una suerte pequeña 25437388
Mary Lohan, Marilé Lauría o María Elena Pujol -la que es, la que fue, la que había sido alguna vez- vuelve al suburbio de Buenos Aires donde formó una familia y vivió hasta que decidió huir. Aún no termina de entender por qué aceptó regresar al pasado que se había propuesto olvidar para siempre. Pero a medida que lo comprenda, entre encuentros esperados y revelaciones inesperadas, entenderá también que a veces la vida no es ni destino ni casualidad: tal vez su regreso no sea otra cosa que una suerte pequeña. Claudia Piñeiro sorprende y cautiva con esta novela aguda y conmovedora donde la realidad y la intimidad tejen la cerrada urdimbre en que el lector queda atrapado una vez más.

«Volví para sentir que era capaz de soltarme en el vacío, de caer para ser -al fin- libre. Aunque se trate de una libertad inútil, aunque sea para ser libre sólo en el instante que dure la caída.»]]> 240 Claudia Piñeiro 8420403644 Guada 0 to-read 4.26 2015 Una suerte pequeña
author: Claudia Piñeiro
name: Guada
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2015
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3)]]> 5 435 J.K. Rowling 043965548X Guada 5 2018-reads, favorites 4.57 1999 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Guada
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2018/10/17
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves: 2018-reads, favorites
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]]> <![CDATA[Early Entrance to College as an Option for Highly Gifted Adolescents (NAGC Select Series)]]> 30292426 54 Alexander R. Pagnani 0996086676 Guada 0 2024-reads, to-buy 0.0 Early Entrance to College as an Option for Highly Gifted Adolescents (NAGC Select Series)
author: Alexander R. Pagnani
name: Guada
average rating: 0.0
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rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
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]]>