Jebediah's bookshelf: all

Jebediah's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 12 May 2025 17:11:36 -0700 60 Jebediah's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The City & the City 6811283 Named one of the best books of the year by The Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, and Publishers Weekly

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma.

But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one.

As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.]]> 329 China Miéville 034549752X Jebediah 5 speculative
It's a straightforward police procedural and I think most readers would agree that plot is sort of incidental bordering on irrelevant. It's the world-building that's mesmerizing. Two cities--culturally, linguistically, and historically distinct--inhabit the same physical space and time, their architectural blueprints superimposed onto one another. The residents of each city are subject to strict sensorial control -- the law forbids them from directly acknowledging the existence and presence of the other city and its inhabitants so the process of unseeing, unhearing, and unsmelling is part of each individual's daily life. What a dreadful way to live. There is one legal crossing point between cities; any other crossing constitutes breach, at which point a shadowy authority materializes out of nowhere to whisk away the offender who is usually never seen or heard from again. The internal logic of the cities is the genius of this book. CM gives us everything: how children are raised to unsee; how the cities interact with the rest of the world; what training foreigners must go through to get visas to visit; the role of law enforcement in maintaining control; how animals exist within and between; illegal trade between the cities; the inevitable political schisms on either side of the border. He's really thought of everything. But despite this, somehow, the more we know, the less we know about this place. The overwhelming sensation of reading this book is claustrophobia and disorientation. The inexplicable constraints within which the narrator, a police inspector, must operate �� mistakenly seeing and then unseeing, fearing breach, trying to solve a murder spanning two cities that pretend the other doesn't exist �� leave you feeling like there’s something at the corner of your eye that you cannot see no matter how hard you try. It's maddening, and entirely brilliant. And amidst all this are easy real-world parallels: the social contracts we make with the state; uncomfortable choices about what to see and what to ignore; what it's like to live in a society ruled by fear and paranoia; abuses of power by entities accountable to no one. We all live in some version of The City & The City and that's why I can't stop thinking about this book days after finishing it. ]]> 3.93 2009

author: China Miéville
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/06
date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: speculative
review:
Blown away. CM consistently mashes and mixes genres, but this one obliterates all boundaries between "real world" and fantastical fiction--a neat feat in the context of a book entirely about the draconian enforcement of boundaries, both real and imaginary. The writing is spare and gritty, nothing like the overstuffed maniacal medley that characterizes a lot of CM's other novels (most of which I also love). You get the general sense that this man's pen can't keep up with his brain and he has a tendency to cram too much into each book -- except this one. This one is restrained genius.

It's a straightforward police procedural and I think most readers would agree that plot is sort of incidental bordering on irrelevant. It's the world-building that's mesmerizing. Two cities--culturally, linguistically, and historically distinct--inhabit the same physical space and time, their architectural blueprints superimposed onto one another. The residents of each city are subject to strict sensorial control -- the law forbids them from directly acknowledging the existence and presence of the other city and its inhabitants so the process of unseeing, unhearing, and unsmelling is part of each individual's daily life. What a dreadful way to live. There is one legal crossing point between cities; any other crossing constitutes breach, at which point a shadowy authority materializes out of nowhere to whisk away the offender who is usually never seen or heard from again. The internal logic of the cities is the genius of this book. CM gives us everything: how children are raised to unsee; how the cities interact with the rest of the world; what training foreigners must go through to get visas to visit; the role of law enforcement in maintaining control; how animals exist within and between; illegal trade between the cities; the inevitable political schisms on either side of the border. He's really thought of everything. But despite this, somehow, the more we know, the less we know about this place. The overwhelming sensation of reading this book is claustrophobia and disorientation. The inexplicable constraints within which the narrator, a police inspector, must operate �� mistakenly seeing and then unseeing, fearing breach, trying to solve a murder spanning two cities that pretend the other doesn't exist �� leave you feeling like there’s something at the corner of your eye that you cannot see no matter how hard you try. It's maddening, and entirely brilliant. And amidst all this are easy real-world parallels: the social contracts we make with the state; uncomfortable choices about what to see and what to ignore; what it's like to live in a society ruled by fear and paranoia; abuses of power by entities accountable to no one. We all live in some version of The City & The City and that's why I can't stop thinking about this book days after finishing it.
]]> <![CDATA[Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism]]> 19194940 256 Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo 1559398590 Jebediah 0 4.74 2002

Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism

author: Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.74
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at: 2020/10/28
date added: 2025/05/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism]]> 815789 272 Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo 1559391758 Jebediah 5 soul-food-religion 4.46 2002

author: Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2020/10/30
date added: 2025/05/07
shelves: soul-food-religion
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #3)]]> 18480329
When the brutal angel emperor brings his army to the human world, Karou and Akiva are finally reunited - not in love, but in a tentative alliance against their common enemy. It is a twisted version of their long-ago dream, and they begin to hope that it might forge a way forward for their people. And, perhaps, for themselves.

But with even bigger threats on the horizon, are Karou and Akiva strong enough to stand among the gods and monsters?

The New York Times bestselling Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy comes to a stunning conclusion as - from the streets of Rome to the caves of the Kirin and beyond - humans, chimaera, and seraphim strive, love, and die in an epic theater that transcends good and evil, right and wrong, friend and enemy.]]> 506 Laini Taylor 031628016X Jebediah 1 ya An ending. A beginning. A dream. Of God and Monsters. The uncommon love story held within the desperately thick hardcover beckoned. She unfurled in her couch and began reading beside a steaming cup of decaffeinated tea that hinted of cinnamon and apples, of autumn long past. Would there ever again be such an autumn , she wondered absently, for a moment, before the tide of language pulled her under.

On and on she read. Akiva was manly but also beautiful. She was reminded repeatedly that his eyes were fire. Godstars and silverdust, they were fire. And Karou was a woman independent, strong, and brave. She led an army of revenants but she burned in the flames of Akiva’s eyes and his devotion to her, which knew no bounds. Karou stood fast, gulped, and joined her eyes with Akiva’s. In the known universe, there was nothing like these two sets of eyeballs, the same yet different. The eyeballs of Akiva and Karou. Each contained such intensity, grief, and resplendence, that the universe was destroyed and reborn each time their gazes locked. It was a thing indescribable in language. But the author tried anyway, over three books that sung with grief and hope. Across the nation, readers held their faces to the glimmering night sky and wept. They wept tears of moonshine and starlight. And they read.

After the universe reconstituted itself in the wake of Akiva and Karou’s soul-shattering look, the nature of their gazes �� shifted. Karou’s was vivid, hopeful, searching. Akiva’s was troubled, unsure, and angry at the devastation he had caused her people. In a voice that was low and sweet and rough with love, he spoke: “hello.�� Her hair was a shimmer of blue and her cream-colored face flushed and he thought, Gods, she was so beautiful. “Hi,�� she said, and the word was a wisp and it brushed against his skin, soft as the caresses they had once shared before their worlds were torn asunder by a knowledge neither of them could ever unknow. As they looked on at each other, it seemed as though all the words in all the languages in all the worlds had been extinguished in the bright blaze of their love. What was there to say? But the ugly shadow of Thiago and his attempted brutalization of Karou hung low in the air between them, even lower than the moon outside the reader’s window. A very masculine rage tore through Akiva’s chest and threatened to blind him. I should have been there to protect you, he said, his voice choked with sorrow. The emotion in his voice seared its way through his body, and his chest rippled, slightly and gently as the leaves of a summer tree. Karou, strong and self-sufficient, said shortly, “I protected myself,�� but her eyes were bright with tears. Outside, clouds were gathering. Clouds of hope and heartache.

But then the unthinkable happened. At the corner of the reader’s eye, a vibration. She turned and saw her iphone blinking the way it did only when someone was calling her. It was like a kick to her heartbeat, that burning light. The screen shone yellow-green, then sparked and blazed like a star calling out to the heavens. It was mom. Dear gods and stardust. She felt…exposed. Torn. An age-old conflict churned inside her: answer the call of duty or continue being caressed by the firelit words of the moonheavy book. Moments passed but seemed like years, like an eternity. She made her decision. She reached over and with the sly cunning of a fox, pressed a button that would silence the ring and as she did, revealed a smile like a lovechild of a shark and scimitar.

She drowned again. The author’s tortured prose opened its arms, and the reader fell into that lunatic embrace, an unwilling captive, and the world fell away around her. Oh, Akiva. Oh, Karou. Oh, two halves of one soul, their destiny written in war and blood. Oh, tears. The reader was dimly aware that plot and pacing were pitch-perfect, that occasional characters were well-drawn, and that the setting was still interesting. But in the end, these things were known and buried under prose that shone unbearably purple in the starlight, growing brighter and brighter like a wounded star in the night sky until there was nothing left of the dream of god and monsters, and of the reader's patience which lay in pieces on the desolate wasteland of her bedroom floor. ]]> 4.17 2014 Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #3)

Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #3)

author: Laini Taylor
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2014
rating: 1
read at: 2014/04/27
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: ya
review:
Outside, the moon hung low. It sang of tremulous shadows and evenings past, of urban gunpowder and decay. In trembling hands, the reader held it. Alas, not the moon but something better. The solid weight of the book, after months of yearning and patient waiting. A creep of color in her cheeks, an imperceptible shiver of anticipation. Finally. She held it, not daring to believe -- but unable to stem the tide of hope and eagerness. It felt heavy. Six hundred and thirteen pages. An ending. A beginning. A dream. Of God and Monsters. The uncommon love story held within the desperately thick hardcover beckoned. She unfurled in her couch and began reading beside a steaming cup of decaffeinated tea that hinted of cinnamon and apples, of autumn long past. Would there ever again be such an autumn , she wondered absently, for a moment, before the tide of language pulled her under.

On and on she read. Akiva was manly but also beautiful. She was reminded repeatedly that his eyes were fire. Godstars and silverdust, they were fire. And Karou was a woman independent, strong, and brave. She led an army of revenants but she burned in the flames of Akiva’s eyes and his devotion to her, which knew no bounds. Karou stood fast, gulped, and joined her eyes with Akiva’s. In the known universe, there was nothing like these two sets of eyeballs, the same yet different. The eyeballs of Akiva and Karou. Each contained such intensity, grief, and resplendence, that the universe was destroyed and reborn each time their gazes locked. It was a thing indescribable in language. But the author tried anyway, over three books that sung with grief and hope. Across the nation, readers held their faces to the glimmering night sky and wept. They wept tears of moonshine and starlight. And they read.

After the universe reconstituted itself in the wake of Akiva and Karou’s soul-shattering look, the nature of their gazes �� shifted. Karou’s was vivid, hopeful, searching. Akiva’s was troubled, unsure, and angry at the devastation he had caused her people. In a voice that was low and sweet and rough with love, he spoke: “hello.�� Her hair was a shimmer of blue and her cream-colored face flushed and he thought, Gods, she was so beautiful. “Hi,�� she said, and the word was a wisp and it brushed against his skin, soft as the caresses they had once shared before their worlds were torn asunder by a knowledge neither of them could ever unknow. As they looked on at each other, it seemed as though all the words in all the languages in all the worlds had been extinguished in the bright blaze of their love. What was there to say? But the ugly shadow of Thiago and his attempted brutalization of Karou hung low in the air between them, even lower than the moon outside the reader’s window. A very masculine rage tore through Akiva’s chest and threatened to blind him. I should have been there to protect you, he said, his voice choked with sorrow. The emotion in his voice seared its way through his body, and his chest rippled, slightly and gently as the leaves of a summer tree. Karou, strong and self-sufficient, said shortly, “I protected myself,�� but her eyes were bright with tears. Outside, clouds were gathering. Clouds of hope and heartache.

But then the unthinkable happened. At the corner of the reader’s eye, a vibration. She turned and saw her iphone blinking the way it did only when someone was calling her. It was like a kick to her heartbeat, that burning light. The screen shone yellow-green, then sparked and blazed like a star calling out to the heavens. It was mom. Dear gods and stardust. She felt…exposed. Torn. An age-old conflict churned inside her: answer the call of duty or continue being caressed by the firelit words of the moonheavy book. Moments passed but seemed like years, like an eternity. She made her decision. She reached over and with the sly cunning of a fox, pressed a button that would silence the ring and as she did, revealed a smile like a lovechild of a shark and scimitar.

She drowned again. The author’s tortured prose opened its arms, and the reader fell into that lunatic embrace, an unwilling captive, and the world fell away around her. Oh, Akiva. Oh, Karou. Oh, two halves of one soul, their destiny written in war and blood. Oh, tears. The reader was dimly aware that plot and pacing were pitch-perfect, that occasional characters were well-drawn, and that the setting was still interesting. But in the end, these things were known and buried under prose that shone unbearably purple in the starlight, growing brighter and brighter like a wounded star in the night sky until there was nothing left of the dream of god and monsters, and of the reader's patience which lay in pieces on the desolate wasteland of her bedroom floor.
]]> <![CDATA[The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain]]> 127280349 Celebrated author Sofia Samatar presents a mystical, revolutionary space adventure for the exhausted dreamer in this brilliant science fiction novella tackling the carceral state and violence embedded in the ivory tower while embodying the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.

"Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?"

The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out amongst the stars.

His whole world changes―literally―when he is yanked "upstairs" to meet the woman he will come to call “professor.�� The boy is no longer one of the Chained, she tells him, and he has been gifted an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s university alongside the elite.

The woman has spent her career striving for acceptance and validation from her colleagues in the hopes of reaching a brighter future, only to fall short at every turn.

Together, the boy and the woman will learn from each other to grasp the design of the chains designed to fetter them both, and are the key to breaking free. They will embark on a transformation―and redesign the entire world.]]> 128 Sofia Samatar 1250881803 Jebediah 5 speculative 3.76 2024 The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

author: Sofia Samatar
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/02
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: speculative
review:

]]> Tender 31945153 Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series and nominated for many awards. Some of Samatar’s weird and tender fabulations spring from her life and her literary studies; some spring from the world, some from the void.]]> 273 Sofia Samatar 1618731262 Jebediah 4 speculative 4.21 2017 Tender

author: Sofia Samatar
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2020/07/05
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: speculative
review:

]]> The Winged Histories 25330014
Sofia Samatar is the author of the Crawford, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria. She also received the John W. Campbell Award. She has written for the Guardian, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and many other publications. She lives in California. Her website is sofiasamatar.com.

Praise for A Stranger in Olondria:

"A book about the love of books. Her sentences are intoxicating and one can easily be lost in their intricacy. . . . Samatar's beautifully written book is one that will be treasured by book lovers everywhere."�� Raul M. Chapa, BookPeople, Austin, Texas]]> 335 Sofia Samatar 1618731149 Jebediah 4 speculative 4.01 2016 The Winged Histories

author: Sofia Samatar
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2020/06/20
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: speculative
review:

]]> Mosquito and Ant: Poems 730992 104 Kimiko Hahn 0393320626 Jebediah 0 poetry 3.99 1999

author: Kimiko Hahn
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> Foreign Bodies: Poems 45894183 NPR Best Book of 2020

Inspired by her encounter with Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s collection of ingested curiosities at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, Kimiko Hahn’s tenth collection investigates the grip that seemingly insignificant objects exert on our lives. Itself a cabinet of curiosities, the collection provokes the same surprise, wonder, and pangs of recognition Hahn felt upon opening drawer after drawer of these swallowed, and retrieved, objects—a radiator key, a child’s perfect attendance pin, a mother-of-pearl button. The speaker of these moving poems sees reflections of these items in the heartbreaking detritus of her family home, and in her long-dead mother’s Japanese jewelry.

As Hahn remakes the lyric sequence in chains reminiscent of the Japanese tanka, the foreign bodies of the title expand to include the immigrant woman’s trafficked body, fossilized remains, a grandmother’s Japanese body. She explores the relationship between our innermost selves and the relics of our vanished past, making room for meditation on grief and the ephemeral nature of the material world, for the account of a nineteenth-century female fossil hunter, and for a celebration of the nautilus. Foreign Bodies investigates the power of possession, replete with Hahn’s electric originality and thrilling mastery of ever-changing forms.]]> 128 Kimiko Hahn 1324005211 Jebediah 0 poetry 3.72 2020 Foreign Bodies: Poems

author: Kimiko Hahn
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> The Threshold: Poems 59808594
Iman Mersal is Egypt’s―indeed, the Arab world’s―great outsider poet. Over the past three decades, she has crafted a voice that is ferocious and tender, street-smart and vulnerable. Her early work captures the energies of Cairo’s legendary literary bohème , a home for “Lovers of cheap weed and awkward confessions / Anti-State agitators�� and “People like me.�� These are poems of wit and rage, freaked by moments of sudden beauty, like “the smell of guava�� mysteriously wafting through the City of the Dead. Other poems bear witness to agonizing loss and erotic temptation, “the breath of two bodies that never had enough time / and so took pleasure in their mounting terror.�� Mersal’s most recent work illuminates the trials of displacement and migration, as well as the risks of crossing boundaries, personal and political, in literature and in life.

The Threshold gathers poems from Mersal’s first four collections of A Dark Alley Suitable for Dance Lessons (1995), Walking as Long as Possible (1997), Alternative Geography (2006), and Until I Give Up the Idea of Home (2013). Taken together, these works chart a poetic itinerary from defiance and antagonism to the establishment of a new, self-created sensibility. At their center is the indefatigably intelligent, funny, flawed, and impossible to pin down. As she writes, “I’m pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind.”]]> 128 Iman Mersal 0374604274 Jebediah 3 poetry, in-translation 4.20 2022 The Threshold: Poems

author: Iman Mersal
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: poetry, in-translation
review:

]]> Perfume & Pain 199797848 A controversial Los Angeles author attempts to revive her career and finally find true love in this hilarious nod to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction.

Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student who smells like metallic orchids and is researching 1950s lesbian pulp, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.

Penelope, a painter living off Urban Outfitters settlement money, immediately ingratiates herself in Astrid’s life, bonding with her best friends and family, just as Astrid and Ivy begin to date in person. Astrid feels judged and threatened by Penelope, a responsible older vegan, but also finds her irresistibly sexy.

When Astrid receives an unexpected call from her agent with the news that actress and influencer Kat Gold wants to adapt her previous novel for TV, Astrid finally has a chance to resurrect her waning career. But the pressure causes Astrid’s worst vice to rear its head—the Patricia Highsmith, a blend of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes—and results in blackouts and a disturbing series of events.

Unapologetically feminine yet ribald, steamy yet hilarious, Anna Dorn has crafted an exquisite homage to the lesbian pulp of yore, reclaiming it for our internet- and celebrity-obsessed world.]]> 352 Anna Dorn 1668047179 Jebediah 3 fem-lgbtq, fic-lit 3.88 2024 Perfume & Pain

author: Anna Dorn
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: fem-lgbtq, fic-lit
review:

]]> Afternoon Raag 26534571 192 Amit Chaudhuri 178074627X Jebediah 5 fic-lit, south-asia 3.44 1993

author: Amit Chaudhuri
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: fic-lit, south-asia
review:

]]> Other Names for Love 58772723
At age sixteen, Fahad hopes to spend the summer with his mother in London. His father, Rafik, has other plans: hauling his son to Abad, the family's feudal estate in upcountry, Pakistan. Rafik wants to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family--to make him a man. He enlists Ali, a local teenager, in this project, hoping his presence will prove instructive.

Instead, over the course of one hot, indolent season, attraction blooms between the two boys, and Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and its inhabitants: the people, who revere and revile his father in turn; cousin Mousey, who lives alone with a man he calls his manager; and most of all, Ali, who threatens to unearth all that is hidden.

Decades later, Fahad is living abroad when he receives a call from his mother summoning him home. His return will force him to face the past. Taymour Soomro's Other Names for Love is a tale of masculinity, inheritance, and desire set against the backdrop of a country's troubled history, told with uncommon urgency and beauty.]]> 256 Taymour Soomro 0374604649 Jebediah 2 fic-lit, south-asia 3.24 2022 Other Names for Love

author: Taymour Soomro
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: fic-lit, south-asia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Best Possible Experience: Stories]]> 63024273
“A full-hearted, brilliant debut of necessary beauty.�� —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars and New York Times bestseller Friday Black

"Injam's stories made me want to cast all else aside and return home.�� —Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning

Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world and in its American diaspora—all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home.

Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Nishanth Injam’s stories question what it means to have a home and to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as it is people who are ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus on the way to visit his parents as his fellow passengers vanish into the restroom. A family, newly in America, determined to host a perfect luncheon for their son’s white classmate—with no idea what to serve him. A woman who returns to a small village in India every summer to visit the grandfather who raised her, a man who lives with the ghosts of his son and his wife. And a man preparing for his green card interview with the American woman he has paid to marry him.

A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to the United States from India in his twenties. The Best Possible Experience , his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal inquiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing the home he left behind, before it was lost]]> 224 Nishanth Injam 0593317696 Jebediah 3 fic-lit, south-asia 4.04 2023 The Best Possible Experience: Stories

author: Nishanth Injam
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: fic-lit, south-asia
review:

]]> Animals 58410959
Hebe Uhart's Animals tells of piglets that snack on crackers, parrots that rehearse their words at night, southern screamers that lurk at the front door of a decrepit aunt's house, and, of course, human animals, whose presence is treated with the same inquisitive sharpness and sweetness that marks all of Uhart's work. Animals is a joyous reordering of attention towards the beings with whom we share the planet. In prose that tracks the goings on of creatures who care little what we do or say, a refreshing humility emerges, and with it a newfound pleasure in the everyday. Watching a whistling heron, Uhart writes, "that rebellious crest gives it a lunatic air." Birds in the park and dogs in the street will hold a different interest after reading Uhart's blissful foray into playful zoology.]]> 200 Hebe Uhart 1939810930 Jebediah 0 3.65 2017 Animals

author: Hebe Uhart
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: in-translation, nature-science
review:

]]> Freedom Song 25449933 248 Amit Chaudhuri Jebediah 3 fic-lit, south-asia 3.00 1999

author: Amit Chaudhuri
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: fic-lit, south-asia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)]]> 44675382 240 Janet Burroway 022661672X Jebediah 3 on-writing 4.31 1987

Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

author: Janet Burroway
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: on-writing
review:

]]> Exteriors 58496573 Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person's lived environment. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux's books - the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.]]> 80 Annie Ernaux 1913097684 Jebediah 1 3.63 1993 Exteriors

author: Annie Ernaux
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1993
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: in-translation, memoir-creative-nonfic
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Moonrise From the Green Grass Roof]]> 36671091 There's a pygmy mountain at the edge of the village. Near the top of the mountain is a mysterious hole. If you toss a stone down that hole, it will keep falling until you return to hear it hit the bottom.
There's a second-grader named Bolu in the village school. He only speaks while he walks. If you want to speak to him, you must walk with him. And then there's the moon, rising from the green grass roof. It travels with Bolu and his friends wherever they go.
In this book, light as pebbles skimming across a pond, Vinod Kumar Shukla speaks of the wonder of a universe in which, however separate we seem, we are inevitably joined as one.]]> 149 Vinod Kumar Shukla 9352773845 Jebediah 3 3.00 Moonrise From the Green Grass Roof

author: Vinod Kumar Shukla
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: fic-lit, south-asia, speculative, in-translation
review:

]]> Against Storytelling 216609001 About the book
A unique collection of essays about the meaning and significance of storytelling in our time.
At what point did we begin to say, 'We are all storytellers'? Far from being a timeless idea, the statement seems to go back to no further than the 1980s, coterminous with the dawning of a new kind of epic novel, an unprecedented supremacy for the English language, and the era of economic liberalisation. Who was it who made 'storytelling' synonymous with cultures outside the West? And could it just be conceivable that much of what's most worthwhile about writing and creativity occur on the fringes of the story?
The essays in this book, delivered originally as talks at a Literary Activism symposium, look again at the assumptions that underlie the way we think of storytelling and storytellers. The contributors include novelists, academics and translators including Anjum Hasan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Charles Bernstein, Geoffrey O'Brien, Gurvinder Singh, Jeremy Harding, Jean-Frédéric Chevallier and Tiffany Atkinson.

About the Editor
Amit Chaudhuri is an award-winning novelist, poet, essayist and musician.]]> 158 Amit Chaudhuri 9360450537 Jebediah 4 south-asia 4.67 Against Storytelling

author: Amit Chaudhuri
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.67
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: south-asia
review:

]]> ALL YOU WHO SLEEP TONIGHT 59680354 The Golden Gate, was hailed by Gore Vidal as "the Great California Novel" and by the New Republic as "a tour de force of the transcendence of the mere tour de force." Now he brings his romance with the English language, his effortless access to the deepest reservoirs of feeling, and his ability to light up the plain surfaces of everyday life to this stunning collection of poems.

In All You Who Sleep Tonight Seth delves into the varieties of love -- love lost, remembered, and deferred. He evokes the unspeakable ironies of Auschwitz and the light-blasted streets of Hiroshima. He conducts the reader through Lion Grove in Suzhou, China, and across the Golden Gate Bridge on its fiftieth anniversary. Throughout, he displays the lyricism and attentiveness that distinguish the best poets of every era.]]> 89 Vikram Seth 9354471161 Jebediah 3 poetry, south-asia 3.82 1990 ALL YOU WHO SLEEP TONIGHT

author: Vikram Seth
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: poetry, south-asia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beastly Tales From Here and There]]> 235842 93 Vikram Seth 0670846570 Jebediah 5 4.00 1992

author: Vikram Seth
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: south-asia, nature-science, poetry
review:

]]> Another Gulmohar Tree 6251126 Just as the lonely strangers' friendship begins to blossom into something deeper Usman has to return to Karachi, leaving Lydia behind.

Two years later, Lydia abandons her life in London and boards a ship to Karachi, where the two are married. But as the years flit by Usman feels a growing distance between them. He realises that he hasn't noticed the buds of the gulmohar tree unfurl, and that he has lost sight of his love for his wife.

A beautiful account of a marriage that is in turns wry and unashamedly romantic.

Another Gulmohar Tree was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Europe and South Asia in 2010.

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi in 1955 and moved to London in the early 1970s. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and reviews regularly for The Independent and the TLS. He is the author of Turquoise, This Other Salt, and the editor of Kahani: Short Stories by Pakistani Women. He has held visiting posts at the University of Southampton and the University of London, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.]]> 114 Aamer Hussein 1846590566 Jebediah 4 fic-lit, south-asia 3.54 2009 Another Gulmohar Tree

author: Aamer Hussein
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: fic-lit, south-asia
review:

]]> Kairos 124946972 Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates

Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos—an unforgettably compelling masterpiece—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement “The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies.��

In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a “Hofmann’s translation is invaluable—it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to it is at once ‘loyal�� and ‘beautiful.’”]]> 309 Jenny Erpenbeck 0811229351 Jebediah 2 fic-lit, in-translation 3.39 2021 Kairos

author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: fic-lit, in-translation
review:
Sort of mystified that the person who wrote Visitation and End of Days could produce a book this pedestrian and character dynamics so predictably gendered. What a disappointment.
]]> <![CDATA[Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake]]> 207003966 A blazing new talent’s hilarious memoir about coming of age and coming out in Pakistan, moving to America, looking for love, and falling in love with himself along the way.

I’m just a man, standing in front of a salad, asking it to be a cake.

What do you do when you’re too gay for Pakistan, too Pakistani to be gay in America, and you’re ashamed of your body everywhere? How can you find happiness despite years of humiliation, physical danger, and a legion of Brooklyn hipsters who know you only as a queer from Whereveristan? How do you summon the courage to be yourself no matter where you are?

Even as a young child in Lahore, Komail Aijazuddin knew he was different—no one else at his all-boys prep school was pirouetting off their desks, or bullied for their “manboobs,�� or spontaneously bursting into songs from The Little Mermaid.

Aijazuddin began to believe his only chance at a happy, meaningful life would be found elsewhere: America, the land of the free, the home of the gays. But the hostility of a post-9/11 world and society’s rejection of his art, his desires, and his body would soon teach him that finding happiness takes a lot more than a plane ticket.

Searching for his place between two worlds while navigating a minefield of expectations, prejudice, and self-doubt, Aijazuddin discovered, sometimes painfully, sometimes hilariously, that there are people and places he’d need to let go of to move forward.]]> 272 Komail Aijazuddin 1419773844 Jebediah 0 south-asia, fem-lgbtq 4.32 2024 Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake

Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake

author: Komail Aijazuddin
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: south-asia, fem-lgbtq
review:

]]> <![CDATA[One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body]]> 50775211 One of the finest and most unusual autobiographies written in contemporary India.
In this unusual, extraordinary autobiography, Shanta Gokhale—writer, translator and one of India’s most illuminating cultural commentators—traces the arc of her life over eight decades through the progress of her body, as it grows, matures and begins to wind down. Starting with her birth in 1939—in philosophic silence, till the doctor’s slap on her bottom made her bawl—she recounts her childhood, youth and middle and old age in chapters built around the many elements and processes of the physical self: tonsils and adenoids, breasts and misaligned teeth; childbirth and fluctuating weight, cancer and bunions. And through these memories emerge others, less visible but just as defining: a carefree childhood growing up in a progressive Marathi household in Mumbai’s Shivaji Park; the pleasures, in adolescence, of badminton, Kathak and hairdressing; the warmth of friends and an almost love in cold England; finding and losing a mate—twice—and bringing up her children as a single parent; the great thrill of her first translation from Marathi into English; nursing her mother, dying of cancer, as she would a baby; surviving cancer herself, and writing her second novel through the recovery.
Told with effortless humour and candour, One Foot on the Ground is the story of a life full of happiness, heartbreak, wonder and acceptance. It will rank among the finest personal histories written in India.]]> 210 Shanta Gokhale 9388874862 Jebediah 5 4.23 One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body

One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body

author: Shanta Gokhale
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/04
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: memoir-creative-nonfic, south-asia
review:

]]> On Marvellous Things Heard 50668618 50 Aristotle 1785167782 Jebediah 5 speculative 3.80 -350

author: Aristotle
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.80
book published: -350
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: speculative
review:

]]> Magical Beatdown (Volume 1) 29618810
Watch in awe as she swiftly disposes of street harassers with her impressive array of magical weapons.

Printed in fluorescent pink and blue ink on thick matte cover-stock.]]> 32 Jenn Woodall Jebediah 5 3.61 Magical Beatdown (Volume 1)

author: Jenn Woodall
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.61
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/01
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Magical Beatdown (Volume 2) 33899826 Jenn Woodall Jebediah 5 4.11 2019

author: Jenn Woodall
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/01
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Magical Beatdown, Vol. 3 63843234
The hyper-violent revenge fantasy continues, printed in striking fluorescent pinks and blues. This book can be read as a stand-alone or as part of the series.]]> Jenn Woodall Jebediah 5 4.14 Magical Beatdown, Vol. 3

author: Jenn Woodall
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/01
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Ninetails: Nine Tales 198137978
A fox spirit avenges a teen girl by seducing her abuser. A shapeshifting woman finds herself chased through the woods by fox hunters; meanwhile, an assassination plot called Operation Fox Hunt unfolds against the last Queen of Korea. Chinese migrants hoping to make new lives as “paper children�� in America find their pasts—and their hopes for the future—embodied in the foxes that haunt the harbor in 1900s Angel Island. In the nine tales of Ninetails, acclaimed poet Sally Wen Mao reimagines the fox spirit from Asian folklore—a shapeshifter, shaman, and seductress—as an icon of vengeance, solidarity and liberation. The characters of her stories are varied—from silicone sex dolls who come to life with new purpose, to women whose crushes manifest as stones—but they all reach for a common to find truth and belonging in a difficult world determined to consider them alien.

With the fabulist vibrancy of Carmen Maria Machado, the sinuous world-building of Helen Oyeyemi, and the sensuous feminist rage of Han Kang, Ninetails is both timeless—unearthing a cultural icon whose origins date back over a thousand years—and timely in its contemporary political urgency.]]> 288 Sally Wen Mao 0143137891 Jebediah 3 speculative 3.67 2024 Ninetails: Nine Tales

author: Sally Wen Mao
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves: speculative
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Consider the Lobster and Other Essays]]> 6751
Contains: "Big Red Son," "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think," "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed," "Authority and American Usage," "The View from Mrs. Thompson's," "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," "Up, Simba," "Consider the Lobster," "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" and "Host."]]> 343 David Foster Wallace 0316156116 Jebediah 3 memoir-creative-nonfic 4.19 2005 Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

author: David Foster Wallace
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/16
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: memoir-creative-nonfic
review:
Long essays. Insanely long and meticulously boring. Although the one about professional athletes was brilliant and I'll never eat lobsters again. One star for each of those.
]]> The Right to Sex 58347562 Thrilling, sharp, and deeply humane, philosopher Amia Srinivasan's 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.]]> 304 Amia Srinivasan 1526612534 Jebediah 5 fem-lgbtq 4.19 2021 The Right to Sex

author: Amia Srinivasan
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/18
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: fem-lgbtq
review:

]]> Strange Weather in Tokyo 18283207 176 Hiromi Kawakami 1846275083 Jebediah 3 fic-lit, in-translation 3.63 2001

author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: fic-lit, in-translation
review:

]]> Monster Portraits 36139586
Del Samatar's drawings conjure beings who drag worlds in their wake. World Fantasy Award-winning author Sofia Samatar responds with allusive, critical, and ecstatic meditations. Together they have created a secret history of the multi-racial child, a guide to the beasts of an unknown mythos, and a dreamer's iconography. Monster Portraits resonates in a world obsessed with the Other, using captivating nomenclature, art, fiction, and essay to examine society’s damaging desire to define and divide. The monstrous never looked so simultaneously haunting and familiar.]]> 78 Sofia Samatar 1941628109 Jebediah 3 speculative 4.07 2017 Monster Portraits

author: Sofia Samatar
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: speculative
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Things We Found During the Autopsy]]> 20602886
These stories contain the following: a dragon; angels; Indian culture; one Christmas story for children; no Indian culture whatsoever; men; poor people; voluntarily homeless youths; women; drugs; sex; Indian dads in cold foreign countries; vomit; boys; girl's hostels; girls; future tense; the Tropicool Icy-Land Urban Indian Slum; ash, and the people who eat ash; authentic village life written from a privileged English-speaking perspective; homosexuals; white people; references to Rajinikanth; non-italicized Tamil words; whores; brain aneurysms; Western dance in South Indian women's colleges; Pazhani; floods; shapeshifters; men named Kathir; minty-fresh non-cola cola; and wannabe Naxalites.]]> 199 Kuzhali Manickavel 9380636172 Jebediah 3 3.93 2014 Things We Found During the Autopsy

author: Kuzhali Manickavel
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: fic-lit, south-asia, speculative
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Poonachi: Or the Story of a Black Goat]]> 38318462
As you follow her story from forest to habitation, independence to motherhood, you recognise in its significant moments the depth and magnitude of your own fears and longings, fuelled by the instinct for survival that animates all life. Masterly and nuanced, Perumal Murugan’s tale forces us reflect on our own responses to hierarchy and ownership, selflessness and appetite, love and desire, living and dying. Poonachi is the story of a goat who carries the burden of being different all her life, of a she-goat who survives against the odds. It is equally an expression of solidarity with the animal world and the female condition. The tale is also a commentary on our times, on the choices we make as a society and a nation, and the increasing vulnerability of individuals, particularly writers and artists, who resist when they are pressed to submit.

Reviews for Poonachi

“Murugan’s sarcasm speaks of the robustness of his spirit �� As in all his novels, (his) story is rich in detail �� (He) sustains the narrative tension right from the start.��- Elizabeth Kuruvilla, The Hindu Literary Review]]> 179 Perumal Murugan Jebediah 1 in-translation, south-asia 4.11 2018 Poonachi: Or the Story of a Black Goat

author: Perumal Murugan
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: in-translation, south-asia
review:

]]> The Eye of the Heron 250260
Luz understands what it means to have no choices. Her father is a Boss and he has ruled over her life with the same iron fist. Luz wonders what it might be like to make her own choices. To be free to choose her own destiny.

When the crisis over the new settlement reaches a flash point, Luz will have her chance.]]> 192 Ursula K. Le Guin 0765346125 Jebediah 3 ursula 3.81 1978 The Eye of the Heron

author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1978
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/10/31
shelves: ursula
review:

]]> What Belongs to You 22929602
What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.

Listening length: 6 hours, 11 minutes]]> 195 Garth Greenwell 0374288224 Jebediah 3 fem-lgbtq, fic-lit 3.79 2016 What Belongs to You

author: Garth Greenwell
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves: fem-lgbtq, fic-lit
review:

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

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Jebediah 2 fic-lit, fem-lgbtq 3.51 2024 All Fours

author: Miranda July
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/17
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves: fic-lit, fem-lgbtq
review:

]]> Hijab Butch Blues 61111274 A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran in this daring, provocative, and radically hopeful memoir.

When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher--her female teacher--she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can't yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don't matter, and it's easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: when Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya?

From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own--ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant.

This searingly intimate memoir in essays, spanning Lamya's childhood to her arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, tells a universal story of courage, trust, and love, celebrating what it means to be a seeker and an architect of one's own life.]]> 284 Lamya H. 0593448766 Jebediah 3 4.47 2023 Hijab Butch Blues

author: Lamya H.
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/17
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: fem-lgbtq, memoir-creative-nonfic
review:

]]> Lila (Gilead, #3) 20575411
Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church - the only available shelter from the rain - and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.

Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.

Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.]]> 261 Marilynne Robinson 0374187614 Jebediah 5 fic-lit, favorites 3.95 2014 Lila (Gilead, #3)

author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves: fic-lit, favorites
review:

]]> Housekeeping 11741 Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.]]> 219 Marilynne Robinson 0312424094 Jebediah 5 fic-lit, favorites 3.82 1980 Housekeeping

author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: fic-lit, favorites
review:

]]> One Hundred Poems of Kabir 166351 162 Kabir 1421253593 Jebediah 3 poetry 4.20 1915

author: Kabir
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1915
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> In Praise of Shadows 34473 56 Jun'ichirō Tanizaki Jebediah 4 in-translation 4.06 1933

author: Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1933
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: in-translation
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution]]> 60843494 A haunting, intimate account of the women and men who built a feminist revolution in the middle of the Arab Spring.

In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution’s symbolic birthplace.

This is the story of the women and men who formed Opantish - Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment - who deployed hundreds of volunteers, scouts rescue teams, and getaway drivers to intervene in the spiraling cases of sexual violence against women protesters in the square. Organized and led by women during 2012��2013 - the final, chaotic months of Egypt’s revolution - teams of volunteers fought their way into circles of men to pull the woman at the center to safety. Often, they risked assault themselves.

Journalist Yasmin El-Rifae was one of Opantish’s organizers, and this is her evocative, aching account of their work, as they raced to develop new tactics, struggled with a revolution bleeding into counter-revolution, and dealt with the long aftermath of assault and devastation. Told in a daring, hybrid narrative style drawn from years of interviews and her own, intimate experience, it is a story of overlapping circles: the circles of male attackers activists had to break through, the ways sexual violence can be circled off as “irrelevant�� to political struggle, and the endless repetitive loops of living with trauma.

Introducing a powerful new voice, a writer whose searchingly beautiful, spare prose cuts to the core of a story ever more urgent and relevant: of women’s resistance when all else has failed.]]> 208 Yasmin El-Rifae 1839767685 Jebediah 5 4.54 2022 Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution

author: Yasmin El-Rifae
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/27
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: fem-lgbtq, memoir-creative-nonfic
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative]]> 208580653 From the award-winning novelist of The Parisian and Enter Ghost comes an outstanding essay on the Palestinian struggle and the power of narrative.

Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University nine days before October 7th, 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history. Profound and moving, Hammad writes from within the moment, giving voice to the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognizing the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today.

"Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.�� Rashid Khalidi, author of the New York Times bestseller The Hundred Years�� War on Palestine]]> 96 Isabella Hammad 0802163920 Jebediah 3 4.67 2024 Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

author: Isabella Hammad
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/27
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Oculus: Poems 40121999 A brilliant second collection by Sally Wen Mao on the violence of the spectacle—starring the film legend Anna May Wong

In Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence spanning the collection speaks in the voice of the international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.]]> 119 Sally Wen Mao 1555978258 Jebediah 0 poetry 4.19 2019 Oculus: Poems

author: Sally Wen Mao
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Forgiving Self: The Road from Resentment to Connection]]> 345102 between our wish to repair our relationships on the one side and our tendency to see ourselves as victims who need revenge on the other.

Dr. Karen writes that our capacity to forgive reveals much about our character–including our ability to recognize the humanity in someone who has hurt us and to see our own limitations and complicity in whatever went wrong. He argues that the forgiving spirit not only liberates us from feeling victimized by others but frees us from compulsive self-hatred and regret as for forgiving others is nothing but the mirror image of forgiving oneself.

Throughout Karen insists that we are not saints, that forgiveness is a struggle for everyone, and that we cannot be truly forgiving if we do not allow ourselves our negative emotions, especially anger. If our harshest feelings are suppressed, we can never move beyond them.

Forgiveness sheds light on the envy, narcissism, and paranoia that threaten relationships; the childhood experiences that magnify those qualities; and, finally, the processes of mourning, healthy protest, and what he calls "the redeployment of love" that can help us to let go and move beyond them.]]> 304 Robert Karen 0385488734 Jebediah 5 psych-med 4.21 2001 The Forgiving Self: The Road from Resentment to Connection

The Forgiving Self: The Road from Resentment to Connection

author: Robert Karen
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: psych-med
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Two or Three Things I Know for Sure]]> 8133912 Bastard Out of Carolina, nominated for the 1992 National Book Award for fiction, introduced Dorothy Allison as one of the most passionate and gifted writers of her generation. Now, in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she takes a probing look at her family's history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the next.

Illustrated with photographs from the author's personal collection, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure tells the story of the Gibson women -- sisters, cousins, daughters, and aunts -- and the men who loved them, often abused them, and, nonetheless, shared their destinies. With luminous clarity, Allison explores how desire surprises and what power feels like to a young girl as she confronts abuse.

As always, Dorothy Allison is provocative, confrontational, and brutally honest. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, steeped in the hard-won wisdom of experience, expresses the strength of her unique vision with beauty and eloquence.]]> 94 Dorothy Allison 1101127988 Jebediah 3 4.06 1995

author: Dorothy Allison
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2012/10/29
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: fem-lgbtq, memoir-creative-nonfic
review:

]]> The Return 28007895
When he was twelve, Matar and his family went into political exile. Eight years later Matar's father, a former diplomat and military man turned brave political dissident, was kidnapped from the streets of Cairo by the Libyan government and is believed to have been held in the regime's most notorious prison. ��Now, the prisons are empty and little hope remains that Jaballa Matar will be found alive. Yet, as the author writes, hope is "persistent and cunning".��

This book is a profoundly moving family memoir, a brilliant and affecting portrait of a country and a people on the cusp of immense change, and a disturbing and timeless depiction of the monstrous nature of absolute power.]]> 256 Hisham Matar 034580774X Jebediah 4 memoir-creative-nonfic 4.15 2016 The Return

author: Hisham Matar
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: memoir-creative-nonfic
review:

]]> Theophanies 123487316
What does it mean to have a woman’s body when that body has been hailed a vessel for the divine? Braiding the scriptures of the Qur’an and the Bible, Theophanies explores the complexities and spectacles of gender, faith, and family by unraveling the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Through art and music, Pakistani history, and scriptural stories, these poems speak back against time to the matriarchs of the Abrahamic faiths, the mothers at the heart of sacred history.

Stitched throughout is longing―for mothers, angels, and signs from the divine. In the absence of matrilineal elders in her family, the speaker turns to the archetypal “mother of nations�� for whom she is named, Sarah, and her sent-away “sister,�� Hajar, to better reckon with her place in the mother line.]]> 100 Sarah Ghazal Ali Jebediah 0 poetry, south-asia 4.46 2024 Theophanies

author: Sarah Ghazal Ali
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: poetry, south-asia
review:

]]> Notes on the End of the World 29868871 —Bianca Stone, author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows]]> 48 Meghan Privitello 1625579624 Jebediah 5 poetry 4.33 2016

author: Meghan Privitello
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child]]> 9513034 184 Thich Nhat Hanh 1935209647 Jebediah 0 self-help 4.29 2010

author: Thich Nhat Hanh
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/13
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: self-help
review:

]]> Art and Fear 187633 122 David Bayles 0961454733 Jebediah 5 3.77 1994

author: David Bayles
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/13
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: memoir-creative-nonfic, on-writing
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Secret Lives of Church Ladies]]> 51582376 The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions.

There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who has a crush on the preacher’s wife. At forty-two, Lyra realizes that her discomfort with her own body stands between her and a new love. As Y2K looms, Caroletta’s “same time next year�� arrangement with her childhood best friend is tenuous. A serial mistress lays down the ground rules for her married lovers. In the dark shadows of a hospice parking lot, grieving strangers find comfort in each other.

With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.]]> 217 Deesha Philyaw 1949199738 Jebediah 4 fem-lgbtq, fic-lit 4.16 2020 The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

author: Deesha Philyaw
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/13
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: fem-lgbtq, fic-lit
review:

]]> Till We Have Faces 17343
Set against the backdrop of Glome, a barbaric, pre-Christian world, the struggles between sacred and profane love are illuminated as Orual learns that we cannot understand the intent of the gods "till we have faces" and sincerity in our souls and selves.]]> 313 C.S. Lewis Jebediah 5 fic-lit 4.19 1956

author: C.S. Lewis
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1956
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: fic-lit
review:

]]> Mansfield Park 45046 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

Adopted into the household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up a meek outsider among her cousins in the unaccustomed elegance of Mansfield Park. Soon after Sir Thomas absents himself on estate business in Antigua (the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in the Introduction in a new, post-colonial light), Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive at Mansfield, bringing with them London glamour, and the seductive taste for flirtation and theatre that precipitates a crisis. While Mansfield Park appears in some ways to continue where Pride and Prejudice left off, it is, as Kathryn Sutherland shows in her illuminating Introduction, a much darker work, which challenges 'the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse'. This new edition provides an accurate text based, for the first time since its original publication, on the first edition of 1814.]]> 479 Jane Austen 0140620664 Jebediah 4 fic-lit 3.62 1814 Mansfield Park

author: Jane Austen
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1814
rating: 4
read at: 2012/09/01
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: fic-lit
review:

]]> Interpreter of Maladies 5439 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.]]> 198 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618101365 Jebediah 5 south-asia 4.18 1999 Interpreter of Maladies

author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: south-asia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within]]> 578518 171 Natalie Goldberg 0877733759 Jebediah 0 on-writing 4.10 1986

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

author: Natalie Goldberg
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves: on-writing
review:

]]> In Other Words 25614298
In Other Words is at heart a love story—of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. And although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery had always eluded her. So in 2012, seeking full immersion, she decided to move to Rome with her family, for “a trial by fire, a sort of baptism�� into a new language and world.

In Rome, Lahiri began to read, and to write—initially in her journal—solely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice. Presented in a dual-language format, it is a book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Nabokov. A startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention.]]> 233 Jhumpa Lahiri 1101875550 Jebediah 5 3.74 2015 In Other Words

author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves: in-translation, on-writing, memoir-creative-nonfic
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories]]> 99300
Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naïve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women �� and how they might be improved.

Collects:
—The Yellow Wallpaper
—Three Thanksgivings
—The Cottagette
—T�ܰ��Ա��
—Making a Change
—If I Were a Man
—Mr. Peebles' Heart]]> 129 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0486298574 Jebediah 3 fic-lit 4.05 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: fic-lit
review:

]]> Slow Startle 30637131 58 Rohan Chhetri 0986065242 Jebediah 0 poetry, south-asia 4.53 22016

author: Rohan Chhetri
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.53
book published: 22016
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: poetry, south-asia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction]]> 429983 250 Ursula K. Le Guin 0060168358 Jebediah 4 ursula 4.25 1979

The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: ursula
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition (Illustrated)]]> 35958167 Leaves of Grass ��in 1855, he rocked the literary world and forever changed the course of poetry. In subsequent editions, Whitman continued to revise and expand his poems--but none matched the raw power and immediacy of the first edition.

This beautifully-designed volume presents the original edition�� Leaves of Grass ��in its entirety, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous letter to Whitman.��

The Kindle e-book��(��:��074�Ҹ��ҳ��)��is FREE when you buy the paperback��(��:��074�Ҹ��ҳ��). Check the item numbers to make sure you have the right edition.��

Kindle edition includes 12 paintings by George Caleb Bingham.]]> 162 Walt Whitman Jebediah 0 poetry 3.94 1855 Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition (Illustrated)

Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition (Illustrated)

author: Walt Whitman
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1855
rating: 0
read at: 2021/11/12
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves: poetry
review:
So much hornier than I expected.
]]> A Strange and Sublime Address 25558800
]]> 264 Amit Chaudhuri Jebediah 5 fic-lit, south-asia 3.22 1991

author: Amit Chaudhuri
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.22
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/29
date added: 2024/07/28
shelves: fic-lit, south-asia
review:
Ten-year-old Sandeep spends his summer holidays at his uncle's home in Calcutta, observes the city, his relatives, and the days passing. That's pretty much it. An exquisitely noticed, languid little book that astonishes on every page with its blend of particularity and dreaminess. I will return to this one again and again.
]]> <![CDATA[The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House]]> 1909749

The Writer's Notebook combines the best craft seminars from the Summer Writers Workshop's history with craft essays by some of Tin House's favorite authors and features a list of contributors that reads like a veritable who’s who of contemporary poets and prose writers. Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, Steve Almond, D. A. Powell, Chris Offutt, and others distill elements of writing and share insights into the joys and pains of their own work. They explore a wide range of topics, everything from writing dialogue to the do’s and don'ts of writing about sex. With how-tos, close readings, and personal anecdotes, The Writer's Notebook offers aspiring wordsmiths advice and inspiration to hone their own craft. Included is a CD of workshop discussions and panels

]]> 288 Dorothy Allison 0979419816 Jebediah 3 on-writing 4.13 2009 The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

author: Dorothy Allison
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: on-writing
review:

]]> Are Prisons Obsolete? 108428
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.]]> 128 Angela Y. Davis 1583225811 Jebediah 3 law 4.53 2003 Are Prisons Obsolete?

author: Angela Y. Davis
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2019/09/16
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves: law
review:

]]> Consent: A Memoir 200798634 Half a Life. She asks herself whether she told the whole truth back then. What did truth look like to her in the era of love-bead curtains, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility of May-December romance? With new understanding about the imbalance of power between an older man and a minor girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband’s death at age ninety-three.]]> 145 Jill Ciment 0593701062 Jebediah 0 memoir-creative-nonfic 3.83 2024 Consent: A Memoir

author: Jill Ciment
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/19
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves: memoir-creative-nonfic
review:

]]> The Late Americans 62092265
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.�� These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.]]> 303 Brandon Taylor 0593332334 Jebediah 2 fem-lgbtq, fic-lit
They're jaded, alienated, sometimes pretentious, and always passive--maddeningly passive. Events, conflict, and relationships just sort of happen to them with no evidence of effort or intention. They give very little to those who apparently matter to them, and expect very little in return. The bonds between people are cobweb thin, based on little other than being at the same place at the same time (or fucking), so when they end over a petty squabble or a cruel fight, it’s impossible for me to care. Do the characters themselves care? We are provided glimpses into their wilted, resigned inner lives by a narrator who seems equally fatigued by existence, so how could we know? Sentences like this, for example, made me want to scream:

“They were always breaking up and getting back together, which Ivan understood. Sometimes it was like that.��
or
“They didn’t talk for the rest of the week. They didn’t talk the following week. And then it was as if they had never been together at all. Things went on. Things always have a way of getting on.��

Or conversations like this,

“You don’t seem happy,�� Ivan said.
“I’m not.��
“I’m sorry.��
“Don’t be if you’re not.��
“I am.��
Goran sighed. “This is tiresome.��

Yes. It is very tiresome.

The unfailing passivity of the main characters leads to all sorts of unpleasantness, which forms “the plot�� of the book. People are violent to them, or cruel. Sometimes, this passivity causes characters to stay in (or return to) romantic entanglements that might have made sense at some point—the reader has to take this on faith—but don’t anymore. Fuck, fight, get back together. Ok, and? Everyone seems to miss everyone else terribly when they’re gone or broken up, but when they’re together they’re bitchy and petty. There is no kindness in these people or softness. No generosity, loyalty or grace. No humor that isn't rooted in meanness, no joy or nuance or emotional complexity. What is their moral framework, what is the core? Who are they beneath their melancholic ruminations, when they’re done fighting and smoking and fucking? I don’t know. I wonder if the author does.]]> 3.34 2023 The Late Americans

author: Brandon Taylor
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: fem-lgbtq, fic-lit
review:
I consistently love Brandon Taylor’s unhurried, quiet, thoughtful nonfiction, particularly his craft pieces. But I find his fiction perennially dissatisfying and I wasn’t able to put a finger on why until I read The Late Americans. It's the characters. Across books and stories, his characters are depressed shadows. (The men, I mean. The women, clearly written by a man, I cannot even get into.)

They're jaded, alienated, sometimes pretentious, and always passive--maddeningly passive. Events, conflict, and relationships just sort of happen to them with no evidence of effort or intention. They give very little to those who apparently matter to them, and expect very little in return. The bonds between people are cobweb thin, based on little other than being at the same place at the same time (or fucking), so when they end over a petty squabble or a cruel fight, it’s impossible for me to care. Do the characters themselves care? We are provided glimpses into their wilted, resigned inner lives by a narrator who seems equally fatigued by existence, so how could we know? Sentences like this, for example, made me want to scream:

“They were always breaking up and getting back together, which Ivan understood. Sometimes it was like that.��
or
“They didn’t talk for the rest of the week. They didn’t talk the following week. And then it was as if they had never been together at all. Things went on. Things always have a way of getting on.��

Or conversations like this,

“You don’t seem happy,�� Ivan said.
“I’m not.��
“I’m sorry.��
“Don’t be if you’re not.��
“I am.��
Goran sighed. “This is tiresome.��

Yes. It is very tiresome.

The unfailing passivity of the main characters leads to all sorts of unpleasantness, which forms “the plot�� of the book. People are violent to them, or cruel. Sometimes, this passivity causes characters to stay in (or return to) romantic entanglements that might have made sense at some point—the reader has to take this on faith—but don’t anymore. Fuck, fight, get back together. Ok, and? Everyone seems to miss everyone else terribly when they’re gone or broken up, but when they’re together they’re bitchy and petty. There is no kindness in these people or softness. No generosity, loyalty or grace. No humor that isn't rooted in meanness, no joy or nuance or emotional complexity. What is their moral framework, what is the core? Who are they beneath their melancholic ruminations, when they’re done fighting and smoking and fucking? I don’t know. I wonder if the author does.
]]> Shame 399256
"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame , the probing story of the 12 year old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life.

With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.]]> 112 Annie Ernaux 1583220186 Jebediah 3 memoir-creative-nonfic 3.72 1997 Shame

author: Annie Ernaux
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: memoir-creative-nonfic
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Catching the Light (Why I Write)]]> 60747384
Harjo insists the most meaningful poetry is birthed through cracks in history from what is broken and unseen. At the crossroads of this brokenness, she calls us to watch and listen for the songs of justice for all those America has denied. This is an homage to the power of words to defy erasure--to inscribe the story, again and again, of who we have been, who we are, and who we can be.]]> 128 Joy Harjo 0300257031 Jebediah 3 4.31 2022 Catching the Light (Why I Write)

author: Joy Harjo
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/11
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: on-writing, soul-food-religion
review:

]]> Sweet Shop 43567501
'Chaudhuri's experiments in poetic alchemy turn sweet nothings into ontological reflections. These odes to the pleasures of faltu-the unnecessary - are pungent, chewy, and succulent.' -Charles Bernstein

'The lexical vitality, magically achieved through words which are mostly new to us, is a perfect lyrical representation of the sweetness and elegiac bitterness of life.' -Bernard O'Donoghue]]> 192 Amit Chaudhuri 0670091863 Jebediah 0 poetry, south-asia 3.47 Sweet Shop

author: Amit Chaudhuri
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.47
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/11
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: poetry, south-asia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence]]> 24727435
In this powerful and timely book, one of the most admired and authoritative religious leaders of our time tackles the phenomenon of religious extremism and violence committed in the name of God. If religion is perceived as being part of the problem, Rabbi Sacks argues, then it must also form part of the solution. When religion becomes a zero-sum conceit—that is, my religion is the only right path to God, therefore your religion is by definition wrong—and individuals are motivated by what Rabbi Sacks calls “altruistic evil,�� violence between peoples of different beliefs appears to be the only natural outcome.
��
But through an exploration of the roots of violence and its relationship to religion, and employing groundbreaking biblical analysis and interpretation, Rabbi Sacks shows that religiously inspired violence has as its source misreadings of biblical texts at the heart of all three Abrahamic faiths. By looking anew at the book of Genesis, with its foundational stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Rabbi Sacks offers a radical rereading of many of the Bible’s seminal stories of sibling Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Rachel and Leah.
��
“Abraham himself,�� writes Rabbi Sacks, “sought to be a blessing to others regardless of their faith. That idea, ignored for many of the intervening centuries, remains the simplest definition of Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion for political ends is not righteousness but idolatry . . . To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege.�� Here is an eloquent call for people of goodwill from all faiths and none to stand together, confront the religious extremism that threatens to destroy us, and Not in God’s Name.]]> 320 Jonathan Sacks 0805243348 Jebediah 2 4.32 2015 Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

author: Jonathan Sacks
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/09
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves:
review:
A few good reinterpretations of biblical stories emerge from what is otherwise a flatout shitstorm of Islamophobia.
]]> The Memory Keeper's Daughter 826300
For though David's son is a healthy boy, his daughter has Down's syndrome. And, in a shocking act of betrayal whose consequences only time will reveal, he tells his wife their daughter died while secretly entrusting her care to a nurse.

As grief quietly tears apart David's family, so a little girl must make her own way in the world as best she can.]]> 401 Kim Edwards 0141030143 Jebediah 2 3.42 2005 The Memory Keeper's Daughter

author: Kim Edwards
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at: 2012/08/01
date added: 2024/06/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Loin de Médine 1692896 Nous découvrons les figures d’une histoire ignorée, oubliée : reines de tribus, prophétesses, femmes chefs de guerre dans une Arabie en effervescence. Fatima, l’indomptable fille du Prophète, se dresse telle une Antigone arabe, tandis qu’Aïcha, sa jeune veuve, s’installe dans son rôle de « diseuse de mémoire ».
Bien d’autres encore, femmes de La Mecque, affranchies, errantes, mêlent leurs voix et se souviennent.
Ce livre puissant, inspiré, restitue aux femmes une place volée ou occultée à la source de l’Islam.]]> 311 Djebar 2253136727 Jebediah 5 3.76 1991 Loin de Médine

author: Djebar
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/23
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves: fem-lgbtq, in-translation, soul-food-religion
review:

]]> The Translator 107824 203 Leila Aboulela 0802170269 Jebediah 0 fic-lit 3.60 1999

author: Leila Aboulela
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/22
date added: 2024/06/22
shelves: fic-lit
review:

]]> Happening 129263635
This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.

In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

Now an award-winning film by Audrey Diwan

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival

Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival]]> 96 Annie Ernaux 1609809483 Jebediah 3 4.36 2000 Happening

author: Annie Ernaux
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/18
date added: 2024/06/18
shelves: memoir-creative-nonfic, in-translation
review:

]]> My Friends 127488823
The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and although nothing does, we continue, inside our dream.

One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.

There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, much less��return to��the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would jeopardize their safety.

When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him, but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.

A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful��work��of literature by an author��at the peak of his powers.]]> 399 Hisham Matar 081299485X Jebediah 5 fic-lit 4.31 2024

author: Hisham Matar
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2024/06/17
shelves: fic-lit
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry]]> 127955 The Giant's House—a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award—was widely praised for its heart, its humor, and its poetic yet unsentimental voice. Like her extraordinary novel, McCracken's stories are a delightful blend of eccentricity and romanticism. In the title story, a young man and his wife are intrigued and amused when a peculiar unknown aunt announces a surprise visit—only the old woman can't be traced on the family tree. In "What We Know About the Lost Aztec Children," the "normal" middle-class son of a former circus performer (the Armless Woman) must suddenly confront his mother's pain. In "It's Bad Luck to Die," a young woman discovers that her husband's loving creations—he's a tattoo artist—make her feel at home in her skin for the first time. Daring, offbeat, and utterly unforgettable, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry is the work of an unparalleled young storyteller who possesses a rare insight and unconventional wisdom far beyond her years. Her stories will steal your heart.

It's bad luck to die --
Some have entertained angels, unaware --
Here's your hat what's your hurry --
The bar of our recent unhappiness --
Mercedes Kane --
What we know about the lost Aztec children --
June --
Secretary of State --
The goings-on of the world]]> 210 Elizabeth McCracken 0380730790 Jebediah 3 fic-lit 3.97 1993 Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry

author: Elizabeth McCracken
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/05/26
shelves: fic-lit
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?]]> 18594409 #1 New York Times Bestseller

2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.

When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the "crazy closet"—with predictable results—the tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed.

While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies—an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades—the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care.

An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.]]> 228 Roz Chast 1608198065 Jebediah 3 graphic-novels 4.15 2014

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

author: Roz Chast
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/05/26
shelves: graphic-novels
review:

]]> What to Read and Why 35487205
In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose’s previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story, and even on books by photographers like Diane Arbus.

Prose considers why the works of literary masters such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen have endured, and shares intriguing insights about modern authors whose words stimulate our minds and enlarge our lives, including Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jennifer Egan, and Mohsin Hamid. Prose implores us to read Mavis Gallant for her marvelously rich and compact sentences, and her meticulously rendered characters who reveal our flawed and complex human nature; Edward St. Aubyn for his elegance and sophisticated humor; and Mark Strand for his gift for depicting unlikely transformations. Here, too, are original pieces in which Prose explores the craft of "On Clarity" and "What Makes a Short Story."

Written with her sharp critical analysis, wit, and enthusiasm, What to Read and Why is a celebration of literature that will give readers a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the written word.]]> 341 Francine Prose 0062397885 Jebediah 3 on-writing 3.43 2018

author: Francine Prose
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/23
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves: on-writing
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature]]> 58772727
Charles Baxter’s new collection of essays, Wonderlands , joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext . In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers�� Conference.

The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story. Baxter is equally at home tackling a thorny matter such as charisma (which intersects with political figures like the disastrous forty-fifth US president) as he is bringing new interest to subjects such as list-making in fiction.

Amid these craft essays, an interlude of two personal essays―the story of a horrifying car crash and an introspective “letter to a young poet”―add to the intimate nature of the book. The final essay reflects on a lifetime of writing, and closes with a memorable image of Baxter as a boy, waiting at the window for a parent who never arrives and filling that absence with stories. Wonderlands will stand alongside his prior work as an insightful and lasting work of criticism.]]> 252 Charles Baxter 1644450917 Jebediah 4 on-writing 4.28 2022 Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature

Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature

author: Charles Baxter
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/23
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves: on-writing
review:

]]> The End of Days 20724710 The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,�� each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there��.

A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of the twentieth century.]]> 239 Jenny Erpenbeck 081122192X Jebediah 5 fic-lit, in-translation 3.78 2012

author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/23
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves: fic-lit, in-translation
review:

]]> Through the Woods 18659623 'It came from the woods. Most strange things do.'

Five mysterious, spine-tingling stories follow journeys into (and out of?) the eerie abyss.

These chilling tales spring from the macabre imagination of acclaimed and award-winning comic creator Emily Carroll.

Come take a walk in the woods and see what awaits you there...]]> 208 Emily Carroll 1442465956 Jebediah 3 graphic-novels 3.94 2014 Through the Woods

author: Emily Carroll
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
shelves: graphic-novels
review:

]]> Difficult Light 51509201 Over twenty years after his son’s death, nearly blind and unable to paint, David turns to writing to examine the deep shades of his loss. Despite his acute pain, or perhaps because of it, David observes beauty in the ordinary: in the resemblance of a woman to Egyptian portraits, in the horseshoe crabs that wash up on Coney Island, in the foam gathering behind a ferry propeller; in these moments, González reveals the world through a painter’s eyes. From one of Colombia’s greatest contemporary novelists, Difficult Light is a daring meditation on grief, written in candid, arresting prose.]]> 140 Tomás González 1939810604 Jebediah 4 4.25 2008

author: Tomás González
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/15
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves: in-translation, memoir-creative-nonfic
review:

]]> Visitation 8638226 Visitation offers the life stories of twelve individuals who seek to make their home in this one magical little house. The novel breaks into the everyday life of the house and shimmers through it, while relating the passions and fates of its inhabitants. Elegant and poetic, Visitation forms a literary mosaic of the last century, tearing open wounds and offering moments of reconciliation, with its drama and its exquisite evocation of a landscape no political upheaval can truly change.]]> 160 Jenny Erpenbeck 081121835X Jebediah 5 fic-lit, in-translation 3.76 2008 Visitation

author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/13
date added: 2024/05/13
shelves: fic-lit, in-translation
review:
My god. Utterly arresting. Best thing I've read this year.
]]> The Old Child 557079 112 Jenny Erpenbeck 1846270561 Jebediah 3 fic-lit, in-translation 3.04 1999

author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.04
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/14
date added: 2024/05/13
shelves: fic-lit, in-translation
review:

]]> Asymmetry 35297339 A singularly inventive and unforgettable debut novel about love, luck, and the inextricability of life and art, from 2017 Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday.

Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, Folly tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, Folly also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age. By contrast, Madness is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.

A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.]]> 277 Lisa Halliday 150116676X Jebediah 3 fic-lit 3.43 2018 Asymmetry

author: Lisa Halliday
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/09
date added: 2024/05/08
shelves: fic-lit
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past]]> 427127 280 Sam Wineburg 1566398568 Jebediah 5 social-science-humanities 3.91 2001

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past

author: Sam Wineburg
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/01
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: social-science-humanities
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Thanda Meetha Pani / ٹھنڈا میٹھا پانی]]> 20436949 نو کہانیوں پر مشتمل خدیجہ مستور کا افسانوی مجموعہ۔ ہجرہ ایوارڈ یافتہ۔]]> 160 Khadija Mastoor 9693505638 Jebediah 3 south-asia, fic-lit 3.83 1981 Thanda Meetha Pani / ٹھنڈا میٹھا پانی

author: Khadija Mastoor
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1981
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/01
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: south-asia, fic-lit
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (Pages from History)]]> 576334 Encounters in the New World.

Providing fascinating commentary along the way, Lepore seamlessly links together primary sources that illustrate the powerful clash of cultures in the Americas.]]> 160 Jill Lepore 0195154916 Jebediah 5 social-science-humanities 4.00 1999 Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (Pages from History)

Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (Pages from History)

author: Jill Lepore
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/01
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves: social-science-humanities
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tongue Tied: Untangling Communication in Sex, Kink, and Relationships]]> 38643389
"My favorite thing when I'm working with clients is when their eyes go wide with the 'ah-ha' moment that they really can have the sex life of their dreams. It's my hope that with this book, you can as well."--Stella Harris

Sex is still a touchy subject despite recent sex-positive advances. We live in a culture that vilifies people who are sexually adventurous and frames our kinks as shame-inducing perversions. Many people have never been able to talk openly about sex with their partner(s). But, you can get what you want out of the bedroom--if you ask for it. Why should anyone settle for mediocre sex?!

Whether addressing sexual frustration with your partner, trying out new fantasies, or negotiating the terms of a BDSM scene, Stella Harris believes that communication skills are vital to sexual fulfillment. Tongue Tied gives readers straightforward advice on how to conquer their fears, identify their needs, and feel positively empowered. Harris charmingly takes readers through all aspects of communication, from basic interpersonal skills to negotiation advice for expert-level kink play. Learn how to have fun, embrace silly moments, support your loved ones, and take personal responsibility for your desires.

An incredible guide full of exercises, tools, and personal examples, Tongue Tied is a must-read for people of every experience level and relationship status.]]> 285 Stella Harris 1627782664 Jebediah 0 fem-lgbtq 4.31 Tongue Tied: Untangling Communication in Sex, Kink, and Relationships

Tongue Tied: Untangling Communication in Sex, Kink, and Relationships

author: Stella Harris
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.31
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/17
date added: 2024/04/17
shelves: fem-lgbtq
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Writing Fiction and Nonfiction]]> 1679037 677 Alice LaPlante 0393061647 Jebediah 0 on-writing 4.24 2009

The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Writing Fiction and Nonfiction

author: Alice LaPlante
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/17
date added: 2024/04/17
shelves: on-writing
review:

]]> Shifting the Silence 56586093 Shifting the Silence does just that, breaks the social taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. In short unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan enumerates her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life at 95, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own inevitable death. The personal is continuously projected outwards and mirrored back through ruminations on climate catastrophe, California wildfires, the on-going war in Syria, planned missions to Mars, and the view of the sea from Adnan’s window in Brittany in a poignant often painful interplay between the interior and the cosmic.]]> 88 Etel Adnan Jebediah 0 4.11 2020 Shifting the Silence

author: Etel Adnan
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/17
date added: 2024/04/17
shelves: memoir-creative-nonfic, poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lady with Lapdog and other stories]]> 15721426
Grief
Agafya
Misfortune
A Boring Story (From an Old Man's Notebook)
The Grasshopper
Ward No. 6
Ariadne
The House with an Attic
Ionych
The Darling
The Lady with the Lapdog

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov may be likened to his contemporaries, the "pointilliste" painters. Piece by piece, episode by episode, character by character, he constructs in prose a survey of the human condition. As David Magarshack writes in his introduction, on reading these stories 'one gets the impression of holding life itself, like a fluttering bird, in one's cupped hands'.]]> 281 Anton Chekhov Jebediah 2 fic-lit 4.19 1899 Lady with Lapdog and other stories

author: Anton Chekhov
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1899
rating: 2
read at: 2015/06/09
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: fic-lit
review:
The persistent hum of misogyny interfered with my enjoyment of this collection. Maybe some other time.
]]> <![CDATA[Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings]]> 4026537
Kuzhali Manickavel was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, lived in various places around Canada, and moved to Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India when she was thirteen years old. Contrary to popular belief, she is not very fond of insects.

"[This book] is just very, very beautiful. The stories it collects are by turns weird, whimsical, surreal, visceral, haunting, quirky and fantastic"--The Guardian

"Kuzhali Manickavel writes dense, dazzling prose that is thick with local grit and soars in a cosmopolitan wonderland. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful and also completely bonkers."--Africa is a Country

"...possibly the most intriguing book on the list of thrilling publications from the house of Blaft... Manickavel (who titled a section of a recent blog post on Indian writing in English 'Do not have an unnecessarily complicated name like Kuzhali Manickavel') writes in English and lives in Chidambaram. The stories in Insects are sometimes as short as half a page and occasionally as long as twelve pages. Many of them do feature insects, or at least insect imagery, and diagrams of insects with witty labels are found throughout the book, such as the one shown here of an earwig representing childhood mythology. It is difficult to think of a way to encapsulate this collection of so many unusual and imaginative other reviewers refer to them as dream-like. I think it better to call them surreal; intricate, ironic and frequently hilarious, though sometimes very, very sad."--Bookslut

"Bloody fantastic"--Sarnath Banerjee]]> 152 Kuzhali Manickavel 8190605631 Jebediah 5 south-asia, speculative 3.73 2008 Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings

Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings

author: Kuzhali Manickavel
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves: south-asia, speculative
review:

]]> The Saint of Bright Doors 61884985
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.

He walked among invisible devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen.

Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.]]> 356 Vajra Chandrasekera 1250847389 Jebediah 3 speculative, south-asia 3.63 2023 The Saint of Bright Doors

author: Vajra Chandrasekera
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/21
shelves: speculative, south-asia
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Jeenay Ki Pabandi / جینے کی پابندی]]> 46184129 افسانے Khalida Hussain 9693531019 Jebediah 3 fic-lit, south-asia 3.00 2017

author: Khalida Hussain
name: Jebediah
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/21
date added: 2024/03/21
shelves: fic-lit, south-asia
review:

]]> The Bluest Eye 11337 The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change—in painful, devastating ways.

With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.]]> 216 Toni Morrison Jebediah 5 fic-lit 4.13 1970

author: Toni Morrison
name: Jebediah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/18
date added: 2024/03/18
shelves: fic-lit
review:

]]>