Rachael's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 25 May 2025 16:48:15 -0700 60 Rachael's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Signs Preceding the End of the World]]> 21535546 Winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction

Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.

Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages � one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.]]> 114 Yuri Herrera 1908276428 Rachael 3 3.90 2009 Signs Preceding the End of the World
author: Yuri Herrera
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2025/05/25
date added: 2025/05/25
shelves:
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]]> The Burning Plain 205848976
Since its publication in 1953, Juan Rulfo’s The Burning Plain (El Llano en llamas) has become Mexico’s most significant and most translated collection of short fiction. Set largely in a distressed rural region of the state of Jalisco known as El Llano Grande (the burning plain of the title), the seventeen stories of this anthology trace the lives of characters in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910�1917) and the Cristero Revolt (1926�1929). A father carries his fatally wounded son through the night in search of healing; a young girl’s prized cow is swept away by a flood, along with her family’s harvest; and a group of campesinos spend all day walking across the immense, barren Llano that the government has given them to farm. Through it all, Rulfo rejects moralizing and nostalgia, capturing instead the hushed reality of a landscape and people marked by violence and the weight of hardship and injustice.

Rulfo’s writing, often compared in importance to that of William Faulkner, Anton Chekov, and Gabriel García Marquez, is characterized by a laconic literary prose and the distinctive language heard throughout the rural communities of southern Jalisco. These qualities come alive in Douglas J. Weatherford’s vibrant new rendition of Mexico’s most celebrated collection. Seventy years after its first publication in Spanish, Rulfo’s work speaks to a new generation of readers.

“Among contemporary writers in Mexico today [1959], Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals.”―The New York Times Book Review

“What is remarkable about these sketches is that the characters are rendered with deep honesty; their faults are highlighted, celebrated in a way that is reminiscent of Chekhov's peasants.”―Publishers Weekly]]> 192 Juan Rulfo 147732996X Rachael 0 to-read 4.24 1953 The Burning Plain
author: Juan Rulfo
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> American Pastoral 11650 Pulitzer Prize Winner (1998)

In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Seymour 'Swede' Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.]]> 432 Philip Roth Rachael 5 3.93 1997 American Pastoral
author: Philip Roth
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/19
date added: 2025/05/19
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]]> Leonardo da Vinci 34684622 600 Walter Isaacson 1501139150 Rachael 0 to-read 4.18 2017 Leonardo da Vinci
author: Walter Isaacson
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind]]> 23692271 512 Yuval Noah Harari Rachael 3 4.33 2011 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2025/05/04
date added: 2025/05/04
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There’s an impressive amount of information in this relatively short book. Great storytelling—I just don’t remember most of what I read because it’s so fast and dense. Worth the read for the chapters on language, money, religion, comments on our industrial food production, and the section on happiness.
]]> <![CDATA[Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?]]> 36402034 258 Philip K. Dick Rachael 4 4.16 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/02
date added: 2025/05/02
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]]> <![CDATA[A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment]]> 36542524
Nearly 3 million Americans visit France every year, in addition to the more than 150,000 American expatriates who live there. Numerous bestselling books attest to American Francophilia, to say nothing of bestselling cookbooks, like those of Julia Child and Paula Wolfert. Now, husband-and-wife team Stephane Henaut and Jeni Mitchell give us the rich history behind the food—from Roquefort and absinthe to couscous and Calvados. The tales in A Bite-Sized History of France will delight and edify even the most seasoned lovers of food, history, and all things French.

From the crêpe that doomed Napoleon to the new foods borne of crusades and colonization to the rebellions sparked by bread and salt, the history of France—from the Roman era to modern times—is intimately entwined with its gastronomic pursuits. Traversing the cuisines of France’s most famous cities as well as its underexplored regions, this innovative culinary and social history includes travel tips; illustrations that explore the impact of war, imperialism, and global trade; the age-old tension between tradition and innovation; and the ways in which food has been used over the centuries to enforce social and political identities. A Bite-Sized History of France tells the compelling story of France through its food.]]> 352 Stephane Henaut 1620972522 Rachael 3 4.19 2018 A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment
author: Stephane Henaut
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
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]]> Abundance 176444106 Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in systemic from climate change to housing, education to healthcare.

To trace the global history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the environmental problems of the 1970s often prevent urban density and green energy projects that would help solve the environmental problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions in matters of education and healthcare have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. In a book exploring how can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them.]]> 304 Ezra Klein 1668023482 Rachael 0 to-read 4.07 2025 Abundance
author: Ezra Klein
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue]]> 50623864
Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.]]> 448 V.E. Schwab 0765387565 Rachael 3 4.16 2020 The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
author: V.E. Schwab
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/14
date added: 2025/04/14
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]]> Autocracy, Inc. 183932735 224 Anne Applebaum 0241627893 Rachael 0 to-read 4.20 2024 Autocracy, Inc.
author: Anne Applebaum
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Minotaur at Calle Lanza 192724173
Venice, 2020. As a pandemic rages across the globe, Zito Madu finds himself in a nearly deserted city, its walls and basilicas humming with strange magic. As he wanders a haunted landscape, we see him twist further into his own his family's difficult immigration from Nigeria to Detroit, his troubled relationship with his father, the sporadic joys of daily life and solitude, his experiences with migration, poverty, foreignness, racism, and his own rage and regret. But as it is with all labyrinths, after finding its center, will he come away unscathed, or will he transform into the gripping, fantastical monstrousness that's out to consume him whole?

With nods to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, this surrealist debut memoir takes us into the labyrinth of memory and the monsters lurking there.]]> 184 Zito Madu 1953368662 Rachael 3 4.22 The Minotaur at Calle Lanza
author: Zito Madu
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.22
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/07
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]]> A Moveable Feast 4631 192 Ernest Hemingway Rachael 4 4.04 1964 A Moveable Feast
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1964
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves:
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]]> The Ministry of Time 220160351 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats� from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge�: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as �1847� or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,� “Spotify,� and “the collapse of the British Empire.� But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.]]> 368 Kaliane Bradley 166804515X Rachael 0 to-read 3.56 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism]]> 205478787
From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, Paris and its people were forced into surrender by Germans and imperiled as rebel republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French army after the burning of central Paris. As Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Sebastian Smee shows, it was against the backdrop of these tumultuous times that the Impressionist movement was born—a reaction to violence, civil war, and political intrigue. Smee tells the story of Paris’s “Terrible Year� through the eyes of the Impressionists, with a focus on the relationship between Edouard Manet, the father of the movement, and Berthe Morisot, the group’s preeminent woman. With narrative sweep and vivid detail, Paris in Ruins captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, revealing how the pressures of the Siege and the chaos of the Commune had a monumental effect on the development of modern art.]]> 384 Sebastian Smee 1324006951 Rachael 3 4.07 Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism
author: Sebastian Smee
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
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]]> <![CDATA[A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire]]> 98652084 A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum comes a wildly entertaining new history of Rome that uses the lives of 21 extraordinary women to upend our understanding of the ancient world.

The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of "The Doing of Important Things," and as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don't make that history. From Romulus through "the political stab-fest of the late Republic," and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that.

Emma Southon's A Rome of One's Own is the best kind of correction. This is a retelling of the history of Rome with all the things Roman history writers relegate to the background, or designate as domestic, feminine, or worthless. This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One's Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.]]> 416 Emma Southon 1419760181 Rachael 0 to-read 4.15 2023 A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire
author: Emma Southon
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City]]> 17978088
Though most people associate the signature characteristics of Paris with the public works of the nineteenth century, Joan DeJean demonstrates that the Parisian model for urban space was in fact invented two centuries earlier, when the first complete design for the French capital was drawn up and implemented. As a result, Paris saw many changes. It became the first city to tear down its fortifications, inviting people in rather than keeping them out. Parisian urban planning showcased new kinds of streets, including the original boulevard, as well as public parks and the earliest sidewalks and bridges without houses. Venues opened for urban entertainment of all kinds, from opera and ballet to a pastime invented in Paris, recreational shopping. Parisians enjoyed the earliest public transportation and street lighting, and Paris became Europe's first great walking city.

A century of planned development made Paris both beautiful and exciting. It gave people reasons to be out in public as never before and as nowhere else. And it gave Paris its modern identity as a place that people dreamed of seeing. By 1700, Paris had become the capital that would revolutionize our conception of the city and of urban life.]]> 307 Joan DeJean 1608195910 Rachael 2 3.82 2014 How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City
author: Joan DeJean
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
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]]> The Mandarins 19528 The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desire and her public life.

The Mandarins won France's highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.]]> 752 Simone de Beauvoir 0007203942 Rachael 5
I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in history, philosophy, or humanism. For 600 pages, you get to be a fly on the wall of Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s house. You get to see important philosophical discussions of the past, while these important thinkers consider a “better� future. But how does one move on from the past? Do the horrors of the past mean anything, or should the optimism of the future take hold and mean everything? ]]> 4.18 1954 The Mandarins
author: Simone de Beauvoir
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1954
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves:
review:
I wonder how much I would have liked this book had my political context been different. Somehow post-WWII Paris offered insightful political conversations that got at the heart of modern politics? I was not expecting this.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in history, philosophy, or humanism. For 600 pages, you get to be a fly on the wall of Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s house. You get to see important philosophical discussions of the past, while these important thinkers consider a “better� future. But how does one move on from the past? Do the horrors of the past mean anything, or should the optimism of the future take hold and mean everything?
]]> Dream Count 219520778 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

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

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0593802721 Rachael 0 to-read 3.88 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Safekeep 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 Rachael 0 to-read 4.05 2024 The Safekeep
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 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 Rachael 3 3.50 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> A Very Easy Death 123942 A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces. The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s death “shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence� (The Sunday Telegraph).
Ěý
Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is ever likely to forget.]]> 112 Simone de Beauvoir 0394728998 Rachael 0 to-read 4.09 1964 A Very Easy Death
author: Simone de Beauvoir
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter 164006
She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent time in France politically.]]> 359 Simone de Beauvoir 0060825197 Rachael 0 to-read 4.13 1958 Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
author: Simone de Beauvoir
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Great Believers 45304101 A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed, indelible piece of literature; it was selected as one of New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Buzzfeed Book of the Year, a Skimm Reads pick, and a pick for the New York Public Library's Best Books of the year.]]> 421 Rebecca Makkai 073522353X Rachael 3 3.5 stars. <br /> 4.27 2018 The Great Believers
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves:
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3.5 stars.

]]> Death of the Author 214329001 The future of storytelling is here.

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

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

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

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.]]> 448 Nnedi Okorafor 0063391155 Rachael 0 to-read 4.04 2025 Death of the Author
author: Nnedi Okorafor
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> Dream Count 219521090 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

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

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X Rachael 0 to-read 3.89 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> Zikora 55612579 The emotional storms weathered by a mother and daughter yield a profound new understanding in a moving short story by the bestselling, award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists

When Zikora, a DC lawyer from Nigeria, tells her equally high-powered lover that she's pregnant, he abandons her. But it's Zikora's demanding, self-possessed mother, in town for the birth, who makes Zikora feel like a lonely little girl all over again. Shunned by the speed with which her ideal life fell apart, Zikora turns to reflecting on her mother's painful past and struggle for dignity. Preparing for motherhood, Zikora begins to see more clearly what her own mother wants for her, for her new baby, and for herself.

©2020 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc, all rights reserved.]]> 39 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Rachael 0 to-read 4.27 2020 Zikora
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)]]> 26228034 410 N.K. Jemisin Rachael 1 4.27 2016 The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 1
read at: 2025/01/14
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]]> Yellowface 213562784
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 322 R.F. Kuang 0063250853 Rachael 0 to-read 3.79 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> Black Cake 57926137 We can’t choose what we inherit. But can we choose who we become?

In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking tale Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their lineage and themselves.

Can Byron and Benny reclaim their once-close relationship, piece together Eleanor’s true history, and fulfill her final request to “share the black cake when the time is right�? Will their mother’s revelations bring them back together or leave them feeling more lost than ever?

Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel is a story of how the inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories, and even names can shape relationships and history. Deeply evocative and beautifully written, Black Cake is an extraordinary journey through the life of a family changed forever by the choices of its matriarch.]]> 385 Charmaine Wilkerson Rachael 0 to-read 4.06 2022 Black Cake
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> The Nickel Boys 42270835 Author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.

Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.

The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead Rachael 0 to-read 4.25 2019 The Nickel Boys
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> The Art Thief 62873378 One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first the story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser.

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

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

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

This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.]]> 224 Michael Finkel 0525657320 Rachael 0 to-read 3.92 2023 The Art Thief
author: Michael Finkel
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> Poverty, by America 61358638 Reimagining the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.]]> 304 Matthew Desmond 0593239911 Rachael 0 to-read 4.27 2023 Poverty, by America
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)]]> 13507212 9780805090031)

Though he battled for years to marry her, Henry VIII has become disenchanted with the audacious Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son, and her sharp intelligence and strong will have alienated his old friends and the noble families of England.

When the discarded Katherine, Henry's first wife, dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice, setting in motion a dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason.

At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over a few terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally himself with his enemies. What price will he pay for Annie's head?]]> 412 Hilary Mantel Rachael 4 4.5 stars. 4.26 2012 Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
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4.5 stars.
]]> Sea of Tranquility 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Rachael 0 to-read 4.04 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
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]]> Prophet Song 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

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

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

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Rachael 0 to-read 4.03 2023 Prophet Song
author: Paul Lynch
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos]]> 207567846
Pillars of Creation tells the story of one of the greatest scientific achievements in the history of civilization, a $10 billion instrument with a staggeringly ambitious goal: unlocking the secrets of the cosmos. Award-winning science writer Richard Panek stands us shoulder to shoulder with senior scientists as they conceive the mission, meet decades-long challenges to bring it to fruition, and, now, use its unprecedented technology to yield new discoveries about the origins of our solar system, to search for life on planets around other suns, and to trace the growth of hundreds of billions of galaxies all the way back to the birth of the first stars. The Webb telescope has captured the world’s imagination, and Pillars of Creation shows how and why—including through sixteen pages of awe-inspiring, full-color photos.

At once a testament to human ingenuity and a celebration of mankind’s biggest leap yet into the cosmos, Panek’s eye-opening book reveals our universe as we’ve never seen it before—through the lens of the James Webb Space Telescope, a marvel that is itself a pillar of creation.]]> 256 Richard Panek 0316570699 Rachael 4 4.05 2024 Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos
author: Richard Panek
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> <![CDATA[The Copenhagen Trilogy (The Copenhagen Trilogy, #1-3)]]> 53317528 Called a masterpiece by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing

Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969-71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child's single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.

Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today's discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up--in this sense, it's Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.

Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class, female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors, with Tove fever gripping readers.]]> 371 Tove Ditlevsen 0374602395 Rachael 4 4.36 1967 The Copenhagen Trilogy (The Copenhagen Trilogy, #1-3)
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> The Hours 11899 The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that became a motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, directed by Stephen Daldry from a screenplay by David Hare.

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.

Passionate, profound, and deeply moving, this is Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date.]]> 230 Michael Cunningham 0312305060 Rachael 3 3.95 1998 The Hours
author: Michael Cunningham
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology]]> 169255300
We like to recount that goodbye started out as "god be with you," that whiskey comes from the Gaelic for "water of life," or that avocado originated as the Aztec word for "testicle." But there are many words with origins unknown, disputed, or so buried in old journals that they may as well be lost to the general public. In Origin Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology, eminent etymologist Anatoly Liberman draws on his professional expertise and etymological database to tell the stories of less understood words such as nerd, fake, ain't, hitchhike, trash, curmudgeon, and quiz, as well as puzzling idioms like kick the bucket and pay through the nose. By casting a net so broadly, the book addresses language history, language usage (including grammar), history (both ancient and modern), religion, superstitions, and material culture.

Writing in the spirit of adventure through the annals of word origins, Liberman also shows how historical linguists construct etymologies, how to evaluate competing explanations, and how to pursue further research.]]> 344 Anatoly Liberman 0197664911 Rachael 0 to-read 2.85 Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology
author: Anatoly Liberman
name: Rachael
average rating: 2.85
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/02
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]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Rachael 0 to-read 3.34 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/02
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]]> Sing, Unburied, Sing 32920226 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781501126062

In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers.

Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.]]> 285 Jesmyn Ward Rachael 4 4.00 2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
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]]> <![CDATA[American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures]]> 40604126
Still, she yearned to see that identity reflected in the larger American narrative.

Now, in American Like Me, America invites thirty-one of her friends, peers, and heroes to share their stories about life between cultures. We know them as actors, comedians, athletes, politicians, artists, and writers. However, they are also immigrants, children or grandchildren of immigrants, indigenous people, or people who otherwise grew up with deep and personal connections to more than one culture. Each of them struggled to establish a sense of self, find belonging, and feel seen. And they call themselves American enthusiastically, reluctantly, or not at all.

Ranging from the heartfelt to the hilarious, their stories shine a light on a quintessentially American experience and will appeal to anyone with a complicated relationship to family, culture, and growing up.]]> 337 America Ferrera 1501180932 Rachael 0 4.32 2018 American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures
author: America Ferrera
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2024/11/19
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]]> <![CDATA[When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s]]> 195790601
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.� Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.

In When the Clock Broke , the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con� right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk� took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals� whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.

In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.]]> 432 John Ganz 0374605440 Rachael 0 to-read 4.08 2024 When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
author: John Ganz
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/09
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]]> Remarkably Bright Creatures 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 Rachael 0 to-read 4.35 2022 Remarkably Bright Creatures
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> Don't Look Now 2871390 Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn she transformed the small dramas of everyday life—love, grief, jealousy—into the stuff of nightmares. Less known, though no less powerful, are her short stories, in which she gave free rein to her imagination in narratives of unflagging suspense.

Patrick McGrath's revelatory new selection of du Maurier's stories shows her at her most chilling and most psychologically astute: a dead child reappears in the alleyways of Venice; routine eye surgery reveals the beast within to a meek housewife; nature revolts against man's abuse by turning a benign species into an annihilating force; a dalliance with a beautiful stranger offers something more dangerous than a broken heart. McGrath draws on the whole of du Maurier's long career and includes surprising discoveries together with famous stories like "The Birds". Don't Look Now is a perfect introduction to a peerless storyteller.]]> 346 Daphne du Maurier 1590172884 Rachael 0 to-read 4.05 2007 Don't Look Now
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Ghosts 58089771 Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937.

In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,� the earliest tale included here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in “All Souls,� the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter.

In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such worldly matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of one’s own soul.

These are stories to “send a cold shiver down one’s spine,� not to terrify, and as Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter “the hard grind of modern speeding-up� by preserving that ineffable space of “silence and continuity,� which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but—“in the fun of the shudder”—its delight.

Contents:
All Souls�
The Eyes
Afterward
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
Kerfol
The Triumph of Night
Miss Mary Pask
Bewitched
Mr. Jones
Pomegranate Seed
A Bottle of Perrier]]> 288 Edith Wharton 1681375729 Rachael 3
The stories, ranked best to worst:
1. All Souls� - if you only want to read one of her stories, this is the one. It’s the first story in the collection and easily the best. The story is as spooky as it is weird—a new short story favorite of mine, for sure.
2. The Triumph of Night - awesome, spooky allegory for the evils of capitalism.
3. Miss Mary Pask - great Gothic tale of lady independence.
4. Kerfol - Doggie ghost revenge story? Yes, please!
5. Pomegranate Seed - Probably the easiest read of the bunch, and certainly the tightest narrative.
6. The Lady’s Maid’s Bell - Classic Edith Wharton’s criticism of the elites through a Gothic lens. The last few pages of this story will certainly stay with me for years to come.
7. Afterward - This is probably Wharton’s second-most famous story in the collection. I liked it! It’s spooky and murderous!
8. The Eyes - a ghost story with monster vibes.
9. Bewitched - meh.
10. Mr. Jones - meh.
11. A Bottle of Perrier - did not like.

I truly loved stories 1-6, 7 and 8 were fun, and 9-11 could be skipped altogether, in my opinion.]]> 3.91 1937 Ghosts
author: Edith Wharton
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1937
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves:
review:
As expected, some short stories were better than others and deserved higher ratings. I’d recommend reading one story at a time and putting the book down for a bit, as the stories can get repetitive.

The stories, ranked best to worst:
1. All Souls� - if you only want to read one of her stories, this is the one. It’s the first story in the collection and easily the best. The story is as spooky as it is weird—a new short story favorite of mine, for sure.
2. The Triumph of Night - awesome, spooky allegory for the evils of capitalism.
3. Miss Mary Pask - great Gothic tale of lady independence.
4. Kerfol - Doggie ghost revenge story? Yes, please!
5. Pomegranate Seed - Probably the easiest read of the bunch, and certainly the tightest narrative.
6. The Lady’s Maid’s Bell - Classic Edith Wharton’s criticism of the elites through a Gothic lens. The last few pages of this story will certainly stay with me for years to come.
7. Afterward - This is probably Wharton’s second-most famous story in the collection. I liked it! It’s spooky and murderous!
8. The Eyes - a ghost story with monster vibes.
9. Bewitched - meh.
10. Mr. Jones - meh.
11. A Bottle of Perrier - did not like.

I truly loved stories 1-6, 7 and 8 were fun, and 9-11 could be skipped altogether, in my opinion.
]]> Our Missing Hearts 60149573 A novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture� in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.]]> 335 Celeste Ng 0593492544 Rachael 3 3.74 2022 Our Missing Hearts
author: Celeste Ng
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty]]> 133486 The story of the love that ended an empire.

In this commanding book, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert K. Massie sweeps readers back to the extraordinary world of Imperial Russia to tell the story of the Romanovs� lives: Nicholas’s political naïveté, Alexandra’s obsession with the corrupt mystic Rasputin, and little Alexis’s brave struggle with hemophilia. Against a lavish backdrop of luxury and intrigue, Massie unfolds a powerful drama of passion and history—the story of a doomed empire and the death-marked royals who watched it crumble.]]> 640 Robert K. Massie 0345438310 Rachael 4 4.21 1967 Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty
author: Robert K. Massie
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/10/14
shelves:
review:

]]> Deacon King Kong 51045613 The funny, sharp, and surprising story of the shooting of a Brooklyn drug dealer and the people who witnessed it—from James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known in the neighborhood as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Causeway Housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range.

The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. In McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local NYPD cops assigned to investigate what happened, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of New York in the late 1960s—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth finally emerges, McBride shows us that not all secrets can be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in compassion and hope.]]> 370 James McBride 073521672X Rachael 5
McBride’s NYC finds its voice in the least likely character: Deacon King Kong. With just this choice, McBride undercuts any expectation of a story that captures the Big Apple. Manhattan remains a dream, not a reality, for all the characters. The uberwealthy remain myths. The Statue of Liberty is a constant reminder of what could be and what isn’t. McBride’s whirlwind of a narrative creates a truth that is easier said than shown, and at the end of this novel all I could think was, “wow.� ]]> 4.11 2020 Deacon King Kong
author: James McBride
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
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This book is New York City.

McBride’s NYC finds its voice in the least likely character: Deacon King Kong. With just this choice, McBride undercuts any expectation of a story that captures the Big Apple. Manhattan remains a dream, not a reality, for all the characters. The uberwealthy remain myths. The Statue of Liberty is a constant reminder of what could be and what isn’t. McBride’s whirlwind of a narrative creates a truth that is easier said than shown, and at the end of this novel all I could think was, “wow.�
]]> <![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 Rachael 0 to-read 3.83 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> <![CDATA[The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York]]> 1111 The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today.

In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.]]> 1246 Robert A. Caro 0394720245 Rachael 0 to-read 4.51 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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]]> The Bee Sting 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

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

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Rachael 0 to-read 3.92 2023 The Bee Sting
author: Paul Murray
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> The Ministry of Time 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats� from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge�: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as �1847� or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,� “Spotify,� and “the collapse of the British Empire.� But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Rachael 0 to-read 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)]]> 19161852
Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She'll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.]]> 468 N.K. Jemisin Rachael 2 4.29 2015 The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/28
date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> <![CDATA[A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3)]]> 50659472 The epic third novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas.

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

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

In this thrilling third book in the #1 New York Times bestselling series from Sarah J. Maas, the fate of Feyre's world is at stake as armies grapple for power over the one thing that could destroy it.]]> 699 Sarah J. Maas 1635575605 Rachael 1 4.47 2017 A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2017
rating: 1
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/09/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Around the World in Eighty Days]]> 54479 252 Jules Verne 014044906X Rachael 2 3.95 1872 Around the World in Eighty Days
author: Jules Verne
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1872
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/06
date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> <![CDATA[A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #2)]]> 50659468
Feyre has undergone more trials than one human woman can carry in her heart. Though she's now been granted the powers and lifespan of the High Fae, she is haunted by her time Under the Mountain and the terrible deeds she performed to save the lives of Tamlin and his people.

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

Bestselling author Sarah J. Maas's masterful storytelling brings this second book in her dazzling, sexy, action-packed series to new heights.]]> 626 Sarah J. Maas 1635575583 Rachael 2 4.65 2016 A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #2)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> <![CDATA[A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)]]> 50659467
At least, he’s not a beast all the time.

As she adapts to her new home, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But something is not right in the faerie lands. An ancient, wicked shadow is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it, or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever.

From bestselling author Sarah J. Maas comes a seductive, breathtaking book that blends romance, adventure, and faerie lore into an unforgettable read.]]> 419 Sarah J. Maas 1635575567 Rachael 1 4.15 2015 A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/08/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)]]> 6101138 This is an alternative cover edition for ISBN 9780007230181

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?]]> 653 Hilary Mantel Rachael 5 3.90 2009 Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/12
date added: 2024/08/12
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]]> The Lost Daughter 1058564
But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.]]> 140 Elena Ferrante 1933372427 Rachael 4 3.70 2006 The Lost Daughter
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2020/07/01
date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

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

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Rachael 4 4.21 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/04
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]]> To the Lighthouse 59716
As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.]]> 209 Virginia Woolf Rachael 5 3.81 1927 To the Lighthouse
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1927
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/08/01
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]]> King: A Life 62039291
The first full biography in decades, Eig mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs]]> 688 Jonathan Eig 0374279292 Rachael 0 to-read 4.65 2023 King: A Life
author: Jonathan Eig
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/31
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]]> I Am Not Sidney Poitier 6080748

An irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

Percival Everett’s hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: “What’s your name?� a kid would ask. “Not Sidney,� I would say. “Okay, then what is it?�

]]> 234 Percival Everett 1555975275 Rachael 0 to-read 3.97 2009 I Am Not Sidney Poitier
author: Percival Everett
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/31
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]]> Lessons in Chemistry 206305528
But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride�) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.

Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.]]> 404 Bonnie Garmus Rachael 0 to-read 4.24 2022 Lessons in Chemistry
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/31
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]]> Dr. No 59808430 Alternative cover edition of ISBN 9781644452080

A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising

The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing� in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.�) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he’ll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks.

With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill’s desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, “Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.�

Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn’t to say that it’s not about anything. In fact, it’s about villains. Bond villains. And that’s not nothing.]]> 262 Percival Everett Rachael 0 to-read 3.68 2022 Dr. No
author: Percival Everett
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/23
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]]> Erasure 355862 We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto.

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk -- or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh -- is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.]]> 280 Percival Everett 0786888156 Rachael 0 to-read 4.17 2001 Erasure
author: Percival Everett
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/23
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Rachael 4 4.45 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
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]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Rachael 0 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2015/07/13
date added: 2024/07/13
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]]> Pedro Páramo 125164752 144 Juan Rulfo 080216093X Rachael 4 4.07 1955 Pedro Páramo
author: Juan Rulfo
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/24
date added: 2024/06/24
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]]> Play It As It Lays 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 Rachael 4 3.94 1970 Play It As It Lays
author: Joan Didion
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/08
date added: 2024/06/08
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]]> <![CDATA[How the GarcĂ­a Girls Lost Their Accents]]> 11208 286 Julia Alvarez 0452287073 Rachael 2 3.64 1991 How the GarcĂ­a Girls Lost Their Accents
author: Julia Alvarez
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1991
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/06
date added: 2024/06/06
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]]> A Little Life 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.ĚýYet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 Rachael 1 4.28 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2024/04/21
date added: 2024/04/21
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]]> Sabrina 37533587 How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Rate your overall mood from 1 to 5, 1 being poor. Rate your stress level from 1 to 5, 5 being severe. Are you experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide? Is there anything in your personal life that is affecting your duty?

When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. He reports to work every night in a bare, sterile fortress that serves as no protection from a situation that threatens the sanity of Teddy, his childhood friend and the boyfriend of the missing woman. Sabrina’s grieving sister, Sandra, struggles to fill her days as she waits in purgatory. After a videotape surfaces, we see devastation shown through a cinematic lens, as true tragedy is distorted when fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists begin to interpret events to fit their own narratives.

The follow-up to Nick Drnaso’s Beverly, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. Presenting an indictment of our modern state, Drnaso contemplates the dangers of a fake-news climate. Timely and articulate, Sabrina leaves you gutted, searching for meaning in the aftermath of disaster.]]> 204 Nick Drnaso 177046316X Rachael 4 3.83 2018 Sabrina
author: Nick Drnaso
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/29
date added: 2024/03/29
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]]> <![CDATA[An Enemy of the People: An Adaptation of the Play by Henrik Ibsen]]> 8335535 ____
When Dr. Stockmann discovers that the water in the small Norwegian town in which he is the resident physician has been contaminated, he does what any responsible citizen would do: reports it to the authorities. But Stockmann's good deed has the potential to ruin the town's reputation as a popular spa destination, and instead of being hailed as a hero, Stockmann is labeled an enemy of the people. Arthur Miller's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's classic drama is a classic in itself, a penetrating exploration of what happens when the truth comes up against the will of the majority. This edition includes Arthur Miller’s preface and an introduction by John Guare.]]> 85 Arthur Miller 0143105582 Rachael 4 4.03 An Enemy of the People: An Adaptation of the Play by Henrik Ibsen
author: Arthur Miller
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/16
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]]> There There 36692478 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525520375.

Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.]]> 294 Tommy Orange Rachael 4 3.98 2018 There There
author: Tommy Orange
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/02/25
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]]> Giovanni’s Room 406235 178 James Baldwin Rachael 4 4.40 1956 Giovanni’s Room
author: James Baldwin
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1956
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/03
date added: 2024/02/03
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]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780063251922.

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver Rachael 3 4.46 2022 Demon Copperhead
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/28
date added: 2024/01/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion]]> 7628 The Good Soldier relates the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples, one English, one American, and the growing awareness by the American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian facade. It is the attitude of Dowell, his puzzlement, his uncertainty, and the seemingly haphazard manner of his narration that make the book so powerful and mysterious. Despite its catalogue of death, insanity, and despair, the novel has many comic moments, and has inspired the work of several distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. This is the only annotated edition available.]]> 368 Ford Madox Ford 1551113813 Rachael 4 3.69 1915 The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion
author: Ford Madox Ford
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1915
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/15
date added: 2024/01/15
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]]> Ninth House (Alex Stern, #1) 43263680
Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs� are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.]]> 461 Leigh Bardugo 1250313074 Rachael 3 4.00 2019 Ninth House (Alex Stern, #1)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/12
date added: 2024/01/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The Merchant of Venice (The Annotated Shakespeare)]]> 69421 167 William Shakespeare 0300115644 Rachael 3 3.72 1596 The Merchant of Venice (The Annotated Shakespeare)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1596
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/07
date added: 2024/01/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Jew of Malta (New Mermaids)]]> 6958746 'Tell me worldlings, underneath the sun, If greater falsehood ever has been done'

The Jew of Malta, written around 1590, can present a challenge for modern audiences. Hugely popular in its day, the play swings wildly and rapidly in genre, from pointed satire, to bloody revenge tragedy, to melodrmatic intrigue, to dark farce and grotesque comedy. Although set in the Mediterranean island of Malta, the playevokes contemporary Elizabethan social tensions, especially the highly charged issue of London's much-resented community of resident merchant foreigners. Barabas, the enormously wealthy Jew of the play's title,appears initially victimized by Malta's Christian Governor, who quotes scripture to support the demand that Jews cede their wealth to pay Malta's tribute to the Turks. When he protests, Barabas is deprived of his wealth, his means of livelihood, and his house, which is converted to a nunnery. In response to this hypocritical extortion, Barabas launches a horrific (and sometimes hilarious) course of violence that goes well beyond revenge, using murderous tactics that include everything from deadly soup to poisoned flowers. The play's sometimes complex treatment of anti-Semitism and its relationship to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice remain matters of continuing scholarly reflection.

This student edition contains a lengthy Introduction with backgroundon the author, date and sources, theme, critical interpretation and stage history, as well as a fully annotated version of the play text in modern spelling.

James R. Siemon is Professor of English at Boston University.]]> 176 Christopher Marlowe 071367766X Rachael 3 3.41 1589 The Jew of Malta (New Mermaids)
author: Christopher Marlowe
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.41
book published: 1589
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/03
date added: 2024/01/03
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]]> The Dutch House 44318414
The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.

Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives, they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.]]> 337 Ann Patchett 0062963678 Rachael 3 4.08 2019 The Dutch House
author: Ann Patchett
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/01/01
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]]> Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 303 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Rachael 0 to-read 3.71 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/12
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]]> The Chrysalids 826845 A world paralysed by genetic mutation

John Wyndham takes the reader into the anguished heart of a community where the chances of breeding true are less than fifty per cent and where deviations are rooted out and destroyed as offences and abominations.]]> 200 John Wyndham Rachael 3 3.92 1955 The Chrysalids
author: John Wyndham
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1955
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2023/11/12
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]]> Chronicle of a Death Foretold 23878
Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to try and stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.]]> 120 Gabriel García Márquez 140003471X Rachael 4 3.98 1981 Chronicle of a Death Foretold
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/23
date added: 2023/09/23
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A great novella, filled with great sentences. Among them, a favorite: “When I saw her like that in the idyllic frame of the window, I refused to believe that the woman there was who I thought it was, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit that life might end up resembling bad literature so much.�
]]> The Secret History 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Rachael 3 4.17 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/20
date added: 2023/08/20
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]]> Augustus 89231 Augustus is a sweeping narrative that brings vividly to life a compelling cast of historical figures through their letters, dispatches, and memoirs.

A mere eighteen years of age when his uncle, Julius Caesar, is murdered, Octavius Caesar prematurely inherits rule of the Roman Republic. Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power–Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony–young Octavius must work against the powerful Roman political machinations to claim his destiny as first Roman emperor. Sprung from meticulous research and the pen of a true poet, Augustus tells the story of one man’s dream to liberate a corrupt Rome from the fancy of the capriciously crooked and the wildly wealthy.]]> 336 John Williams 1400076730 Rachael 5
Augustus is Williams’s answer to these questions. The result? An incredible tale of humanity, the essential but impossible nature of truth, and the enduring power of philosophy, beauty, and love (particularly when the world is loveless).

Truly a great read, for history and fiction enthusiasts alike.
]]> 4.23 1972 Augustus
author: John Williams
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/09
date added: 2023/08/09
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At what point does history become fiction? When history transforms from a list of facts into a narrative? When the impossible but worthy pursuit of the truth leaves us grappling with meaning?

Augustus is Williams’s answer to these questions. The result? An incredible tale of humanity, the essential but impossible nature of truth, and the enduring power of philosophy, beauty, and love (particularly when the world is loveless).

Truly a great read, for history and fiction enthusiasts alike.

]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Rachael 4 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/06
date added: 2023/08/06
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]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Rachael 0 to-read 3.84 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Rachael 0 to-read 4.14 2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
author: David Grann
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/31
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]]> Hello Beautiful 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano Rachael 3 4.14 2023 Hello Beautiful
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/30
date added: 2023/07/30
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]]> Chain-Gang All-Stars 61190770
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

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

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.]]> 367 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 0593317335 Rachael 2 4.13 2023 Chain-Gang All-Stars
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/07/26
date added: 2023/07/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]]> 29496076 Ěý
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,� roamed � virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward Native Americans that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly riveting, but also emotionally devastating.]]> 359 David Grann 0385534256 Rachael 5 4.12 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/24
date added: 2023/07/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland]]> 40163119
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.]]> 441 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521316 Rachael 5 4.47 2018 Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/19
date added: 2023/07/19
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]]> The Things They Carried 133518
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.]]> 246 Tim O'Brien 0767902890 Rachael 2 4.14 1990 The Things They Carried
author: Tim O'Brien
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1990
rating: 2
read at: 2023/05/31
date added: 2023/07/17
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]]> Goya 279351 The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The Culture of Complaint), now turns his renowned critical eye to one of art history s most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes.

With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns.

With his salient passion for the artist and the art, Hughes brings Goya vividly to life through dazzling analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya s development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life.

In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya s work.

Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes s own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercely brave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death. This is one genius writing at full capacity about another and the result is truly spectacular.]]> 448 Robert Hughes 0375711287 Rachael 4 4.10 2003 Goya
author: Robert Hughes
name: Rachael
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/02
date added: 2023/07/02
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]]> Intimacies 55918474 A novel from the author of A Separation, a taut and electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.

She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into explosive political fires: her work interpreting for a former president accused of war crimes becomes precarious as their relationship is unbound by shifting language and meaning.

This woman is the voice in the ear of many, but what command does that give her, and how vulnerable does that leave her? Her coolly impassioned views on power, love, and violence, are tested, both in her personal intimacies and in her role at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her; it is her drive towards truth, and love, that throws into stark relief what she wants from her life.]]> 225 Katie Kitamura 0399576169 Rachael 3 3.62 2021 Intimacies
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/25
date added: 2023/06/25
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]]> The Sentence 56816904
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written]]> 387 Louise Erdrich 006267112X Rachael 0 to-read 3.92 2021 The Sentence
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> Trust 58210933 An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.]]> 402 Hernan Diaz 0593420314 Rachael 0 to-read 3.77 2022 Trust
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Rachael
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/20
shelves: to-read
review:

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