en-US Tue, 08 Apr 2025 04:28:26 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 1033975 320 J.P. Donleavy 0140042822 Tim 0 to-read 4.03 1975
author: J.P. Donleavy
name: Tim
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205363943 The French novel taking the world by an ultracontemporary Dangerous Liaisons about sex, feminism, and addiction.

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

Virginie Despentes, the celebrated author of King Kong Theory, has written her breakthrough a Dangerous Liaisons for our time. We follow Rebecca and Oscar as they develop an unlikely friendship and argue over questions of right and wrong in a city—Paris—where pleasure, excess, and freedom rule the day, or used to. Dear Dickhead is a guns-blazing novel about a culture that makes men and women sick, and about how the search for feeling leaves us addicted to what makes us feel. The result is a provocative and unmissable book.]]> 304 Virginie Despentes 0374611610 Tim 3 abandoned 3.66 2022
author: Virginie Despentes
name: Tim
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: abandoned
review:
Kind of funny but honestly just wasn’t in the mood for a book with letters back and forth.
]]> 195790867 Robin Sloan expands the Penumbraverse to new reaches of time and space in a rollicking far-future adventure.

In Moonbound, Robin Sloan has written a novel with the full scope and ambitious imagination of the very books that lit the engines of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: an epic quest as only Sloan could conceive it, mixing science fiction, fantasy, good old-fashioned literary storytelling, and unrivaled enthusiasm for what’s next.

It is thirteen thousand years from now . . . A lot has happened, and yet a lot is still very familiar. Ariel is a boy in a small town under a wizard’s rule. Like many adventurers before him, Ariel is called to explore a world full of unimaginable glories and unknown enemies, a mission to save the world, a girl. Here, as they say, be dragons. But none of this happens before Ariel comes across an artifact from an earlier civilization, a sentient, record-keeping artificial intelligence that carries with it the perspective of the whole of human history―and becomes both Ariel’s greatest ally and the narrator of our story.

Moonbound is an adventure into the richest depths of Story itself. It is a deeply satisfying epic of ancient scale, blasted through the imaginative prism one of our most forward-thinking writers. And this is only the beginning.]]> 432 Robin Sloan 0374610606 Tim 0 currently-reading 3.97 2024
author: Robin Sloan
name: Tim
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 150778765 In Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman brings her unparalleled wit and knack for social observation to the world of work.

At a big-box store in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every morning at 3:55. Under the eye of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before customers arrive. When a golden opportunity for a promotion presents itself, the diverse members of Movement―among them a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging to her “cool kid� status from high school, a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together and set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot into motion. A darkly comic workplace caper that explores the aches and uses of solidarity, Help Wanted is a deeply human portrait of people trying, against increasingly long odds, to make a living.]]> 288 Adelle Waldman 132402044X Tim 1 3.56 2024
author: Adelle Waldman
name: Tim
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:
Read the first three chapters and I didn’t care about any of the characters or where the story was going. Felt like a long list of people’s names and products coming off a truck.
]]> 214152261 From Booker Prize finalist David Szalay, a propulsive, hypnotic novel, about a man whose future is derailed by a series of events that he is unable to control.

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother’s age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands—as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead.

What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees István emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London’s billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers. Through it all, István is a calm, detached observer of his own life, and through his eyes we experience a tragic twist on an immigrant “success story,� brightened by moments of sensitivity, softness, and Szalay’s keen observation.

Fast-paced and immersive, Flesh reveals István’s life through intimate moments, with lovers, employers, and family members, charted over the course of decades. As the story unfolds, the tension between what is seen and unseen, what can and cannot be said, hurtles forward until finally—with everything at stake—sudden tragedy again throws life as István knows it in jeopardy. Spare and penetrating, Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.]]> 368 David Szalay 198212279X Tim 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: David Szalay
name: Tim
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214356055 A gripping and heartfelt horror-tinged space adventure from the BSFA award-winning author of Stars and Bones and Embers of War. Readers of James S.A. Corey and Becky Chambers will love this fast-paced story of space piracy, deadly alien artifacts and a race to save what is left of humanity.

When archaeologist Ursula Morrow accidentally infects herself with an alien parasite, she fears she may have jeopardised her career. However, her concerns become irrelevant when Earth is destroyed, billions die, and suddenly no one needs archaeologists anymore…�

Two years later, she’s plucked from a refugee camp on a backwater world and tasked with retrieving the artifact that infected her, as it just might hold the key to humanity’s survival. With time running short, and the planet housing the weapon now situated in hostile territory, she realises she’s going to have to commit an act of desperate piracy if she’s going to achieve her objective before the enemy’s final onslaught.

A thrilling, page-turning journey into deep space where the fights are brutal, the relationships are complicated and the world ended years ago.]]> 352 Gareth L. Powell 1803368632 Tim 0 to-read 3.76
author: Gareth L. Powell
name: Tim
average rating: 3.76
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210384823 An utterly gripping story of alien encounter and survival from Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Children of Time.

They looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back . . .

New planets are fair game to asset strippers and interplanetary opportunists � and a commercial mission to a distant star system discovers a moon that is pitch black, but alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is anathema to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.

Under no circumstances should a human end up on Shroud’s inhospitable surface. Except a catastrophic accident sees Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne doing just that. Forced to stage an emergency landing, in a small, barely adequate vehicle, they are unable to contact their ship and are running out of time. What follows is a gruelling journey across land, sea and air. During this time, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s dominant species. It also begins to understand them . . .

If they escape Shroud, they’ll face a crew only interested in profiteering from this extraordinary world. They’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all.]]> 436 Adrian Tchaikovsky 1035013797 Tim 0 to-read 4.15 2025
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Tim
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213395539 In this epic Afrofuturist debut, an archivist finds herself the target of a violent plot and must rely on the help of her AI assistive technologies.

In near-future Los Angeles, Xandria Brown works diligently as an archivist at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Descended from a family of obsessive collectors who took part in the Great Migration, Xandria has always been passionate about the art of curation and preservation, especially of seemingly useless African American ephemera. But while juggling multiple projects, her neurocognitive symptoms of long COVID are worsening, as her healthbot keeps having to remind her. When the Huntington unexpectedly goes into lockdown, Xandria must rely on her adaptive technology and her own flickering intuition to preserve her life’s work—the Diwata Collection. A strikingly original saga written in lyrical prose, The Ephemera Collector announces Stacy Nathaniel Jackson as a singular new voice in fiction.]]> 320 Stacy Nathaniel Jackson 1324093404 Tim 0 to-read 3.93 2025
author: Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
name: Tim
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 176823085 400 Rajani LaRocca 0063295407 Tim 4 8yo loved it. 4.18 2024
author: Rajani LaRocca
name: Tim
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: children-and-teen-fiction, fantasy
review:
8yo loved it.
]]> 211025439
“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.�

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

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

Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.]]> 528 Adam Ross 0385351291 Tim 5 3.80 2025
author: Adam Ross
name: Tim
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
review:
Takes a little bit of time to get going but this is a wonderful novel that at times feels dreamy in both good and bad ways as the main character is disconnected from himself, but then is told from a point in the future with a mature gaze on a nostalgia for childhood, even one full of trauma.
]]> 213395531 The thrilling narrative of how New York came to be, by the author of the beloved classic The Island at the Center of the World.

In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he began parleying with Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch leader on Manhattan.

Bristling with vibrant characters, Taking Manhattan reveals the founding of New York to be an the result not of an English military takeover but of clever negotiations that led to a fusion of the multiethnic capitalistic society the Dutch had pioneered to the power of the rising English empire. But the birth of what might be termed the first modern city is also a story of the brutal dispossession of Native Americans and of the roots of American slavery. Taking Manhattan shows how the paradox of New York’s origins—boundless opportunity coupled with subjugation and displacement—reflect America’s promise and failure to this day. Russell Shorto, whose work has been described as “astonishing� (New York Times) and “revelatory� (New York magazine), has once again mined newly translated sources to offer a vibrant tale and a fresh and trenchant argument about American beginnings.]]> 408 Russell Shorto 0393881164 Tim 0 to-read 4.35 2025
author: Russell Shorto
name: Tim
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

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

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

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Tim 4 3.54 2024
author: Danzy Senna
name: Tim
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:
It comes together and neutralizes the heavy handed winks in the first half. You know something bad is combing for the main characters but it’s not what is initially telegraphed. How does the reader feel for Jane? I felt bad but not too bad for her.
]]> 36222611
One day, three schoolmates show up at Aru's doorstep to catch her in a lie. They don't believe her claim that the museum's Lamp of Bharata is cursed, and they dare Aru to prove it. Just a quick light, Aru thinks. Then she can get herself out of this mess and never ever fib again.

But lighting the lamp has dire consequences. She unwittingly frees the Sleeper, an ancient demon whose duty it is to awaken the God of Destruction. Her classmates and beloved mother are frozen in time, and it's up to Aru to save them.

The only way to stop the demon is to find the reincarnations of the five legendary Pandava brothers, protagonists of the Hindu epic poem, the Mahabharata, and journey through the Kingdom of Death. But how is one girl in Spider-Man pajamas supposed to do all that?]]> 355 Roshani Chokshi 1368012353 Tim 0 4.07 2018
author: Roshani Chokshi
name: Tim
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read, children-and-teen-fiction, childrens-books, fantasy
review:

]]> 123198491
Perfect for fans of Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and Nevermoor.

War has come to the supernatural world, and Amari’s two worst enemies are leading the charge.

Elaine Harlowe has manipulated her way into becoming prime minister, using her mind control ability to force the Bureau to take up her vicious grudge against magiciankind. Meanwhile, Dylan Van Helsing, the newly crowned leader of the League of Magicians—and Amari’s former partner—is after a destructive new power that would not only ensure the magicians� victory . . . it would make him invincible.

With neither the Bureau nor the League safe for Amari, and her newly returned brother, Quinton, determined to keep her out of the fray, she and her friends decide to find a way to end the war on their own.

So when they learn that the only way to stop Dylan is to find powerful magical inventions known as Wonders, they go after them. But wielding these items comes at a terrible cost, and Amari will have to decide just how much she’s willing to sacrifice . . . because the Despicable Wonders will demand everything.]]> 395 B.B. Alston Tim 0 4.46 2024
author: B.B. Alston
name: Tim
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: children-and-teen-fiction, childrens-books
review:

]]> 211479192 A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.

On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.

Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it.

Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds.

But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.]]> 384 Samantha Sotto Yambao 0593724992 Tim 2 fantasy 3.81 2025
author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
name: Tim
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: fantasy
review:
Very jumbled and slapdash. Magic filling in for a lack of cohesion.
]]> 199797716
Ernesto and Elena Vega arrive in Mexico City where Ernesto works on a construction site until he is discovered by a local lucha libre trainer. At a time when luchadores—Mexican wrestlers donning flamboyant masks and capes—were treated as daredevils or rockstars, Ernesto finds fame as El Rey Coyote, rapidly gaining name recognition across Mexico.

Years later, in East Los Angeles Freddy Vega is struggling to save his father’s gym while Freddy’s own son Julian is searching for professional and romantic fulfillment as a Mexican American gay man refusing to be defined by stereotypes. The once larger-than-life Ernesto Vega is now dying, leading Freddy and Julian to find their own passions and discover what really happened back in Mexico.

Told from alternating perspectives, Ernesto takes you from the ranches of Michoacán to the makeshift colonias and crowded sports arenas of Mexico City. Freddy describes life in the suburban streets of 1980s Los Angeles and the community their family built as Julian descends deep into the culture of hook-up apps, lucha burlesque shows, and the dark underbelly of West Hollywood, The Sons of El Rey is an intimate portrait of a family wading against time and legacy, yet always choosing the fight.]]> 384 Alex Espinoza 1668032783 Tim 0 to-read 3.88 2024
author: Alex Espinoza
name: Tim
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15811545
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. 

Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.]]> 432 Ruth Ozeki 0670026638 Tim 0 to-read 4.06 2013
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Tim
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199531728
Ever since the world filled with portals to hell and bloodthirsty demons started popping out on the reg, Jasper’s life has gotten worse and worse. A teenage nobody with no friends or family, he is plagued by the life he can’t remember and the person he’s sure he’s supposed to be.

Jasper spends his days working as a checkout clerk at the Here For You discount mart, where a hell portal in aisle nine means danger every shift. But at least here he can be near the girl he’s crushing on—Kyle Kuan, a junior member of the monster-fighting Vanguard—who seems to hate Jasper for reasons he can't remember or understand.

But when Jasper and Kyle learn they both share a frightening vision of the impending apocalypse, they’re forced to team up and uncover the uncomfortable truth about the hell portals and the demons that haunt the world. Because the true monsters are not always what they seem, the past is not always what we wish, and like it or not, on Black Friday, all hell will break loose in aisle nine.

Perfect for fans of Grasshopper Jungle or The Last of Us comes Aisle Nine, the debut young adult novel from rising YA star lan X. Cho.]]> 272 Ian X. Cho 0063206803 Tim 0 to-read 3.53 2024
author: Ian X. Cho
name: Tim
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205670068
Forty thousand years ago, humanity fled a dying Earth. Traveling in massive arkships, these brave pioneers spread out across the galaxy to find a new home. After traveling thousands of light-years, one fleet of arkships arrived at Centauri, a dense cluster of stars with a vast array of potentially habitable planets. The survivors of Earth signaled to the remaining arkships that humanity had finally found its new home among the stars.

Thousands of years later, the Centauri Cluster has flourished. The original settlers have evolved into advanced beings known as Celestials and divided themselves into powerful Dominions. One of the most influential is that of the Crown Celestials, an alliance of five great houses that controls vast areas of Centauri. As arkships continue to arrive, the remaining humans and their descendants must fight for survival against overwhelming odds or be forced into serving the Crown Dominion.

Among those yearning for a better life is Finn, for whom Earth is not a memory but merely a footnote from humanity’s ancient history. Born on one of the Crown Dominion worlds, Finn has known nothing but the repressive rule of the Celestials, though he dreams of the possibility of boundless space beyond his home.

When another arkship from Earth, previously thought lost, unexpectedly arrives, Finn sees his chance to embrace a greater destiny and become a Traveler—one of a group of brave heroes dedicated to ensuring humanity’s future by journeying into the vast unknown of distant space.]]> 928 Peter F. Hamilton 0593357663 Tim 0 to-read 4.17 2024
author: Peter F. Hamilton
name: Tim
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127278666 Some people think foxes are similar to ghosts because we go around collecting qi, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking . . .

Manchuria, 1908.
In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach—until, perhaps, now.

Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them—their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change—or does it?

Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.

New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. Epic in scope and full of singular, unforgettable characters, The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about old loves and second chances, the depths of maternal love, and ancient folktales that may very well be true.]]> 390 Yangsze Choo 1250266017 Tim 4 3.97 2024
author: Yangsze Choo
name: Tim
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 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 Tim 0 to-read 3.97 2025
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Tim
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 222918576 You can only escape your destiny for so long�

It’s been more than twenty years since tragedy prompted Luna Valens to walk away from her pack.

Scarred by her past, she’s done her best to lead a normal human life. Thanks to a potion that suppresses her magic, nobody around her has a clue that she’s a werewolf.

±«˛ÔłŮľ±±ôâ€�

Her potion supplier disappears, her family reestablishes contact, and a mysterious werewolf with a metal detector and a penchant for calling her my lady saunters into her life.

As if all that weren’t enough, someone from her past is trying to kill her. Someone dangerous.

To survive and figure out what’s going on, Luna will have to once again embrace her power. But, after so long, will she be able to summon the wolf?]]> 228 Lindsay Buroker Tim 0 to-read 4.29 2025
author: Lindsay Buroker
name: Tim
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 196943014 370 J.N. Chaney Tim 0 to-read 4.40
author: J.N. Chaney
name: Tim
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212806663 “A wise, tremendously moving exploration of what it means to seek companionship and understanding, in books and in life.”—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

“A must for the obsessive reader.”—Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or and The Idiot

Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners�.

Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?

Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.]]> 240 Sarah Chihaya 059359472X Tim 0 to-read 3.78 2025
author: Sarah Chihaya
name: Tim
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 223001257
Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has. A mother, grandmother, wife, divorcée, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.]]> 304 Virginia Evans 0593798430 Tim 0 to-read 4.64 2025
author: Virginia Evans
name: Tim
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 217927769 A searing journey through the highs and lows of twenty-first century womanhood from an award-winning journalist beloved for her unflinchingly honest and often comedic appraisals of pop culture, identity, and disillusionment

After a brief fling with corporate stability in her twenty-something cis era, Harron Walker has transitioned into a terminally single freelancer and part-time shopgirl. She's in the throes of her second adolescence and its requisite daily spirals. She wants it all, otherwise known as: basic human rights, a stable job with good pay and healthcare benefits, someone to love, the ability to feel safe and secure, the pursuit of satisfaction and maybe even contentment. And when she starts to acquire those things—well, as The Monkey's Paw famously asked, "What could go wrong?"

In sixteen wholly original essays that blend memoir, cultural criticism, investigative journalism, and a dash of fanfiction, Walker places her own experiences within the larger context of the pressing and underdiscussed aspects of contemporary American womanhood that make up daily life. She recounts an attempt to eviscerate a corporation's attempt at pinkwashing their way into bath bomb sales while simultaneously confronting her “pick me� impulse to do so. She interrogates her relationship to labor, from the irony of working in a transphobic workplace in order to cover gender-affirming surgery to the cruel specter of the girlboss that none of us ever think we'll become. She explores the allure and violence of assimilating into white womanhood in all its hegemonic glory, exposes the ways in which the truth of trans women's reproductive healthcare is erased in favor of reactionary narratives, and considers how our agency is stripped from us—by governments, employers, partners, and ourselves—purely on account of our bodies.

With razor-sharp, biting prose that’s as uncompromising as it is playful, Walker grapples with questions of love, sex, fertility, labor, embodiment, community, autonomy, and body fluids from her particular often at the margins, conditionally at the center.]]> 272 Harron Walker 0593450043 Tim 0 to-read 4.05 2025
author: Harron Walker
name: Tim
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 208840779 Inspired by an ominous Prague legend, What Wakes the Bells is a lavish gothic fantasy by debut author Elle Tesch.

Built by long-gone Saints, the city of Vaiwyn lives and breathes and bleeds. As a Keeper, Mina knows better than most what her care of Vaiwyn’s bells means for the sentient city. It’s the Strauss family’s thousand-year legacy―prevent the Vespers from ringing, or they will awake a slumbering evil.

One afternoon, to Mina's horror, her bell peals thirteen times, shattering the city’s tenuous peace. With so much of the city's history and lore lost in a long-ago disaster, no one knows the danger that has been unleashed―until the city begins to fight back. As the sun sets, stone gargoyles and bronze statues tear away from their buildings and plinths to hunt people through the streets. Trapped in Mina’s bell, the soul of a twisted and power-hungry Saint festered. Now free of his prison, he hides behind the face of one of Vaiwyn’s citizens, corrupting the city and turning it on itself.

Time is running out, and the only chance Mina has to stop the destruction and horrific killings is finding and destroying the Saint’s host. Everyone is a suspect, including Mina's closest loved ones. She will have to decide how far she’ll go to save her city―and who she’s willing to kill to do it.]]> 336 Elle Tesch 1250322804 Tim 0 to-read 3.53 2025
author: Elle Tesch
name: Tim
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 222320454
Their path is fraught with danger while ferocious Kangals relentlessly pursue them. They trek through lush forests, frozen tundras, and putrid caves which test their ability to survive. As the duo battles against time and nature's fiercest obstacles, they uncover more than just their hidden strength-they unravel truths that could reshape their world.]]> 228 E.K. Mikulski Tim 0 to-read 4.36 2025
author: E.K. Mikulski
name: Tim
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 220999091 A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
Rebecca meets The House of Spirits in this sweeping, gorgeously atmospheric novel about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous

Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Now, nearly a century since it was built, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for misfits, seeking to forget their pasts and disappear into the mansions dark corridors.

Until Sana. She and her father are the latest of Akbar Manzil’s long list of tenants, seeking a new home after suffering painful loss. Unlike the others, who choose not to look too closely at the mansion’s unsettling qualities—the strange assortment of bones in the overgrown garden, the mysterious figure seen to move sometimes at night—she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion. To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects—and to the locked door at its end, unopened for decades.

Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time, with faded photographs of a couple in love and a worn diary that whispers of a dark past: the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, the original owner’s second wife, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the room’s shadows is a grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who once loved Meena and has haunted the mansion since her mysterious death. Obsessed with Meena’s story, and unaware of the creature that follows her, Sana digs into the past like fingers into a wound, awakening the memories of the house itself—and dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone living and dead at Akbar Manzil.

Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.]]> 320 Shubnum Khan 0593653475 Tim 0 to-read 3.78 2024
author: Shubnum Khan
name: Tim
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 10267492 73 Edith Wharton 1420935186 Tim 0 currently-reading 4.19 1911
author: Edith Wharton
name: Tim
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1911
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 195790861 To fix the world they first must break it further.

Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into their core programming, they murder their owner. The robot then discovers they can also do something else they never did before: run away. After fleeing the household, they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating, and a robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is finding a new purpose.]]> 376 Adrian Tchaikovsky 1250290287 Tim 0 to-read 3.99 2024
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Tim
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 55777544 “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?�

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives� successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives� tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.]]> 464 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0593133498 Tim 0 to-read 3.72 2024
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Tim
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 243972 204 Robert GlĂĽck 185242334X Tim 0 to-read 3.84 1994
author: Robert GlĂĽck
name: Tim
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 210451633 An invaluable reassessment of what we think we know about the daily lives of women in medieval Europe.  Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife charts the life and times of four medieval women—Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a no-good wife—who all bucked convention and forged their own path. Largely forgotten by modern readers, these women have an astonishing amount to teach us about love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, and earning a living.   Through these four writers, Hetta Howes engagingly reveals how everyday women lived, survived, and thrived in medieval times. Who did they marry and why? Were they expected to have children? Did they ever have extramarital affairs? Could they earn money and become self-sufficient? How did they make friends? Could they be leaders? What did they think about death—and what about life and their place in it? While in many ways the Middle Ages was a terrible time to be a woman, there were areas of life that were surprisingly progressive. Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife paints a vibrant portrait of these women, their world, and the ways they speak to us today.]]> 256 Hetta Howes 0520396588 Tim 0 to-read 4.04 2024
author: Hetta Howes
name: Tim
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 209192695 From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.]]> 449 Haruki Murakami 0593801970 Tim 0 paused 3.73 2023
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Tim
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: paused
review:

]]> 208430621
In this fresh take on love and trouble in America, Brock Hobson, an insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher, finds his equilibrium disturbed by the results of a predictive blood test. Baxter, a master storyteller, brings us a gradually building rollercoaster narrative, and a protagonist who is impertinent, searching, and hilariously relatable. From his good-as-gold, gentle girlfriend to the excessively macho subcontractor guy his ex-wife left him for, not to mention his well-raised teenage kids, now exploring sex and sexuality, the secondary characters in Brock's life all contribute meaningfully to the drama, as increasing challenges to his sense of self and purpose crash over him. The final battle—no spoilers, but there is one—couldn't be more delightful, as this quick and bracing novel reminds us to choose the best people to love, accept the ones we love even if we didn’t choose them, and love them all well.]]> 224 Charles Baxter 0593700856 Tim 1
I loved Saul and Patsy. Loved Charles Baxter’s essays on writing, but this book was terrible. To start, it’s boring. The narrator is annoying. It tries to be funny without being funny. And even though it’s a short novel it feels exhausting. I skimmed just to finish it and read something better.

My advice to you is to skip this book over. You don’t need to read it.]]> 3.07 2024
author: Charles Baxter
name: Tim
average rating: 3.07
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:
Holy shit, this is a stupid book. And not even stupid-funny. It’s stupid-tiresome. Like if you need to follow your book title with “a comedy,� then maybe it’s not funny. Maybe if it were funny, people would laugh when they read it and be amused.

I loved Saul and Patsy. Loved Charles Baxter’s essays on writing, but this book was terrible. To start, it’s boring. The narrator is annoying. It tries to be funny without being funny. And even though it’s a short novel it feels exhausting. I skimmed just to finish it and read something better.

My advice to you is to skip this book over. You don’t need to read it.
]]> 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan � today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma � who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods � the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 �lvaro Enrigue 059354479X Tim 0 to-read 3.76 2022
author: �lvaro Enrigue
name: Tim
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 24983
But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin--barely of age herself--finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.

Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit.]]> 578 Connie Willis 0553562738 Tim 0 to-read 4.02 1992
author: Connie Willis
name: Tim
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201626991
She wakes in a castle on the edge of a hellish chasm, in a kingdom on the brink of war. Home to dangerous monsters, scheming courtiers and her favourite fictional character: the Once and Forever Emperor. He’s impossibly alluring, as only fiction can be. And in this fantasy world, she discovers she's not the heroine, but the villainess in the Emperor's tale.

So be it. The wicked are better dressed, with better one-liners, even if they're doomed to bad ends. She assembles the wildly disparate villains of the story under her evil leadership, plotting to change their fate. But as the body count rises and the Emperor's fury increases, it seems Rae and her allies may not survive to see the final page.

This adult epic fantasy debut from Sarah Rees Brennan puts the reader in the villain's shoes, for an adventure that is both 'brilliant' (Holly Black) and 'supremely satisfying' (Leigh Bardugo). Expect a rogue's gallery of villains including an axe wielding maid, a shining knight with dark moods, a homicidal bodyguard, and a playboy spymaster with a golden heart and a filthy reputation.]]> 435 Sarah Rees Brennan 0316568716 Tim 0 to-read 3.87 2024
author: Sarah Rees Brennan
name: Tim
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 150247395
Called in to investigate this mystery is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol. Din is an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. His job is to observe and report, and act as his superior’s eyes and ears--quite literally, in this case, as among Ana’s quirks are her insistence on wearing a blindfold at all times, and her refusal to step outside the walls of her home.

Din is most perplexed by Ana’s ravenous appetite for information and her mind’s frenzied leaps—not to mention her cheerful disregard for propriety and the apparent joy she takes in scandalizing her young counterpart. Yet as the case unfolds and Ana makes one startling deduction after the next, he finds it hard to deny that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.

Featuring an unforgettable Holmes-and-Watson style pairing, a gloriously labyrinthine plot, and a haunting and wholly original fantasy world, The Tainted Cup brilliantly reinvents the classic mystery tale.]]> 410 Robert Jackson Bennett 1984820702 Tim 0 to-read 4.28 2024
author: Robert Jackson Bennett
name: Tim
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195853541
In Universes is a mind-bending tour across parallel worlds, each an answer to the question of what life would be like if events had played out just a little differently. The universes grow increasingly strange: women fracture into hordes of animals, alien-infested bears prowl apocalyptic landscapes. But across them all, Raffi—alongside their sometimes-friends, sometimes-lovers Britt, Kay, and Graham—reaches for a life that feels authentically their own.

Blending realism with science fiction, In Universes explores the thirst for genius, the fluidity of gender and identity, and the pull of the past against the desire to lead a meaningful life. Part Ted Chiang, part Carmen Maria Machado, part Everything Everywhere All At Once, In Universes insists on the transgressive power of hope even in the darkest of times.]]> 240 Emet North 0063314878 Tim 0 to-read 3.82 2024
author: Emet North
name: Tim
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Tim 5 4.16 2024
author: Richard Powers
name: Tim
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/27
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: beautiful, sunbursts-behind-closed-eyes, technology
review:
Damn, this book was wonderful! I thought I knew where it was going and then, Powers switched the tracks and suddenly everything I thought I knew was wrong. It's beautiful, it's sad, it's terrifying and perhaps hopeful if you're optimistic about the future.
]]> 202220516 A stirring, unsparing debut novel about black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student, from the "extraordinary [and] insightful" author of Sink (New York Times Book Review). After a deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a MD/PhD student at The University of Pennsylvania, and an emergency department tech at a hospital in North Philly, he becomes interested in the Holmesburg Prison Experiments, in which the prison conducted scientific trials on their inmates. Through this curiosity he comes to know his estranged father, who is serving time for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, his best friend Murray, a fellow vet, judges the journey he sets out upon, while simultaneously pushing him towards a ruinous self-discovery. Balancing single fatherhood, his studies, and long shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his more storied friends and colleagues.  GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.]]> 240 Joseph Earl Thomas 1538740982 Tim 0 to-read 3.69 2024
author: Joseph Earl Thomas
name: Tim
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195095780
In this ingenious, sweeping novel, Phillip B. Williams introduces us to an enigmatic woman named Saint, a fearsome conjuror who, in the 1830s, annihilates plantations all over Arkansas to rescue the people enslaved there. She brings those she has freed to a haven of her own a town just north of St. Louis, magically concealed from outsiders, named Ours.

It is in this miraculous place that Saint’s grand experiment—a truly secluded community where her people may flourish—takes root. But although Saint does her best to protect the inhabitants of Ours, over time, her conjuring and memories begin to betray her, leaving the town vulnerable to intrusions by newcomers with powers of their own. As the cracks in Saint’s creation are exposed, some begin to wonder whether the community’s safety might be yet another form of bondage.

Set over the course of four decades and steeped in a rich tradition of American literature informed by Black surrealism, mythology, and spirituality, Ours is a stunning exploration of the possibilities and limitations of love and freedom by a writer of capacious vision and talent.]]> 592 Phillip B. Williams 059365482X Tim 0 to-read 3.80 2024
author: Phillip B. Williams
name: Tim
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 203553197
Twenty-four-year-old Akosua is easily knocked off her feet. When she falls and hits her head, she’s too preoccupied with her latest dramas to fully absorb the shock. In the span of three months, she has broken up with her boyfriend Wisdom, discovered that her deadbeat dad has moved back to the States from Ghana, and dropped so many classes that she believes she’s the only history grad student in the history of grad students to be registered for just one partial-credit class. Instead of facing her problems, Akosua seeks distraction in Daniel, a “good Ghanaian man.� But as her head injury worsens, she questions whether she can continue to run away from her father any more than she can keep ignoring her brain and its traumas. Vibrant, funny, and bittersweet, Blood on the Brain is a novel about the complications of family, romance, and culture—and how coming of age can feel like a blow to the head.]]> 248 Esinam Bediako 163628180X Tim 0 to-read 4.03
author: Esinam Bediako
name: Tim
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127464148 A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
Rebecca meets The House of Spirits in this sweeping, gorgeously atmospheric novel about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous

Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Now, nearly a century since it was built, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for misfits, seeking to forget their pasts and disappear into the mansions dark corridors.

Until Sana. She and her father are the latest of Akbar Manzil’s long list of tenants, seeking a new home after suffering painful loss. Unlike the others, who choose not to look too closely at the mansion’s unsettling qualities—the strange assortment of bones in the overgrown garden, the mysterious figure seen to move sometimes at night—she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion. To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects—and to the locked door at its end, unopened for decades.

Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time, with faded photographs of a couple in love and a worn diary that whispers of a dark past: the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, the original owner’s second wife, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the room’s shadows is a grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who once loved Meena and has haunted the mansion since her mysterious death. Obsessed with Meena’s story, and unaware of the creature that follows her, Sana digs into the past like fingers into a wound, awakening the memories of the house itself—and dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone living and dead at Akbar Manzil.

Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.]]> 320 Shubnum Khan 0593653459 Tim 0 to-read 3.80 2024
author: Shubnum Khan
name: Tim
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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:

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.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Tim 0 to-read 3.54 2024
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Tim
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18745228
Pam Munoz Ryan eloquently portrays the Mexican workers' plight in this abundant and passionate novel that gives voice to those who have historically been denied one. "When I was a child, I always assumed my grandmother grew up in poverty because the stories she told were primarily about raising her children in farm labor camps in California in the 1930s. It wasn't until I was a young woman that she told me about her childhood in Mexico. I was so moved by her riches-to-rags fairytale that I felt compelled to share her story." � Pam Munoz Ryan.]]> 304 Pam Muñoz Ryan 0545532345 Tim 5 4.42 2000
author: Pam Muñoz Ryan
name: Tim
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Tim 5 4.08 2024
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Tim
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/04
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: science-fiction, beautiful, surreal
review:
Wonderful, weird, inspiring and sad. Best book I’ve read this year.
]]> 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,� chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.� Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 192 AysegĂĽl Savas 163973306X Tim 0 to-read 3.88 2024
author: AysegĂĽl Savas
name: Tim
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Tim 3 3.35 2024
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Tim
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves:
review:
Honestly, this was a bit of a slog. Love Kushner’s writing but needed to start skimming the emails from Bruno.
]]> 61885010 The Archive Undying, national bestseller Emma Mieko Candon's bold entry into the world of mecha fiction.

WHEN AN AI DIES, ITS CITY DIES WITH IT
WHEN A CITY FALLS, IT LEAVES A CORPSE BEHIND
WHEN THAT CORPSE RUNS OFF, ONLY DEVOTION CAN BRING IT BACK

When the robotic god of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. It killed its priests, its city, and all its wondrous works. But in its final death throes, the god brought one thing back to its favorite child, Sunai. For the seventeen years since, Sunai has walked the land like a ghost, unable to die, unable to age, and unable to forget the horrors he's seen. He's run as far as he can from the wreckage of his faith, drowning himself in drink, drugs, and men. But when Sunai wakes up in the bed of the one man he never should have slept with, he finds himself on a path straight back into the world of gods and machines.

The Archive Undying is the first volume of Emma Mieko Candon's Downworld Sequence, a sci-fi series where AI deities and brutal police states clash, wielding giant robots steered by pilot-priests with corrupted bodies.

Come get in the robot.]]> 496 Emma Mieko Candon 1250821541 Tim 0 to-read 3.32 2023
author: Emma Mieko Candon
name: Tim
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 190678 340 Charles Pellegrino 0380770261 Tim 0 to-read 3.80 1995
author: Charles Pellegrino
name: Tim
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 968827 Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is widely regarded as a high point of both humanistic and hard SF, winning SF's Hugo Award and Locus Award on its first publication.]]> 251 Kate Wilhelm 0060146540 Tim 0 to-read 3.86 1976
author: Kate Wilhelm
name: Tim
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62194599 Internationally bestselling superstar author Angie Thomas makes her middle grade debut with the launch of an inventive, hilarious, and suspenseful new contemporary fantasy trilogy inspired by African American history and folklore.

It’s not easy being a Remarkable in the Unremarkable world. Some things are cool—like getting a pet hellhound for your twelfth birthday. Others, not so much—like not being trusted to learn magic because you might use it to take revenge on an annoying neighbor.

All Nic Blake wants is to be a powerful Manifestor like her dad. But before she has a chance to convince him to teach her the gift, a series of shocking revelations and terrifying events launch Nic and two friends on a hunt for a powerful magic tool she’s never heard of...to save her father from imprisonment for a crime she refuses to believe he committed.]]> 354 Angie Thomas 0063225131 Tim 5 Kids and I loved this! 4.16 2023
author: Angie Thomas
name: Tim
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: children-and-teen-fiction, fantasy
review:
Kids and I loved this!
]]> 206101580 From the New York Times bestselling author and legendary storyteller Alan Moore, the first book in an enthralling new fantasy series about murder, magic, and madness in post-WWII London.

Dennis Knuckleyard is a hapless eighteen-year-old who works and lives in a second-hand bookstore. One day, his boss and landlady, Coffin Ada, sends him to retrieve some rare books, one of which, Dennis discovers, should not exist. A London Walk by Rev. Thomas Hampole is a fictitious book that appears in a real novel by another author. Yet A London Walk is physically there in his hands, nonetheless.

Coffin Ada tells Dennis the book comes from the other London, the Great When, a version of the city that is beyond time. In the Great When, epochs blend and realities and unrealities blur, while concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous and terrible beings. But, Coffin Ada tells Dennis, if he does not return the book to this other London, he will be killed.

So begins Dennis' adventure in Long London. Delving deep into the city's occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers, Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events that may endanger both Londons.

Mystical, hilarious, and magnificently imagined, The Great When is an unforgettable introduction to the consciousness-altering world of Long London.]]> 315 Alan Moore 1635578841 Tim 0 to-read 3.58 2024
author: Alan Moore
name: Tim
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 30150846
In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes.

Following her award-winning book The Latehomecomer , Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has polished a life of poverty for his children, burnished their grim reality so that they might shine.

Written with the exquisite beauty for which Kao Kalia Yang is renowned, The Song Poet is a love story -- of a daughter for her father, a father for his children, a people for their land, their traditions, and all that they have lost.]]> 210 Kao Kalia Yang 1627794956 Tim 0 to-read 4.41 2016
author: Kao Kalia Yang
name: Tim
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 23292111 Now a major motion picture "The Front Runner" starring Hugh JackmanAn NPR Best Book of the YearIn May 1987, Colorado Senator Gary Hart—a dashing, reform-minded Democrat—seemed a lock for the party’s presidential nomination and led George H. W. Bush by double digits in the polls. Then, in one tumultuous week, rumors of marital infidelity and a newspaper’s stakeout of Hart’s home resulted in a media frenzy the likes of which had never been seen before.   Through the spellbindingly reported story of the Senator’s fall from grace, Matt Bai, Yahoo News columnist and former chief political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, shows the Hart affair to be far more than one man’s rather, it marked a crucial turning point in the ethos of political media, and the new norms of life in the public eye. All the Truth Is Out is a tour de force portrait of the American way of politics at the highest level, one that changes our understanding of how we elect our presidents and how the bedrock of American values has shifted under our feet.]]> 254 Matt Bai 038535312X Tim 0 to-read 4.13 2014
author: Matt Bai
name: Tim
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205977739
Mal and Christopher embark on a wild adventure, racing from island to island, searching for someone who can explain why the magic is fading and why magical creatures are suddenly dying. They consult sphinxes, battle kraken, and negotiate with dragons. But the closer they get to the dark truth of what's happening, the clearer it becomes: no one else can fix this. If the Archipelago is to be saved, Mal and Christopher will have to do it themselves.]]> 368 Katherine Rundell 0593809866 Tim 0 4.13 2023
author: Katherine Rundell
name: Tim
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: to-read, children-and-teen-fiction
review:

]]> 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 Tim 5 Amazing. Wonderful novel. 4.47 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Tim
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:
Amazing. Wonderful novel.
]]> 13630171
Built from the skulls of fallen generals and demon princes, it is a seat of honor and ancient, powerful magic, keeping the demon corelings at bay. From atop the throne, Ahmann Jardir was meant to conquer the known world, forging its isolated peoples into a unified army to rise up and end the demon war once and for all.

But Arlen Bales, the Warded Man, stood against this course, challenging Jardir to a duel he could not in honor refuse. Rather than risk defeat, Arlen cast them both from a precipice, leaving the world without a savior, and opening a struggle for succession that threatens to tear the Free Cities of Thesa apart.

In the south, Inevera, Jardir’s first wife, must find a way to keep their sons from killing each other and plunging their people into civil war as they strive for glory enough to make a claim on the throne.

In the north, Leesha Paper and Rojer Inn struggle to forge an alliance between the duchies of Angiers and Miln against the Krasians before it is too late.

Caught in the crossfire is the duchy of Lakton--rich and unprotected, ripe for conquest.

All the while, the corelings have been growing stronger, and without Arlen and Jardir there may be none strong enough to stop them. Only Renna Bales may know more about the fate of the missing men, but she, too, has disappeared...]]> 681 Peter V. Brett 0345531485 Tim 1
I skimmed. Because otherwise it's a lot of fighting corelings, pointless sex or rape, talking with limited interior growth.]]> 4.11 2015
author: Peter V. Brett
name: Tim
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2024/08/27
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: drags-like-an-anchor-in-the-water, fantasy, hundreds-of-pages-too-long, recycle-into-something-useful
review:
The Demon Cycle books are just not that good. It's one of the sad things about fantasy where the desire for books is greater than what's produced by writers. Brett doesn't know when to use point-of-view or flashback. What would these novels be like if there where three point-of-view characters in the whole novel instead of showing a scene from five different character's perspectives? Also, the slowness of whole chapters of flashback in order to make a secondary character a main character are tedious.

I skimmed. Because otherwise it's a lot of fighting corelings, pointless sex or rape, talking with limited interior growth.
]]> 13642948
Arlen Bales was once an ordinary man, but now he has become something more—the Warded Man, tattooed with eldritch wards so powerful they make him a match for any demon. Arlen denies he is the Deliverer at every turn, but the more he tries to be one with the common folk, the more fervently they believe. Many would follow him, but Arlen’s path threatens to lead him to a dark place he alone can travel to, and from which there may be no returning.

The only one with hope of keeping Arlen in the world of men, or joining him in his descent into the world of demons, is Renna Tanner, a fierce young woman in danger of losing herself to the power of demon magic.

Ahmann Jardir has forged the warlike desert tribes of Krasia into a demon-killing army and proclaimed himself Shar’Dama Ka, the Deliverer. He carries ancient weapons--a spear and a crown--that give credence to his claim, and already vast swaths of the green lands bow to his control.

But Jardir did not come to power on his own. His rise was engineered by his First Wife, Inevera, a cunning and powerful priestess whose formidable demon bone magic gives her the ability to glimpse the future. Inevera’s motives and past are shrouded in mystery, and even Jardir does not entirely trust her.

Once Arlen and Jardir were as close as brothers. Now they are the bitterest of rivals. As humanity’s enemies rise, the only two men capable of defeating them are divided against each other by the most deadly demons of all--those lurking in the human heart.]]> 656 Peter V. Brett Tim 2
I skimmed. Because otherwise it's a lot of fighting corelings, pointless sex or rape, talking with limited interior growth.]]> 4.24 2013
author: Peter V. Brett
name: Tim
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: fantasy, hundreds-of-pages-too-long, mediocre-as-a-frozen-pizza, not-as-good-as-everyone-says
review:
The Demon Cycle books are just not that good. It's one of the sad things about fantasy where the desire for books is greater than what's produced by writers. Brett doesn't know when to use point-of-view or flashback. What would these novels be like if there where three point-of-view characters in the whole novel instead of showing a scene from five different character's perspectives? Also, the slowness of whole chapters of flashback in order to make a secondary character a main character are tedious.

I skimmed. Because otherwise it's a lot of fighting corelings, pointless sex or rape, talking with limited interior growth.
]]> 33245077
But in their efforts to bring the war to the demons, Arlen and Jardir have set something in motion that may prove the end of everything they hold dear—a Swarm. Now the war is at hand and humanity cannot hope to win it unless Arlen and Jardir, with the help of Arlen’s wife, Renna, can bend a captured demon prince to their will and force the devious creature to lead them to the Core, where the Mother of Demons breeds an inexhaustible army.

Trusting their closest confidantes, Leesha, Inevera, Ragen and Elissa, to rally the fractious people of the Free Cities and lead them against the Swarm, Arlen, Renna, and Jardir set out on a desperate quest into the darkest depths of evil—from which none of them expects to return alive.]]> 881 Peter V. Brett 0425285790 Tim 2 4.34 2017
author: Peter V. Brett
name: Tim
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 211207600 As darkness falls after sunset, the corelings rise—demons who possess supernatural powers and burn with a consuming hatred of humanity. For hundreds of years the demons have terrorized the night, slowly culling the human herd that shelters behind magical wards—symbols of power whose origins are lost in myth and whose protection is terrifyingly fragile. It was not always this way. Once, men and women battled the corelings on equal terms, but those days are gone. Night by night the demons grow stronger, while human numbers dwindle under their relentless assault. Now, with hope for the future fading, three young survivors of vicious demon attacks will dare the impossible, stepping beyond the crumbling safety of the wards to risk everything in a desperate quest to regain the secrets of the past. Together, they will stand against the night.Look for Peter V. Brett’s complete Demon THE WARDED MAN | THE DESERT SPEAR | THE DAYLIGHT WAR | THE SKULL THRONE | THE CORE]]> 482 Peter V. Brett Tim 3
Things that suck: Whole lot of rape, too black and white, too long.]]> 4.33 2008
author: Peter V. Brett
name: Tim
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: fantasy, hundreds-of-pages-too-long, needs-an-editor, not-as-good-as-everyone-says
review:
Cool things: Demons that rise from the earth, wards to protect humans, magic, badass hero.

Things that suck: Whole lot of rape, too black and white, too long.
]]> 8176879 674 Peter V. Brett Tim 3 4.20 2010
author: Peter V. Brett
name: Tim
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/21
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: fantasy, hundreds-of-pages-too-long, not-as-good-as-everyone-says
review:

]]> 174156218 An electrifying debut novel from an “unusually gifted writer� (Lorrie Moore) about the radical intimacy of physical competition

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors� pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.]]> 224 Rita Bullwinkel 0593654102 Tim 3
Instead of following one girl boxer from start to finish, the writer follows all of the competitors. We see them match by match. We flow into their pasts and their futures. It’s neat at first. Then, it becomes predictable and boring.

Am I invested in the next round of characters? By rounds three and four, I wasn’t. Why should I care about these next characters who are going to be with me for 20 pages? You can say the human experience. But I also want a plot. I skimmed. It was more of same.

I skimmed the next rounds and then read the final. It felt like a shtick at that point. Meditative. Thought writing. But repetitive. The best part of the novel was the ending. It was a cool jump forward in time that put the lack of meaning of a weekend boxing tournament in Reno into perspective. But still, it doesn’t save the book.

Neat idea. Talented writer. Didn’t come together for me.

What were your thoughts?]]> 3.49 2024
author: Rita Bullwinkel
name: Tim
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves:
review:
What is it when a novel is a little experimental and then you get what it’s doing? Does it propel you forward? Does it feel less due to its predictability?

Instead of following one girl boxer from start to finish, the writer follows all of the competitors. We see them match by match. We flow into their pasts and their futures. It’s neat at first. Then, it becomes predictable and boring.

Am I invested in the next round of characters? By rounds three and four, I wasn’t. Why should I care about these next characters who are going to be with me for 20 pages? You can say the human experience. But I also want a plot. I skimmed. It was more of same.

I skimmed the next rounds and then read the final. It felt like a shtick at that point. Meditative. Thought writing. But repetitive. The best part of the novel was the ending. It was a cool jump forward in time that put the lack of meaning of a weekend boxing tournament in Reno into perspective. But still, it doesn’t save the book.

Neat idea. Talented writer. Didn’t come together for me.

What were your thoughts?
]]> 52661162
Then a local boy appeals to him for help. His brother is missing, and no one in the village, least of all the police, seems to care. And once again, Cal feels that restless itch.

Something is wrong in this community, and he must find out what, even if it brings trouble to his door.]]> 451 Tana French 073522465X Tim 4 3.70 2020
author: Tana French
name: Tim
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/08
date added: 2024/08/08
shelves:
review:
Great characters. Vivid setting. A different kind of mystery with some genre tropes along the way.
]]> 156480764
In New York City, bookseller Cassie Andrews is living an unassuming life when she is given a gift by a favourite customer. It's a book - an unusual book, full of strange writing and mysterious drawings. And at the very front there is a handwritten message to Cassie, telling her that this is the Book of Doors, and that any door is every door .

What Cassie is about to discover is that the Book of Doors is a special book that bestows an extraordinary powers on whoever possesses it, and soon she and her best friend Izzy are exploring all that the Book of Doors can do, swept away from their quiet lives by the possibilities of travelling to anywhere they want.

But the Book of Doors is not the only magical book in the world. There are other books that can do wondrous and dreadful things when wielded by dangerous and ruthless individuals - individuals who crave what Cassie now possesses.

Suddenly Cassie and Izzy are confronted by violence and danger, and the only person who can help them is, it seems, Drummond Fox. He is a man fleeing his own demons - a man with his own secret library of magical books that he has hidden away in the shadows for safekeeping. Because there is a nameless evil out there that is hunting them all . . .

Because some doors should never be opened.]]> 408 Gareth Brown 1787637247 Tim 1
Not sure why this got a lot of positive attention, but I’m definitely not going to finish it.

Want to read an amazing book about magical doors? Read Exit West.]]> 4.04 2024
author: Gareth Brown
name: Tim
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2024/08/08
shelves:
review:
Ugh. Read the first two chapters and it reads like a perky YA novel written by an intro to creative writing student. Also, magical doors, bookshops and mysterious characters, does it get more trite?

Not sure why this got a lot of positive attention, but I’m definitely not going to finish it.

Want to read an amazing book about magical doors? Read Exit West.
]]> 48484 Two months since the stars fell...

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune’s orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever’s out there isn’t talking to us. It’s talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won’t be needed, and a fainter hope she’ll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called “vampire,� recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist � an informational topologist with half his mind gone � as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find.

But you’d give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them…]]> 384 Peter Watts 0765312182 Tim 0 to-read 4.01 2006
author: Peter Watts
name: Tim
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 45032 488 Jane Austen Tim 3 literature 3.86 1814
author: Jane Austen
name: Tim
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: literature
review:

]]> 201187765
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters� rich interior lives amid the social an]]> 448 Claire Messud 039363504X Tim 0 to-read 3.50
author: Claire Messud
name: Tim
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58388343 While we live, the enemy shall fear us.

All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the all-powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory over humanity.

They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.

Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, she escapes from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.

A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you, Some Desperate Glory is award-winning author Emily Tesh’s highly anticipated debut novel.]]> 438 Emily Tesh 1250834988 Tim 3 4.01 2023
author: Emily Tesh
name: Tim
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:
If you combined the books Wool and Ender’s Game in a space opera but not as good as either of those books.
]]> 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 Tim 5 3.92 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: Tim
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves:
review:
Halfway through, during the Imelda section, I thought about quitting this book. So glad I didn't as it really soared. The ending is so sad and rough though.
]]> 123004552
“I love Dragonlance and I love Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Plain and simple. Their books are my favorite fantasy series of all time.”—Joe Manganiello

Destina Rosethorn—as her name implies—believes herself to be a favored child of destiny. But when her father dies in the War of the Lance, she watches her carefully constructed world come crashing down. She loses not only her beloved father but also the legacy he has left the family lands and castle. To save her father, she hatches a bold plan—to go back in time and prevent his death.

First, she has to secure the Device of Time Journeying, last known to be in the possession of the spirited kender Tasslehoff Burrfoot. But to change time, she’ll need another magical artifact—the most powerful and dangerous artifact ever created. Destina’s quest takes her from the dwarven kingdom of Thorbardin to the town of Solace and beyond, setting in motion a chain of disastrous events that threaten to divert the course of the River of Time, alter the past, and forever change the future.]]> 400 Margaret Weis 1984819399 Tim 0 to-read 3.69 2022
author: Margaret Weis
name: Tim
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1971304
By turns insightful and funny, thrilling and terrifying, City of Thieves is a gripping, cinematic World War II adventure and an intimate coming-of-age story with an utterly contemporary feel for how boys become men.]]> 258 David Benioff 0670018708 Tim 0 to-read 4.28 2008
author: David Benioff
name: Tim
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 176443453
It’s been a year since his ex-boyfriend dumped him and moved from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and Valdin is doing fine. He has a good flat with his sister Greta, a good career where his colleagues only occasionally remind him that he is the sole M�ori person in the office, and a good friend who he only sleeps with when he’s sad. But when work sends him to Argentina and he’s thrown back in his former lover’s orbit, Valdin is forced to confront the feelings he’s been trying to ignore—and the future he wants.

Greta is not letting her painfully unrequited crush (or her possibly pointless master’s thesis, or her pathetic academic salary...) get her down. She would love to focus on the charming fellow grad student she meets at a party and her friendships with a circle of similarly floundering twenty-somethings, but her chaotic family life won’t stop her mother is keeping secrets, her nephew is having a gay crisis, and her brother has suddenly flown to South America without a word.

Sharp, hilarious, and with an undeniable emotional momentum that builds to an exuberant conclusion, Greta & Valdin careens us through the siblings� misadventures and the messy dramas of their sprawling, eccentric Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family. An acclaimed bestseller in New Zealand, Greta & Valdin is fresh, joyful, and alive with the possibility of love in its many mystifying forms.]]> 352 Rebecca K. Reilly 1668028042 Tim 3 international, funny, cute 3.90 2021
author: Rebecca K. Reilly
name: Tim
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves: international, funny, cute
review:
I enjoyed this novel, but the characters get a little grating after a while. Too quirky. Too much like caricature. Too earnest to be satire. And the ending. Ugh. The marriage ending is a cop out.
]]> 123136728 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Tim 2 not-as-good-as-everyone-says 3.56 2023
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Tim
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/27
date added: 2024/06/28
shelves: not-as-good-as-everyone-says
review:
Seinfeld in space without the laughs. A largely plotless novel that would have made a killer short story, the writer is so taken with the beauty of her language that the sentences crack and fall apart under the weight of taking moments too far. Descriptions go on and on. There’s a meditative quality to the writing, but it’s ruined by being too much of everything. Too meditative, too much inaction, too many words describing the same thing over and over.
]]> 200634908 A novel of family, secrets, ghosts, and homecoming set on the seaside cliffs of Maine, by the New York Times best-selling author of Friends and Strangers.

On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house, lavender with gingerbread trim, a home that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother.

Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The new owner, Genevieve, a summer person from Beacon Hill, has gutted it, transforming the house into a glossy white monstrosity straight out of a shelter magazine. Strangely, Genevieve is convinced that the house is haunted—perhaps the product of something troubling Genevieve herself has done. She hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there. The story Jane uncovers—of lovers lost at sea, romantic longing, shattering loss, artistic awakening, historical artifacts stolen and sold, and the long shadow of colonialism—is even older than Maine itself.

Enthralling, richly imagined, filled with psychic mediums and charlatans, spirits and past lives, mothers, marriage, and the legacy of alcoholism, this is a deeply moving novel about the land we inhabit, the women who came before us, and the ways in which none of us will ever truly leave this earth.]]> 384 J. Courtney Sullivan 059331915X Tim 0 to-read 3.51 2024
author: J. Courtney Sullivan
name: Tim
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 150739 not supposed to be: headstrong, tomboyish, smart - and bored. So bored that she runs away to live with a dragon - and finds the family and excitement she's been looking for.

Cover illustrator: Peter de Sève]]> 240 Patricia C. Wrede 015204566X Tim 0 4.16 1990
author: Patricia C. Wrede
name: Tim
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/13
shelves: to-read, children-and-teen-fiction
review:

]]> 9542311 334 Mary Roach 0393339912 Tim 0 to-read 3.97 2010
author: Mary Roach
name: Tim
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49089632
There are some differences. This America has been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not. Some of these forces are charmingly everyday, like the ability to make an orb of light appear or travel across the world through rings of fungi. But other forces are less charming and should never see the light of day.

Elatsoe lives in this slightly stranger America. She can raise the ghosts of dead animals, a skill passed down through generations of her Lipan Apache family. Her beloved cousin has just been murdered in a town that wants no prying eyes. But she is going to do more than pry. The picture-perfect facade of Willowbee masks gruesome secrets, and she will rely on her wits, skills, and friends to tear off the mask and protect her family.]]> 362 Darcie Little Badger 1646140052 Tim 0 to-read 3.98 2020
author: Darcie Little Badger
name: Tim
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 2247142
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.� Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game.

“Sinister and strangely alluring,� (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.]]> 271 Patricia Highsmith Tim 4 3.96 1955
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Tim
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/07
date added: 2024/06/07
shelves:
review:
Creepy. Great work placing the reader in Tom’s head.
]]> 198123575 “Be prepared to fully lose yourself in The Winner—a book I started and then simply couldn’t stop reading. Teddy Wayne has written a timely, topical novel that still somehow feels like a classic.”—Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of Long Bright River

Conor O’Toole has never been anywhere as casually glamorous as Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod. It’s a sweet deal for the summer: free lodging in a guest cottage in exchange for tennis lessons, luxuriously far from the cramped Yonkers apartment he shares with his diabetic mother.

In this oceanfront paradise, however, new clients prove hard to come by, and Conor has bills to pay. Then a sharp-tongued divorcée appears, offering him double his usual rate. Soon he realizes Catherine is expecting additional, off-the-court services for her money, and Conor tumbles into a secret erotic affair unlike anything he’s experienced before.

Despite his steamy flings with a woman twice his age, he simultaneously finds himself falling for the artsy, outspoken girl he met on the beach. Conor somehow finds a way to manage this tangled web—until he makes one final, irreversible mistake.

A dark, explosive literary thriller that brilliantly skewers the elite, Whiting Award winner Teddy Wayne’s unputdownable novel is cinematic, shocking, and a psychological masterpiece.]]> 320 Teddy Wayne 0063353598 Tim 0 to-read 3.11 2024
author: Teddy Wayne
name: Tim
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 269528
With its frank treatment of a woman's sexual awakening, Summer created a sensation upon its 1917 publication. Edith Wharton � the author of Ethan Frome and a peerless observer and chronicler of society � completely shattered the standards of conventional love stories with this novel's candor and realism. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author declared Summer a personal favorite among her works, and liked to refer to it as "the Hot Ethan." Over a century later, it remains fresh and relevant.]]> 127 Edith Wharton Tim 0 to-read 3.68 1917
author: Edith Wharton
name: Tim
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1917
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 104097 448 Guy Gavriel Kay 0743450094 Tim 0 to-read 4.18 1998
author: Guy Gavriel Kay
name: Tim
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 176443757
“Honest, highwire, virtuosic writing that summons up the world with all its charms and hazards.� —George Saunders, author of Liberation Day
“This funny as hell tale kept me moved to the core. Unputdownable.� —Mary Karr, author of Lit

Even though his firearms store is failing, things are looking up for David Rizzo. His son, Nick, has just recovered after a near-fatal overdose, which means one Rizzo can use Nick’s resurrection to create the most compelling television commercial for a gun emporium that the world has ever seen. After all, this is America , Rizzo tells himself. Surely anything is possible. But the relationship between father and son is fragile, mired in mutual disappointment. And when the pair embarks on their scheme to avoid bankruptcy, a high stakes crash of hijinks, hope, and disaster ensues.

Featuring a cast of unforgettable characters, this razor-sharp social satire lays bare both the gun and opioid crises. Fans of Don DeLillo and Stephen Markley will be thrilled by this smart, inventive debut.]]> 224 Alexander Sammartino 1982196742 Tim 4 3.21 2024
author: Alexander Sammartino
name: Tim
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/17
date added: 2024/05/21
shelves:
review:
Here's my review .
]]> 18222716 384 Kate Milford 0544052706 Tim 0 children-and-teen-fiction 4.01 2014
author: Kate Milford
name: Tim
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/19
shelves: children-and-teen-fiction
review:

]]> 156023123
She’s learning, too.

Doug says he loves that Annie’s artificial intelligence makes her seem more like a real woman, but the more human Annie becomes, the less perfectly she behaves. As Annie's relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder whether Doug truly desires what he says he does. In such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?]]> 231 Sierra Greer 0063312697 Tim 4 3.81 2024
author: Sierra Greer
name: Tim
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/19
date added: 2024/05/19
shelves:
review:
Feels very inspired by West World, but not violent. Feminist, sci-fi that explores sex and relationships where men hold power.
]]> 127282849
This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer who has hit the literary their novel has just won the prize for the Fictionalization of Social Evils. But the actual trophy, and with it the funds, hovers peskily out of reach.

Neon-beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with their partner Drew and eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular quest through their childhood in the Forest and an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, along with wormholes and time loops, Corey learns―the hard way―the difference between a prize and a gift.

Following the Goldsmiths Prize–winning Sterling Karat Gold , Isabel Waidner’s bold and buoyant new novel is about coming into one’s own, the labor of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself, and what ensues when a large amount of cultural capital is suddenly deposited in a place it has never been before.]]> 160 Isabel Waidner 1644452693 Tim 0 to-read 3.47 2023
author: Isabel Waidner
name: Tim
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 197063361
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms � what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings. Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency.

Drawn deeper into the agency's work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.

Exploring the natural world with the wonder and reverence we usually reserve for the stars, In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how � no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope � we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.]]> 496 Martin MacInnes 0802163467 Tim 0 to-read 3.70 2023
author: Martin MacInnes
name: Tim
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61273436 A bold, bitingly satirical near-future mosaic novel about a city run along 'meritocratic' lines, the injustice it creates, and the revolution that will destroy it.

We are the future of the human race.

Welcome to Apex City, formerly Bangalore. Here, technology is the key to survival, productivity is power, and even the self must be engineered, for the only noble goal in life: success.

Everything is decided by the mathematically perfect Bell Curve. With the right image, values and opinions, you can ascend to the glittering heights of the Ten Percent � the Virtual elite � and have the world at your feet. The less-fortunate struggle among the workaday Seventy Percent, or fall to the precarious Twenty Percent; and below that lies deportation to the ranks of the Analogs, with no access to electricity, running water or even humanity.

The system has no flaws, and cannot be questioned. Until a single daring theft sets events in motion that will change the city forever...

Previously published in South Asia only as Analog/Virtual, The Ten-Percent Thief is a striking debut by a ferocious new talent.]]> 368 Lavanya Lakshminarayan 1786188538 Tim 0 to-read 3.71 2020
author: Lavanya Lakshminarayan
name: Tim
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 4954833 Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm TĂłibĂ­n's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.]]> 262 Colm TĂłibĂ­n 1439138311 Tim 0 to-read 3.71 2009
author: Colm TĂłibĂ­n
name: Tim
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 Tim 0 to-read 4.00 2019
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Tim
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 157998171
In this groundbreaking book, Charles Duhigg unravels the secrets of the supercommunicators to reveal the art - and the science - of successful communication. He unpicks the different types of everyday conversation and pinpoints why some go smoothly while others swiftly fall apart. He reveals the conversational questions and gambits that bring people together. And he shows how even the most tricky of encounters can be turned around. In the process, he shows why a CIA operative was able to win over a reluctant spy, how a member of a jury got his fellow jurors to view an open-and-shut case differently, and what a doctor found they needed to do to engage with a vaccine sceptic.

Above all, he reveals the techniques we can all master to successfully connect with others, however tricky the circumstances. Packed with fascinating case studies and drawing on cutting-edge research, this book will change the way you think about what you say, and how you say it.]]> 307 Charles Duhigg 0593243935 Tim 0 to-read 4.20 2024
author: Charles Duhigg
name: Tim
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 179546766
There’s the world you can see. And then there’s the one you can’t. Welcome to the Morningside.

After being expelled from their ancestral home, Silvia and her mother finally settle at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in Island City where Silvia’s aunt Ena serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family's past. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place where she was born and spent her early years, nor does she know why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an a person willing to give the young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia's lonely and impoverished reality.

Enchanted by Ena’s stories, Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities and becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside. Bezi Duras is an enigma to everyone in the building. She has her own elevator entrance and leaves only to go out at night and walk her three massive hounds, often not returning until the early morning. Silvia’s mission to unravel the truth about this woman’s life, and her own haunted past, may end up costing her everything.

Startling, inventive, and profoundly moving, The Morningside is a novel about the stories we tell—and the stories we refuse to tell—to make sense of where we came from and who we hope we might become.]]> 287 Téa Obreht 1984855506 Tim 2 apocalyptic-fiction
The magic realism was half-hearted. A could or couldn’t be from the perspective of a young teen too eager to believe. Or as if the writer thought a good spin on post apocalyptic fiction would be magic realism. Post apocalyptic fiction feels tired and dead at this point.

The war crimes part was interesting but it felt soldered on.

Climate collapse? A woman who is a mythical creature? A writer stealing a story? War crimes? An immigrant family traveling to someplace with the promise of home? It’s chunky and falls apart. I joke with my kids when they tell stories to think of it like berries in pancakes. Too many berries and the pancakes fall apart. Too much in the story and it falls apart from not having a focus; getting confused.

]]> 3.55 2024
author: TĂ©a Obreht
name: Tim
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/27
date added: 2024/04/27
shelves: apocalyptic-fiction
review:
Uneven. Feels like three different book ideas mashed into one. A solid idea would have been the focus to be on The Dispatcher. Then Sil and Mila’s stories could have been vignettes.

The magic realism was half-hearted. A could or couldn’t be from the perspective of a young teen too eager to believe. Or as if the writer thought a good spin on post apocalyptic fiction would be magic realism. Post apocalyptic fiction feels tired and dead at this point.

The war crimes part was interesting but it felt soldered on.

Climate collapse? A woman who is a mythical creature? A writer stealing a story? War crimes? An immigrant family traveling to someplace with the promise of home? It’s chunky and falls apart. I joke with my kids when they tell stories to think of it like berries in pancakes. Too many berries and the pancakes fall apart. Too much in the story and it falls apart from not having a focus; getting confused.


]]> 194803857 A raucous and wickedly smart satire of Hollywood, toxic fandom, and our chronically online culture, following a washed-up actor on his quest to revive the cult TV show that catapulted him to teenage fame

David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, recovering alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot—not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence.

Hollywood, the Internet, and a fractured nation have other plans, however, and David soon drinks himself to a realization: This seemingly innocuous revival of an old Buffy rip-off could be the spark that sets ablaze a nation gripped by far-right conspiracy, climate catastrophe, and mass violence.

Reboot is a madcap speculative comedy for our era of glass-eyed doom-scrolling and Millennial nostalgia—and yet it’s still full of heart. It’s a tale of former teen heartthrobs, striving parents, internet edgelords, and fish-faced cryptids, for anyone who has looked back on their life and wanted—even if but for a moment—to hit “reset.”]]> 304 Justin Taylor 0553387626 Tim 0 to-read 2.96 2024
author: Justin Taylor
name: Tim
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127282597
At twenty-four, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet—a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds—introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she's preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup that Arthur has a wife—and that she has no idea Hera exists.

With its daringly specific and intimate voice, Green Dot is a darkly hilarious and deeply felt examination of the joys and indignities of coming into adulthood against the pitfalls of the twenty-first century and the winding, tortuous, and often very funny journey we take in deciding who we are and who we want to be.]]> 320 Madeleine Gray 1250890594 Tim 0 to-read 3.62 2024
author: Madeleine Gray
name: Tim
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 137123578 Intergalactic visions, deadly threats, and explosive standoffs between mostly good and nearly completely evil converge in an alternative fiction novel that could only be conceived by the inimitable Walter Mosley, one of the country’s most beloved and acclaimed writers

Martin Just wakes up one morning after what feels like, and might actually be, a centuries-long sleep with two new innate pieces of knowledge: Humanity is a virus destined to destroy all existence. And that he is the Cure.

Martin, his wife, and his two children are the only Black family on their neighborhood block in the Hollywood hills of Los Angeles. Suddenly, Martin is both father and Antibody, husband and Cure, occasionally slipping into an alternate consciousness � equipped with unprecedented physical strength � to violently defend them.

The family is stalked by Tor Waxman � the pale, white-haired embodiment of death who wears a dapper suit, carries a cane, and seeks to destroy all life with his fatal touch. Martin must convince his family of the danger and get them to engage with him in a battle beyond all imagining. Mosley effortlessly marries the sublime and the pedestrian: from monumental battles with truly universal stakes to the banality of standoffs with neighborhood police patrols, and the quotidian yet joyfully intimate conversations the family shares at home while gathered for dinner.

With his boundless talent and skilled range, Walter Mosley brings an ethereal, incisive look at a primal struggle driven by the spirit of the universe, in the vein of masters Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and Jeff VanderMeer. Expansive and innovative, sexy and satirical, Touched brilliantly imagines the ways in which human life and technological innovation threaten existence itself.]]> 176 Walter Mosley 0802161847 Tim 3 3.33 2023
author: Walter Mosley
name: Tim
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/12
date added: 2024/04/12
shelves:
review:
I really loved it but wondered how the ending would pay off in such a short novel with a grand idea. In the end, it didn’t work out. So many loose ends. But it was cool while it lasted.
]]> 127280776
There are only three real powers in the universe: the corporate power of the Trust versus the Union's labor's leverage. And between them, the Guild tries to keep everyone's hands above the table. It ain't easy.

Branded a Guild deserter, Jal "accidentally" lands a ride on a Guild ship. Helmed by an AI, with a ship's engineer/medic who doesn't see much of a difference between the two jobs, and a "don't make me shoot you" XO, the Guild crew of the Ambit is a little . . . different.

They're also in over their heads. Responding to a distress call from an abandoned planet, they find a mass grave, and a live programmer who knows how it happened. The Trust has plans. This isn't the first dead planet, and it's not going to be the last.

Unless the crew of the Ambit can stop it.]]> 407 L.M. Sagas 1250871255 Tim 1 abandoned 3.83 2024
author: L.M. Sagas
name: Tim
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2024/04/10
date added: 2024/04/10
shelves: abandoned
review:
Made it like a third of the way and it just feels like something for the WB. Like a lightweight sci-fi novel that is more a cozy, friendship book that takes place in space. Characters are almost simplistic or perhaps complex but then overly explained. Shifts of third person limited show us how they think about one another and their thoughts aren’t complex. There’s not a lot of feeling. Also, I can’t stand sci-fi that then uses contemporary words like joggers for example. A fast fashion trend shouldn’t be a thing that far into the future.
]]> 66086834 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525558965.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”]]> 464 Zadie Smith Tim 4 Fun, captivating novel. 3.25 2023
author: Zadie Smith
name: Tim
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/07
date added: 2024/04/07
shelves:
review:
Fun, captivating novel.
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