en-US Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:37:42 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 50852136 A dazzling and darkly comic novel of love, violence, and friendship in the California suburbs

Bunny Lampert is the princess of North Shore��--beautiful, tall, blond, with a rich real-estate-developer father and a swimming pool in her backyard. Michael⁠⁠--with a ponytail down his back and a septum piercing��--lives with his aunt in the cramped stucco cottage next door. When Bunny catches Michael smoking in her yard, he discovers that her life is not as perfect as it seems. At six foot three, Bunny towers over their classmates. Even as she dreams of standing out and competing in the Olympics, she is desperate to fit in, to seem normal, and to get a boyfriend, all while hiding her father's escalating alcoholism.

Michael has secrets of his own. At home and at school Michael pretends to be straight, but at night he tries to understand himself by meeting men online for anonymous encounters that both thrill and scare him. When Michael falls in love for the first time, a vicious strain of gossip circulates and a terrible, brutal act becomes the defining feature of both his and Bunny's futures⁠⁠--and of their friendship. With storytelling as intoxicating as it is intelligent, Rufi Thorpe has created a tragic and unflinching portrait of identity, a fascinating examination of our struggles to exist in our bodies, and an excruciatingly beautiful story of two humans aching for connection.]]> 277 Rufi Thorpe amelia 0 currently-reading 3.69 2020
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: amelia
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 205478811 A profound and piercing tribute to messy webs of queer friendship and to what is left behind in transition.

Everything in Edith’s life is approaching disaster. Her writing career is stagnant. Her love life is a mess. Her ex, Tessa, is marrying a man. Her teeth are rotting in her skull. And her best friend, Val, is dead.

Still Life volleys between the present and recent past. Edith was a bumbling college “boy,�� pre-transition, in love with Tessa, enamored by Val, and drowning in Boston. She and Tessa called each other Joni and Joan, an homage to fledgling adulthood’s musical backdrop. Now, Edith is wracked with guilt over Val. A sometimes-lover, trans mentor, purveyor of estrogen pills and wisdom from a life on the fringe, Val was everything Tessa wasn’t and everything Edith needed. Was Valerie's fatal car crash Edith's fault? Would she have stayed put if Edith had loved her better?

Infused with pop culture, cigarettes, and Sondheim, Katherine Packert Burke traces the lives of three women, trans and cis, here and gone, to craft a tableau of modern womanhood.]]> 272 Katherine Packert Burke 1324076364 amelia 1
“What I do isn’t a kind of anything. It’s pure, unadulterated emptiness.��

YEP

Other annoyances:
- we receive almost no emotional insight from the protagonist, Edith, about any of her huge choices that are covered in the novel, including (a) transitioning, (b) maybe not transitioning, (c) sleeping with a friend, which deeply hurts her ex, (c) any other life event, including writing books, moving, etc. She sure talks about these things, but there’s a total lack of depth, which just makes for a boring read.

- Edith is constantly dropping references - writers, philosophers, artists - in conversation, to which her companions reply with some iteration of “Ha, you’re so clever�� and the conversation stops. Extremely Grad School writing!

- people compliment Edith for her cleverness, which is not displayed outside these lines. “Were you always this charming?!�� someone asks at the end of a charmless scene. “‘Emotional physics��? See, THIS is why she’s a writer! Me, I’d never come up with that!�� someone crows, being impressed by a phrase that goes nowhere and does nothing.

- Edith is SO PASSIVE but annoyed by everyone. Just an unpleasant person to spend time with! She needs to be convinced to come to a wedding by the BRIDE?! Don’t go! Or go! This is not that interesting!

- the standards of quotation marks and attributing words to a speaker have a rich tradition because they make a text readable.

- Edith, about describing herself in a dating profile: “The ironic detachment people expected from trans girls�� �� to me, this is what the author thinks she’s doing while simply under-developing absolutely everything but the congratulations her proxy receives within the story.]]> 3.78 2024
author: Katherine Packert Burke
name: amelia
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:
This quote sums Still Life up for me, by an author who, in the last few sentences of this novel, transforms it into autobiographical territory by assuming the role of her protagonist:

“What I do isn’t a kind of anything. It’s pure, unadulterated emptiness.��

YEP

Other annoyances:
- we receive almost no emotional insight from the protagonist, Edith, about any of her huge choices that are covered in the novel, including (a) transitioning, (b) maybe not transitioning, (c) sleeping with a friend, which deeply hurts her ex, (c) any other life event, including writing books, moving, etc. She sure talks about these things, but there’s a total lack of depth, which just makes for a boring read.

- Edith is constantly dropping references - writers, philosophers, artists - in conversation, to which her companions reply with some iteration of “Ha, you’re so clever�� and the conversation stops. Extremely Grad School writing!

- people compliment Edith for her cleverness, which is not displayed outside these lines. “Were you always this charming?!�� someone asks at the end of a charmless scene. “‘Emotional physics��? See, THIS is why she’s a writer! Me, I’d never come up with that!�� someone crows, being impressed by a phrase that goes nowhere and does nothing.

- Edith is SO PASSIVE but annoyed by everyone. Just an unpleasant person to spend time with! She needs to be convinced to come to a wedding by the BRIDE?! Don’t go! Or go! This is not that interesting!

- the standards of quotation marks and attributing words to a speaker have a rich tradition because they make a text readable.

- Edith, about describing herself in a dating profile: “The ironic detachment people expected from trans girls�� �� to me, this is what the author thinks she’s doing while simply under-developing absolutely everything but the congratulations her proxy receives within the story.
]]> 211004894
"Kari Ferrell’s memoir is a zippy, intimate account of low-level trickery before the era of scams fully erupted." —The Atlantic

"Raw and riveting. With a combination of bruising vulnerability and self-deprecating humor, Ferrell’s audacious coming-of-age tale pairs the thrill of true crime with the redemptive arc of a good memoir. It’s a deliciously edgy testament to reinvention." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The compelling, edgy, compassionate, laugh-out-loud memoir from Kari Ferrell, formerly known as the "Hipster Grifter"

Before Anna Delvey, before the Tinder Swindler, there was Kari Ferrell. Adopted at a young age by a Mormon family in Utah, Kari struggled with questions of self-worth and identity as one of the few Asian Americans in her insulated community, leading her to run with the “bad crowd�� in an effort to fit in.

Soon, stealing from superstores turned into picking up men (and picking their pockets), and before she knew it, Kari graduated from petty theft to Utah’s most wanted list. Though Kari was able to escape the Southwest, she couldn’t outrun her new moniker: the Hipster Grifter.

New York City’s indie sleaze scene had found its newest celebrity—just as Kari found herself in a heap of trouble. Jail time, riots, bad checks, and an explosion of internet infamy and fetishization put her name in the spotlight. Beyond the gossip and Gawker posts, there’s a side to Kari the media never saw—until now.]]> 288 Kari Ferrell 1250288223 amelia 4 3.36 2025
author: Kari Ferrell
name: amelia
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:
An excellent listen, especially if, like me, you are an elder millennial who tangibly remembers the gross, exciting days of Vice magazine’s ascension and indie sleaze. With that part aside, Farrell’s perspective on consumption culture, Mormonism, and prison reform are welcome and engaging, and woven into her memoir not as excuses, but realizations. It’s great.
]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 amelia 4 3.88 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: amelia
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:
Sally Rooney is so skilled at making you feel with her characters - the hurt, the hope, the longing, the loathing. I found the writing style she chose for Peter really, really off-putting �� which, shoot, is a great way to express his hidden internal turmoil, so I guess I applaud it. But that style, coupled with Peter’s insistence that the clear, correct, happy solutions presented to him are wrong, actually, for Reasons, frustrated me in a way that I never fully overcame. That said: ugh, even when Sally is making me feel bad, I know she’s achieving her goal!
]]> 568537
But the tower romm isn't the only place holding secrets. In the parlor there's a gruesome painting, which seems to have a terrible hold over Nina. Could there be a connection between it and the ghostly child crying upstairs? As Nina and Chris begin investigating, a second ghost puts in an eerie appearance. The girls realize this could be the biggest ghost-busting adventure of their lives -- if they survive!]]> 192 Bruce Coville 0553158279 amelia 4 4.09 1991
author: Bruce Coville
name: amelia
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves:
review:

]]> 57926137 We can’t choose what we inherit. But can we choose who we become?

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

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

Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel is a story of how the inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories, and even names can shape relationships and history. Deeply evocative and beautifully written, Black Cake is an extraordinary journey through the life of a family changed forever by the choices of its matriarch.]]> 385 Charmaine Wilkerson amelia 2
Spoilers, aka notes for myself for book club:
- there’s so much about race and heritage, yet no acknowledgement of Chinese ancestry, which is central to Mr. Lin’s (initial) story
- why weren’t any personal scenes about Marble’s adoption shared? These theoretically crucial moments were only referenced, and nothing about being part of a Black family beside her childhood hunch!
- the one obvious relationship between black cake and geographical heritage just isn’t discussed with a food writer who specializes in exactly that
- B&B never really have a conversation - that we’re privy to, anyhow - to clear the air or renew their relationship
- the hardship of Bennie’s time away from the family is all sort of antithetical to her mother’s revealed narrative - like, amends could have been made from what we’ve been told by the characters!
- this whole book uses lurking as a love language �� it’s not showing care! It’s showing stubbornness!
- oh good lord the whole thing with the pregnant gf and then naming the kid after B (I have already forgotten his name) - get out of town! He has anger issues surfing won’t cure!
- I don’t know if this author understands the concept of virality online, which I only say because it comes up A LOT]]> 4.06 2022
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: amelia
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:
I’m not sure why this author chose to take an already-complex core narrative and continually add more characters, add more personal issues, add more perspectives �� especially because the text was rife with reminders and summaries, as if she didn’t trust the reader to remember. (Which, fair, I guess �� pretty sure we met a new character in the second-to-last chapter.) The end result was a super uneven resolution, with “mysteries�� solved that were dropped in the first chapter, and a number of storylines that asked us to forget character development in order to appreciate the tidy bow. This book over-promised and under-delivered, while spoon-feeding social awareness and littering in late reveals that only served to make a convoluted reading experience.

Spoilers, aka notes for myself for book club:
- there’s so much about race and heritage, yet no acknowledgement of Chinese ancestry, which is central to Mr. Lin’s (initial) story
- why weren’t any personal scenes about Marble’s adoption shared? These theoretically crucial moments were only referenced, and nothing about being part of a Black family beside her childhood hunch!
- the one obvious relationship between black cake and geographical heritage just isn’t discussed with a food writer who specializes in exactly that
- B&B never really have a conversation - that we’re privy to, anyhow - to clear the air or renew their relationship
- the hardship of Bennie’s time away from the family is all sort of antithetical to her mother’s revealed narrative - like, amends could have been made from what we’ve been told by the characters!
- this whole book uses lurking as a love language �� it’s not showing care! It’s showing stubbornness!
- oh good lord the whole thing with the pregnant gf and then naming the kid after B (I have already forgotten his name) - get out of town! He has anger issues surfing won’t cure!
- I don’t know if this author understands the concept of virality online, which I only say because it comes up A LOT
]]> 198563641 From the New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over and Flying Solo, a podcast producer agrees to host a new series about modern dating—but will the show jeopardize her chance at finding real love?

Cecily Foster loves to make podcasts. She fiercely protects her colleagues, dearly adores her friends, and never misses dinner with her sister. But after a disastrous relationship with a colleague who stole her heart and her ideas, she’s put romantic love on hold.

When the boss who’s disappointed her again and again finally offers her the chance to host her own show, she wants to be thrilled. But there’s a catch—actually, two catches. First, the show will be about Cecily’s dating life. And second, she has to follow the guidance of influencer and newly minted relationship coach Eliza Cassidy, whose relentlessly upbeat attitude seems ready-made for social media, not real life.

Cecily would rather do anything other than put her singledom on display (ugh) or take advice from the internet (UGH). But when her boss hints that doing the show is the only way to protect a friend’s job, she realizes she has no choice.

To make matters more complicated, once she’s committed to twenty blind dates of Eliza’s choosing, Cecily finds herself unable to stop thinking about Will, a photographer she helped to rescue a very big and very lovable lost dog. Even though there are sparks between the two, Will’s own path is uncertain, and Eliza’s skeptical comments about Cecily’s decision-making aren’t helping. On the one hand, Will seems great. But on the other hand . . . don’t they all?

As Cecily struggles to balance the life she truly desires and the one Eliza wants to create for her, she finds herself at a crossroads. Can Cecily sort through all the advice and find a way to do what she loves without losing herself in the process?]]> 320 Linda Holmes 059359925X amelia 0 to-read 3.81 2025
author: Linda Holmes
name: amelia
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52879778 From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner, a collection of interlaced tales of men and women as they face the mysteries and magic of the world

On a fateful flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son.

At times funny and irreverent, always moving and deeply urgent, these stories---among them a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize winner---cap a fifteen-year project. From the Nile's depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-racked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are tales of ecstasy, epiphany, and what the New York Times Magazine called the "struggle for survival...hand to hand, word to word," by "one of the finest prose stylists in American fiction."]]> 240 Daniel Mason 031647763X amelia 5 3.69 2020
author: Daniel Mason
name: amelia
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves:
review:
A great audiobook listen! Mason’s style is so satisfying �� like if Amor Towles and Kevin Wilson had a baby. Lightly unnerving, moving, fantastical and beautiful, with depth and hope. My expectations were high after reading North Woods - phew and yay.
]]> 54870208
The house may look respectable on the outside, but inside it’s a literal and figurative mess: clutter on every surface, IMPEACHMENT: Now More Than Ever bumper stickers on the doors, cereal and takeout for dinner. And even more troublesome (were Mary Jane’s mother to know, which she does not): The doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important job—helping a famous rock star dry out. A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in.

Over the course of the summer, Mary Jane introduces her new household to crisply ironed clothes and a family dinner schedule, and has a front-row seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll (not to mention group therapy). Caught between the lifestyle she’s always known and the future she’s only just realized is possible, Mary Jane will arrive at September with a new idea about what she wants out of life, and what kind of person she’s going to be.��]]> 320 Jessica Anya Blau 0063052296 amelia 1
1.5 stars if I could, because it was�� pleasant. Dull, but pleasant. Also: why wasn’t this marketed as YA?]]> 4.09 2021
author: Jessica Anya Blau
name: amelia
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
review:
What an absolute nothingburger of a book. I thought perhaps the author was gearing up for some sort of parallel examination of how Mary Jane provided the steady, quiet labor of a housewife in contrast to her bohemian employers, but instead her mom just dampens her own judgement once Mrs. Cohn starts behaving more like she believes she should, and that’s considered a melding of the worlds. Sexism, racism, antisemitism - and what a lot of explicit antisemitism there was! - and general judgmental hatred (couched in white suburban churchgoing) went unaddressed. Very White “I noted racism, which is all the healing needed�� nonsense. Woof. Even fake versions of Cher deserve better!

1.5 stars if I could, because it was�� pleasant. Dull, but pleasant. Also: why wasn’t this marketed as YA?
]]> 17402288
Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.]]> 179 Jenny Offill 0385350813 amelia 4 2015-tournament-of-books
2025 re-read: Wow, this felt very different reading than my first go �� now with two kids, married over a decade. I had trouble reading it as anything other than autobiographical�� which isn’t fair, but with an unnamed protagonist, it almost feels like being dared to maintain the separation. Devastating and wry and so emotionally candid, while also being aloof. We’re only invited to share the minimum context, while feeling the maximum effect. The intentionality of every moment of this novel is so tangible - the style alone! - and I have so many questions about why. But only because it’s a feat, and works so well when it feels like it really shouldn’t be able to. ]]> 3.76 2014
author: Jenny Offill
name: amelia
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: 2015-tournament-of-books
review:
3.5 stars if I could. I loved the style and tone, but when the narrative direction shifted, they suddenly became a detriment to my ability to keep apace with the story. That said, read it in one VERY enjoyable sitting.

2025 re-read: Wow, this felt very different reading than my first go �� now with two kids, married over a decade. I had trouble reading it as anything other than autobiographical�� which isn’t fair, but with an unnamed protagonist, it almost feels like being dared to maintain the separation. Devastating and wry and so emotionally candid, while also being aloof. We’re only invited to share the minimum context, while feeling the maximum effect. The intentionality of every moment of this novel is so tangible - the style alone! - and I have so many questions about why. But only because it’s a feat, and works so well when it feels like it really shouldn’t be able to.
]]> 201465867
Michael is coming undone. Adrift after his wife's departure, he has begun taking himself on long, solitary walks across the English countryside. Becoming ever more reclusive, he’ll do anything to avoid his empty house.

Marnie, on the other hand, is stuck. Hiding alone in her London flat, she avoids old friends and any reminders of her rotten, selfish ex-husband. Curled up with a good book, she’s battling the long afternoons of a life that feels like it’s passing her by.

When a persistent mutual friend and some very unpredictable weather conspire to toss Michael and Marnie together on the most epic of ten-day hikes, neither of them can think of anything worse. Until, of course, they discover exactly what they’ve been looking for.

Michael and Marnie are on the precipice of a bright future . . . if they can survive the journey.]]> 368 David Nicholls 0063394057 amelia 3 3.97 2024
author: David Nicholls
name: amelia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves:
review:
A lovely little story of people liking each other, and appreciating the significance and impact of that gift.
]]> 208209822
What happened was this: Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and in that period there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on the xylophone, but also she was rabid with fear of losing this love, because of past injury. And then what happened was that she became a wild-pregnant-mammal-thing and then she exploded herself by having a whole baby blast through her vagina during a global plague and then she was expected to carry on like everything was normal—but was this normal, and had she or anything ever been normal? Herein lies an account of this journey, told in five phases—Single, True Love, Pregnancy, Baby, and Ongoing—through luminous, laugh-out-loud funny, unclassifiable essays that take the form of letters to a doctor, dreams of a stork, fantasy therapy sessions, gossip between racoons, excerpts from an imaginary olden timey play, obituaries, theories about post-partum hair loss, graduation speeches, and more. No one writes like Jenny Slate.]]> 240 Jenny Slate 0316263931 amelia 0 currently-reading 3.72 2024
author: Jenny Slate
name: amelia
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 226753102 30 Rachael Maddux amelia 0 to-read 0.0
author: Rachael Maddux
name: amelia
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 226993970 34 Rachael Maddux amelia 0 to-read 5.00
author: Rachael Maddux
name: amelia
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

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

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

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

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 amelia 3 4.35 2022
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: amelia
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:
This started as a pleasant, charming book, but spoiled its own momentum in the last 80 pages, drawing out a reveal that had already been spelled out for the reader several times over. (Like, so often that I actually went back to confirm that this was not new information.) I know we’re not looking for realism in a book with an octopus narrator, but the tidiness of every little thing falling into place, aided by a bevy of unrelated callbacks, made it feel convoluted instead of satisfying. Great cover, though.
]]> 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 amelia 5 4.14 2021
author: Claire Keegan
name: amelia
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:
A small story, and an enormous one all the same. Highly recommend the audiobook!
]]> 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore amelia 4 4.16 2024
author: Liz Moore
name: amelia
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves:
review:
A story of place, reverence and respect, and who decides which people deserve the latter two. The narrative was meaty and well-served by the different voices and time periods, and my engagement wasn’t contingent on solving the mystery �� it focused the story, but there was narrative beyond it, thank goodness. And while I love stories about the suffering of rich people, it would have been cool for a man to feel a single repercussion in this book. Clearly sexism is the primary through line in the narrative, but sheesh �� the misogyny was the hardest part to read�� in a book about missing children. The solution was compelling, but probably the least interesting part �� mysteries! What a genre!
]]> 197449225 256 Paul Scheer 0063293714 amelia 2 Fine! Nice! 4.15 2024
author: Paul Scheer
name: amelia
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves:
review:
Fine! Nice!
]]> 176443831
Failed Pitbull impersonator Ismael Reyes—you can call him Izzy—might not be the Scarface type, but why should that keep him from trying? Growing up in Miami has shaped him into someone who dreams of being the King of the 305, with the money, power, and respect he assumes comes with it. After finding himself at the mercy of a cease-and-desist letter from Pitbull’s legal team and living in his aunt’s garage-turned-efficiency, Izzy embarks on an absurd quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana.

When Izzy’s efforts lead him to the tank that houses Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium, she proves just how powerful she and the water surrounding her really are—permeating everything from Miami’s sinking streets to Izzy’s memories to the very heart of the novel itself. What begins as Izzy’s story turns into a super-saturated fever dream as sprawling and surreal as the Magic City, one as sharp as an iguana’s claws, and as menacing as a killer whale’s teeth. As the truth surrounding Izzy’s boyhood escape from Cuba surfaces, the novel reckons with the forces of nature, with the limits and absence of love, and with the dangers of pursuing a tragic inheritance. Wildly narrated and expertly rendered, Say Hello to My Little Friend is Jennine Capó Crucet’s most daring, heart-breaking, and fearless book yet.]]> 304 Jennine Capó Crucet 1668023326 amelia 4
Every perspective was a gift, and there were so many observations that felt culturally monumental (emotional crippling via machismo! Female prospects in a patriarchal religious world! Pop culture as a life plan!). And poor Izzy - a sympathetic dope who only understands grandiosity - whose potential for growth is always countered by the prescient narrator that reminds you he is, in fact, not growing. So much of everything, in short, but maybe also too experimental to feel completely satisfying. (I’ve also never seen Scarface or read Moby Dick, so perhaps my perspective is moot!)

Tl;dr �� what a ride! Recommend.]]> 3.72 2024
author: Jennine Capó Crucet
name: amelia
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves:
review:
This book is a feat of storytelling, and also feels totally indescribable, if almost unfinished (but only in plot! For sure all author goals were achieved). Maybe it’s an achievement in setting? Of character creation? Of character abandonment? Of humor writing? Certainly the most fully Pitbull has ever been rendered in a novel!

Every perspective was a gift, and there were so many observations that felt culturally monumental (emotional crippling via machismo! Female prospects in a patriarchal religious world! Pop culture as a life plan!). And poor Izzy - a sympathetic dope who only understands grandiosity - whose potential for growth is always countered by the prescient narrator that reminds you he is, in fact, not growing. So much of everything, in short, but maybe also too experimental to feel completely satisfying. (I’ve also never seen Scarface or read Moby Dick, so perhaps my perspective is moot!)

Tl;dr �� what a ride! Recommend.
]]> 23014702 The arresting debut novel from award-winning writer Jennine Capó Crucet

When Lizet—the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the first in her family to graduate from high school—secretly applies and is accepted to an ultra-elite college, her parents are furious at her decision to leave Miami. Just weeks before she's set to start school, her parents divorce and her father sells her childhood home, leaving Lizet, her mother, and Leidy—Lizet's older sister, a brand-new single mom—without a steady income and scrambling for a place to live.

Amidst this turmoil, Lizet begins her first semester at Rawlings College, distracted by both the exciting and difficult moments of freshman year. But the privileged world of the campus feels utterly foreign, as does her new awareness of herself as a minority. Struggling both socially and academically, she returns to Miami for a surprise Thanksgiving visit, only to be overshadowed by the arrival of Ariel Hernandez, a young boy whose mother died fleeing with him from Cuba on a raft. The ensuing immigration battle puts Miami in a glaring spotlight, captivating the nation and entangling Lizet's entire family, especially her mother.

Pulled between life at college and the needs of those she loves, Lizet is faced with difficult decisions that will change her life forever. Urgent and mordantly funny, Make Your Home Among Strangers tells the moving story of a young woman torn between generational, cultural, and political forces; it's the new story of what it means to be American today.]]> 388 Jennine Capó Crucet 1250059666 amelia 0 to-read 3.71 2015
author: Jennine Capó Crucet
name: amelia
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201626923 The new collection of stories capturing the travails of aging Millennials from “one of the funniest writers in America�� (NPR) From the author of��New Teeth, hailed as "a triumph of sustained humor" (Sarah Lyall, New York Times Book Review), comes a hilarious new collection of short stories chronicling modern mayhem. Glory Days takes��a close look at life in the twenty-first century as only Simon Rich can, unearthing irony and humor at every turn. Learn what life was like back in 2023 before humans had to leave earth in “History Report.�� Cope with student debt and a midlife crisis with Ant and Grasshopper in a “Millennial Edition�� of the classic tale. Commiserate with New York City as she deals with the hoards of Warby Parker-clad newcomers claiming her streets, bike lanes and apartments in “The City Speaks.�� And help the King of Nigeria finally��recover his lost son in “The Mission.�� �� Humorous and deeply heartfelt,��Glory Days��captures the highs, lows, and laugh-out-loud ridiculousness of life these days.�� ��]]> 224 Simon Rich 0316569003 amelia 0 to-read 4.10 2024
author: Simon Rich
name: amelia
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 203020280 Cue The Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.

Nussbaum traces four paths of reality innovation—game shows, prank shows, soap operas, and clip shows—that united in the Survivor format, sparking a tumultuous Hollywood gold-rush. Along the way, we meet tricksters and innovators—from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; Bachelor mastermind Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray, the visionary behind The Real World—along with dozens of crew members and ordinary people whose lives became fodder for the reality revolution. We learn about the tools of the trade—like Candid Camera’s brilliant “reveal�� and the notorious Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and the moral outrage that reality shows provoked. But Cue The Sun! also celebrates what made the genre so powerful: a jolt of authentic emotion.

Through broad-ranging reporting, Nussbaum examines seven tumultuous decades, exploring the celebreality boom, reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, and the dark truth behind The Apprentice. A shrewd observer who cares about television, she is the ideal voice for the first substantive cultural history of the genre that has, for better or worse, made America what it is today.]]> 464 Emily Nussbaum 0525508996 amelia 0 to-read 3.94 2024
author: Emily Nussbaum
name: amelia
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213066781
Prepare to be schooled in the art of conversation by dynamic duo Casey Wilson and Jessica St. Clair. Dismissing the notion that small talk is a painful social obligation, these self-proclaimed small talk maestros share their gift of gab in this laugh-out-loud and instructive audiobook. With their help you might find yourself excitedly asking your barista about the weather…and maybe you’ll get a free coffee. Who knows!

In The Art of Small Talk, Casey and Jessica share six simple rules for how to engage in small talk and achieve the connectedness we all crave with any and everyone. Backed by scientific research (conducted by real experts), they’ll teach you how to move past the perceived misery of idle chit-chat and start making magic out of the mundane.

The audiobook features smart humor, genuine advice, and conversations with both the famous and the intellectual. Hear from folks like Amy Poehler, Colin Quinn, Tony Hale, Malcolm Gladwell, June Diane Raphael, and a range of experts with their takes on not only the how but also the why. Filled with entertaining tips to take you from Hostile Beginner to Confident Expert, compelling insights on the significance of chatting up strangers, plus transformational tape of a real, live, Small Talk trainee in action, The Art of Small Talk breathes new life into a lost art and explores its profound impact on our human experience.

After listening to the undisputed Patron Saints of Small Talk, you will have all the tools and gumption at your disposal to take your headphones off on the tarmac and ask your mate in 20C: Have you listened to the Art of Small Talk by Casey Wilson and Jessica St. Clair? It will change your life.]]> 5 Casey Wilson 1962556034 amelia 0 to-read 3.66 2024
author: Casey Wilson
name: amelia
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

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

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 amelia 0 dnf
This gives my Barbara Kingsolver success rate a firm 0% �� I don’t know what my deal is, but I guess we’re just not meant to be!]]> 4.46 2022
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: amelia
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: dnf
review:
I have but one life to live, and I opted out of being miserable. I know it was well-written, I hear the ending is beautiful. But getting there means being painted into a devastating corner with the broadest strokes. No thanks!

This gives my Barbara Kingsolver success rate a firm 0% �� I don’t know what my deal is, but I guess we’re just not meant to be!
]]> 55858638 New York Times bestselling trilogy that began with A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate.

The one thing you never talk about while you're in the Scholomance is what you'll do when you get out. Not even the richest enclaver would tempt fate that way. But it's all we dream about, the hideously slim chance we'll survive to make it out the gates and improbably find ourselves with a life ahead of us, a life outside the Scholomance halls.

And now the impossible dream has come true. I'm out, we're all out--and I didn't even have to turn into a monstrous dark witch to make it happen. So much for my great-grandmother's prophecy of doom and destruction. I didn't kill enclavers, I saved them. Me, and Orion, and our allies. Our graduation plan worked to perfection: we saved everyone and made the world safe for all wizards and brought peace and harmony to all the enclaves of the world.

Ha, only joking! Actually it's gone all wrong. Someone else has picked up the project of destroying enclaves in my stead, and probably everyone we saved is about to get killed in the brewing enclave war on the horizon. And the first thing I've got to do now, having miraculously got out of the Scholomance, is turn straight around and find a way back in.]]> 407 Naomi Novik 0593158369 amelia 4 4.08 2022
author: Naomi Novik
name: amelia
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves:
review:
A great audiobook narrator can truly make or break a book, and I credit Anita Dadia with ensuring I read all three books in this series about a very smart and justifiably furious protagonist figuring out how to wield world-ending power. This series does a great job of forgoing the common fantasy narrative that good and evil are black and white, and that our hero’s actions can solve every problem. A real pessimistic take on saving the world, and the books kept getting better, in my humble opinion!
]]> 44908180 The Daily Show, he was invited to return as a contributor, serving as the show's "Resident Expert" and "Deranged Millionaire." This led to an unexpected and, frankly, implausible career in front of the camera.

In these pages, Hodgman explores the strangeness of his career, speaking plainly of fame, especially at the weird, marginal level he has enjoyed--not only the surreal excitement of it, but also the drudgery of it, the emptiness of the status it conveys, and the hard moments of losing that status.

Through these stories you will learn many things, such as what it's like to be invited to become an honorary member of an Ivy League secret society, only to be hazed and humiliated by the dapper young members of that club. Or how it feels when your TV gig is cancelled and you can console yourself with the fact that all of that travel that made your children feel so sad and abandoned at least left you with a prize: Platinum Medallion Status with your airline.]]> 304 John Hodgman 0525561102 amelia 5
Also, I listened to this one �� highly recommend!]]> 4.12 2019
author: John Hodgman
name: amelia
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves:
review:
John Hodgman is so thoughtful, measured and funny. While reading about his (devastated) reaction to the first Trump presidency was a special kind of torture, knowing what I know now, the rest was a treat. A great look at privilege and access, and the requirements of maintaining both.

Also, I listened to this one �� highly recommend!
]]> 199743738 Secrets. Lies. Murder. Let the festivities begin...

It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests�� healing have been placed in the Seaside Cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule�� cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen.

But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. Just outside the Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. And the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. Something’s not right with the guests. There’s been a fire. A body’s been discovered.

THE FOUNDER * THE HUSBAND * THE MYSTERY GUEST * THE KITCHEN HELP

It all began with a secret, fifteen years ago. Now the past has crashed the party. And it’ll end in murder at�� The Midnight Feast.]]> 354 Lucy Foley 0063003104 amelia 2

~~ Spoilers! ~~


And then we’re supposed to be surprised �� so shocked that we require explicit explanation, a visual image, and a pun �� that THE BIRDS are women?!? Yes! You told us!!! You told us who they were!?!! They have matching tattoos!!! We know!!! I feel bonkers.]]> 3.55 2024
author: Lucy Foley
name: amelia
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves:
review:
The melodrama! Is this how these books are?? Highly recommend the audiobook�� truly excellent British voiceactors delivering sultry, expository dialogue and reflections from each character/caricature. Subtlety has no place at a manor!! It got deeply silly at some point, but I guess silly is known for being fun, and it was absolutely a fun tangled web of Deception! Lies! Intrigue! Romance! Redemption! Murder! Magic! Mayhem!


~~ Spoilers! ~~


And then we’re supposed to be surprised �� so shocked that we require explicit explanation, a visual image, and a pun �� that THE BIRDS are women?!? Yes! You told us!!! You told us who they were!?!! They have matching tattoos!!! We know!!! I feel bonkers.
]]> 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

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

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

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach amelia 5 4.11 2024
author: Alison Espach
name: amelia
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves:
review:
I loved this story - sure, the mechanics were a little tidy, but that lightness allowed for some really well-explored dark depth elsewhere. Probably the best reflection on COVID’s emotional effects I’ve read (save possibly for Raw Dog) �� both the slow slide into depression and the weird, scary optimism of trying to figure out what it means to be yourself upon reentering the world. Also a lovely testament to chemistry and what it takes to feel like our truest selves - lovely!
]]> 9517 Persepolis, heralded by the Los Angeles Times as "one of the freshest and most original memoirs of our day," Marjane Satrapi dazzled us with her heartrending memoir-in-comic-strips about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Here is the continuation of her fascinating story. In 1984, Marjane flees fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a new life in Vienna. Once there, she faces the trials of adolescence far from her friends and family, and while she soon carves out a place for herself among a group of fellow outsiders, she continues to struggle for a sense of belonging.

Finding that she misses her home more than she can stand, Marjane returns to Iran after graduation. Her difficult homecoming forces her to confront the changes both she and her country have undergone in her absence and her shame at what she perceives as her failure in Austria. Marjane allows her past to weigh heavily on her until she finds some like-minded friends, falls in love, and begins studying art at a university. However, the repression and state-sanctioned chauvinism eventually lead her to question whether she can have a future in Iran.

As funny and poignant as its predecessor, Persepolis 2 is another clear-eyed and searing condemnation of the human cost of fundamentalism. In its depiction of the struggles of growing up--here compounded by Marjane's status as an outsider both abroad and at home--it is raw, honest, and incredibly illuminating.]]> 187 Marjane Satrapi 0375714669 amelia 0 to-read 4.22 2001
author: Marjane Satrapi
name: amelia
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 9516
Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.]]> 153 Marjane Satrapi 037571457X amelia 4 4.27 2003
author: Marjane Satrapi
name: amelia
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 62039259 A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting the welfare of a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,�� our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.��

When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.�� As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief, while scrambling to avoid earthquakes, floods, and the noise of their own conflicted psyche. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?

In elegiac prose woven with humor, imagination, sensuality, and tragedy, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world told by a lovable mountain lion. Both feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings mythmaking to real life.]]> 160 Henry Hoke 037460987X amelia 5 4.02 2023
author: Henry Hoke
name: amelia
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves:
review:
Sad and painful and funny in a tiny, affecting package. Sorry, wild animals.
]]> 60410002 Who knows you better than your best friend? Who knows your secrets, your fears, your desires, your strange imperfect self? Edi and Ash have been best friends for over forty years. Since childhood they have seen each other through life's milestones: stealing vodka from their parents, the Madonna phase, REM concerts, unexpected wakes, marriages, infertility, children. As Ash notes, 'Edi's memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine.'

So when Edi is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ash's world reshapes around the rhythms of Edi's care, from chipped ice and watermelon cubes to music therapy; from snack smuggling to impromptu excursions into the frozen winter night. Because life is about squeezing the joy out of every moment, about building a powerhouse of memories, about learning when to hold on, and when to let go.
]]> 224 Catherine Newman 0063230895 amelia 0 to-read 3.96 2022
author: Catherine Newman
name: amelia
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 157184735 From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.]]> 383 Mona Awad amelia 0 to-read 3.54 2023
author: Mona Awad
name: amelia
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198530925
They were just friends. Best friends. Allies. They spent entire summers sitting on Shiloh’s porch steps, dreaming about the future. They were both going to get out of north Omaha—Shiloh would go to college and become an actress, and Cary would join the Navy. They promised each other that their friendship would never change.

Well, Shiloh did go to college, and Cary did join the Navy. And yet, somehow, everything changed.

Now Shiloh’s thirty-three, and it’s been fourteen years since she talked to Cary. She’s been married and divorced. She has two kids. And she’s back living in the same house she grew up in. Her life is nothing like she planned.

When she’s invited to an old friend’s wedding, all Shiloh can think about is whether Cary will be there—and whether she hopes he will be. Would Cary even want to talk to her? After everything?

The answer is yes. And yes. And yes.

Slow Dance is the story of two kids who fell in love before they knew enough about love to recognize it. Two friends who lost everything. Two adults who just feel lost.

It’s the story of Shiloh and Cary, who everyone thought would end up together, trying to find their way back to the start.]]> 400 Rainbow Rowell 0063380196 amelia 0 to-read 3.63 2024
author: Rainbow Rowell
name: amelia
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 193781998 An exuberant debut, The Husbands delights in how do we navigate life, love, and choice in a world of never-ending options?

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.

As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actually��living?]]> 352 Holly Gramazio 0385550618 amelia 5 3.50 2024
author: Holly Gramazio
name: amelia
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
review:
A creative, clever, often funny and sometimes extremely stressful read about life’s possible paths and just how many we might choose if we had the opportunity, and the love and loss that would accompany each choice. Very neat to get to know a protagonist through her confusion and bafflement outside of a mystery/suspense novel. The result was often heartfelt in a really lovely, unusual way that was spacious in a way those genres can’t afford. I loved the repeating world-building, and the few through-lines we were gifted as time marched on. It affected my dreams, which is extremely high praise!
]]> 60931 The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.]]> 288 Octavia E. Butler 0807083690 amelia 0 to-read 4.30 1979
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: amelia
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55559887 A budding dark sorceress determined not to use her formidable powers uncovers yet more secrets about the workings of her world in the stunning sequel to A Deadly Education, the start of Naomi Novik’s groundbreaking crossover series.

At the Scholomance, El, Orion, and the other students are faced with their final year—and the looming specter of graduation, a deadly ritual that leaves few students alive in its wake. El is determined that her chosen group will survive, but it is a prospect that is looking harder by the day as the savagery of the school ramps up. Until El realizes that sometimes winning the game means throwing out all the rules . . .]]> 388 Naomi Novik 0593128869 amelia 4 4.21 2021
author: Naomi Novik
name: amelia
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 51733706 Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle’s snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a “safe space�� app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter.

With nuanced emotional precision, gritty humor, and compassionate insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities, the stories in Afterparties deliver an explosive introduction to the work of Anthony Veasna So.]]> 272 Anthony Veasna So 0063049910 amelia 3
HOWEVER: oh my gosh, reading about the fate of So’s estate and unfinished work after reading Yellowface so recently �� hoo boy!]]> 3.94 2021
author: Anthony Veasna So
name: amelia
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves:
review:
3.5 if I could! Sometimes incredibly poignant, reflective, and funny, and a valuable snapshot of a community. I really enjoyed the stories that had a focused narrator! But for me, the book was uneven in a way that didn’t prompt me to come back to it �� admittedly, not uncommon for me with short stories.

HOWEVER: oh my gosh, reading about the fate of So’s estate and unfinished work after reading Yellowface so recently �� hoo boy!
]]> 199531902
The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. Triggered by the death of their patriarch, Rudy, the glue that held them all together, everyone’s lives soon take a dramatic turn.

Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of twenty-one to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her.

But they each learn in different ways that running from the past can’t save you—and then must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need to move forward.

Beginning in the 1970s and spanning forty years, A Reason to See You Again takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma, the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another, and the many unexpected forms that love can take.]]> 240 Jami Attenberg 0063039842 amelia 0 to-read 3.20 2024
author: Jami Attenberg
name: amelia
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12875258
1987. There's only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that's her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June's world is turned upside down. But Finn's death brings a surprise acquaintance into June's life—someone who will help her to heal, and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart.

At Finn's funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail. Inside is a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn's apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realizes she's not the only one who misses Finn, and if she can bring herself to trust this unexpected friend, he just might be the one she needs the most.

An emotionally charged coming-of-age novel, Tell the Wolves I'm Home is a tender story of love lost and found, an unforgettable portrait of the way compassion can make us whole again.]]> 360 Carol Rifka Brunt 0679644199 amelia 0 currently-reading 4.01 2012
author: Carol Rifka Brunt
name: amelia
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 199534613
Margo braucht Geld. Seit sie ungewollt von ihrem Collegeprofessor, der sie jetzt mit dem Kind alleinlässt, schwanger wurde, mehr denn je. Wie Margo es auch dreht und wendet, kein Job scheint passend zu sein, oder könnte auch nur ansatzweise ihr Leben mit einem Baby finanzieren. Durch einen Zufall wird sie auf die Plattform OnlyFans aufmerksam, und Margo ist fasziniert von dieser Welt, in der Frauen mit sich und ihrem Körper experimentieren, und offenbar gut dabei verdienen. Also beginnt auch sie, Inhalte zu produzieren. Dabei erhält sie Unterstützung von ihrer Mitbewohnerin Suzie, einem großen Cosplay-Fan, und auch von ihrem Vater Jinx, einem Ex-Wrestlingprofi. Ehe sie sich versieht, ist Margo ein Online-Phänomen. Könnte dies die Antwort auf all ihre Probleme sein, oder hat der Internet-Ruhm einen zu hohen Preis?]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 amelia 5
Weaving together the hypocrisy of self-righteous men, pro-wrestling and the art of perspective, OnlyFans as sex work, the imbalance of child custody system, breastfeeding and early motherhood, smart vs. naive, love vs. comfort, Mary as raped child and expert storyteller, tender and burgeoning family relationships, the impossible economics of parenthood and hopeful ones of social media, the judgement of sex work by those who utilize it, loneliness, the impossible mechanics of drug addiction, performing to the male gaze professionally and personally, the gift of trust, true dehumanizing work vs disrespected work, the ignorance of the impact of economic disparity, pride in one’s work, the weakness of men, the strength of women, the rules of power, and art as a question of love was incredible.

But to have the thread tying it all together be sexism and the damning impact of the opinions of pathetic men �� my kind of book, and one I can’t stop thinking about. Concise and full of fury, but also joy, pride, and love.

]]> 3.87 2024
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: amelia
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:
Genuinely reeling from how much I loved this book.

Weaving together the hypocrisy of self-righteous men, pro-wrestling and the art of perspective, OnlyFans as sex work, the imbalance of child custody system, breastfeeding and early motherhood, smart vs. naive, love vs. comfort, Mary as raped child and expert storyteller, tender and burgeoning family relationships, the impossible economics of parenthood and hopeful ones of social media, the judgement of sex work by those who utilize it, loneliness, the impossible mechanics of drug addiction, performing to the male gaze professionally and personally, the gift of trust, true dehumanizing work vs disrespected work, the ignorance of the impact of economic disparity, pride in one’s work, the weakness of men, the strength of women, the rules of power, and art as a question of love was incredible.

But to have the thread tying it all together be sexism and the damning impact of the opinions of pathetic men �� my kind of book, and one I can’t stop thinking about. Concise and full of fury, but also joy, pride, and love.


]]> 45134200 Eileen is sick of being 79.
Leena's tired of life in her twenties.
Maybe it's time they swapped places...

When overachiever Leena Cotton is ordered to take a two-month sabbatical after blowing a big presentation at work, she escapes to her grandmother Eileen's house for some overdue rest. Eileen is newly single and about to turn eighty. She'd like a second chance at love, but her tiny Yorkshire village doesn't offer many eligible gentlemen.

Once Leena learns of Eileen's romantic predicament, she proposes a a two-month swap. Eileen can live in London and look for love. Meanwhile Leena will look after everything in rural Yorkshire. But with gossiping neighbours and difficult family dynamics to navigate up north, and trendy London flatmates and online dating to contend with in the city, stepping into one another's shoes proves more difficult than either of them expected.

Leena learns that a long-distance relationship isn't as romantic as she hoped it would be, and then there is the annoyingly perfect �� and distractingly handsome �� school teacher, who keeps showing up to outdo her efforts to impress the local villagers. Back in London, Eileen is a huge hit with her new neighbours, but is her perfect match nearer home than she first thought?]]> 336 Beth O'Leary 1787475018 amelia 3 3.95 2020
author: Beth O'Leary
name: amelia
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:
Read this on an international flight and it was just right. Cute-bordering-on-cutesy, predictable and smooth in ways only good romance novels can get away with (you can almost hear a little heart emoji pop up when The Surprising People They Will End Up With are introduced), but with some thoughtful and heavy statements on grief, aging, loneliness, and community. A very pleasing little story!
]]> 63133205 The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 288 Britney Spears 1668009048 amelia 3
It’s not the best writing �� I wish there was more about the experience of fame that young, or seeing the success of her weird Disney cohort, or what it was like to perform in general. How did she date?! I wish I understood more about the context of her life. But it sure is a story that needed to be told by the author, alone, and I’m grateful to have her perspective. ]]> 3.83 2023
author: Britney Spears
name: amelia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves:
review:
It’s gutting to remember so many of the moments described in this book - interviews and perspectives that were demeaning and cruel - and remember my own perception at the time. The world was unfair and rude to Brittney Spears, her own family even worse, and I’m so glad she had the ability and drive to right the record. I, too, would have shaved my head and attacked strangers if my infant had been taken away from me (as a manipulative move by my ex!) in the throes of post-partum depression and anxiety! The inherent contradiction of her conservatorship - that she was well enough to provide the financial support for MANY, but not well enough to be allowed to eat chocolate or use the bathroom - is chilling and horrible.

It’s not the best writing �� I wish there was more about the experience of fame that young, or seeing the success of her weird Disney cohort, or what it was like to perform in general. How did she date?! I wish I understood more about the context of her life. But it sure is a story that needed to be told by the author, alone, and I’m grateful to have her perspective.
]]> 55894337 When a jealous witch curses her family's well, it's up to Vonceil to set things right in an epic journey that will leave her changed forever.

When Vonceil's older brother, Elber, comes home to their family's Oklahoma farm after serving on the front lines of World War I, things aren't what she expects. His experiences have changed him into a serious and responsible man who doesn't have time for Vonceil anymore. He even marries the girl he had left behind.

Then a mysterious and captivating woman shows up at the farm and confronts Elber for leaving her in France. When he refuses to leave his wife, she puts a curse on the family well, turning the entire town's water supply into saltwater. Who is this lady dressed all in white, what has she done to the farm, and what does Vonceil's old uncle Dell know about her?

To find out, Vonceil will have to strike out on her own and delve deep into the world of witchcraft, confronting dangerous relatives, shapeshifting animals, a capricious Sugar Witch, and the Lady in White herself--the foreboding Salt Witch. The journey will change Vonceil, but along the way she'll learn a lot about love and what it means to grow up.]]> 240 Hope Larson 0823446204 amelia 5 4.17 2021
author: Hope Larson
name: amelia
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves:
review:
First, I read this book in a sitting. Then, the next day, I read it with my daughters (who loved it) and it prompted a thoughtful book discussion! With small children! So for that alone I’d give it 5 stars, but it’s also beautiful, gutting, and oblique in only the way fairy tales can get away with. Making parallel the loss of familiarity, scope of purpose, and youth to war with�� the cost of securing a witches�� potion?? Get out. The tears of sorrow bring life to memory and love lost?! Acknowledging that aging and growing are painful, isolating experiences? All extremely fun to cry about with my kids.
]]> 200028726 From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and—thanks to the cottage’s ancient plumbing—septic too.

This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

It's one precious week: everything is in balance; everything is in flux. And when Rocky comes face to face with her family’s history and future, she is forced to accept that she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.]]> 240 Catherine Newman 0063345161 amelia 5
Sappy note: I hope my kids and I can talk to each other like this when they’re adults. ]]> 3.55 2024
author: Catherine Newman
name: amelia
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/10
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves:
review:
A book of intense feelings, love of time and place (past and present), and the understanding that no phase of life exists in a vacuum. And holy smokes, what a read on motherhood, parenthood, and bodily autonomy. I laughed, I cried, I cried some more, I highlighted roughly 30% of the book. Eager to read more by this author!

Sappy note: I hope my kids and I can talk to each other like this when they’re adults.
]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 amelia 5 3.84 2023
author: James McBride
name: amelia
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/24
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
I really loved this story of community, assimilation, opportunity, tradition, where we come from, where we’re going, differences, acceptance, love and disparity in a small, poor Pennsylvania town. The idea that some people and groups deserve to belong “more�� than others felt very timely (and always will), and was given the trouncing it deserves.
]]> 51045613 The funny, sharp, and surprising story of the shooting of a Brooklyn drug dealer and the people who witnessed it—from James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird

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

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

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of New York in the late 1960s—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth finally emerges, McBride shows us that not all secrets can be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in compassion and hope.]]> 370 James McBride 073521672X amelia 0 to-read 4.11 2020
author: James McBride
name: amelia
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198137722 Two young housemates embark on a road trip to discover themselves in a fractured America in this sparkling novel of love, friendship and chosen family, by the award-winning author of The Third Rainbow Girl.

What does it feel like, standing in the moments that will mark your life?


When Bernie replies to Leah's ad for a new housemate in Philadelphia, the two begin an intense and defiantly uncategorizable friendship based on a mutual belief in their art, and one another. Both aspire to capture the world around them: Leah through her writing; Bernie through her photography.

After Bernie's former photography professor, the renowned yet tarnished Daniel Dunn, dies and leaves her a complicated inheritance, Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie to his home in rural Pennsylvania, turning the jaunt into a road trip with an ambitious mission: to document America through words and photographs.

What ensues is a three-week journey into the heart of the nation, bringing the aritsts into conversation with people from all walks of life—“the absurd dreamers and failures of this wide, wide country”—as they try to make sense of the times they are living in. Along the way, Leah and Bernie discover what it means to to pursue their own ideas and dreams, and to embrace what they are capable of both romantically and artistically.

Housemates is a warm and insightful coming-of-age story of youth and freedom, a glorious celebration of queer life, and how art and love might save us all.]]> 352 Emma Copley Eisenberg 0593242238 amelia 0 currently-reading 3.52 2024
author: Emma Copley Eisenberg
name: amelia
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 63026545
Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.

In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood—and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.]]> 248 Kiese Laymon amelia 0 to-read 4.47 2018
author: Kiese Laymon
name: amelia
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195820847 "A story of love, healing, and second chances �� (Emily Henry) following a down on his luck country musician who, in the throes of grief after a shocking loss, moves back home and rekindles a relationship with his high school sweetheart, from award-winning author Jeff Zentner.

Colton Gentry is riding high. His first hit in nearly a decade has caught fire, he’s opening for country megastar Brant Lucas, and he’s married to one of the hottest acts in the country. But he’s hurting. Only a few weeks earlier, his best friend, Duane, was murdered onstage by a mass shooter at a country music festival. One night, with his trauma festering and Jim Beam flowing through his veins, Colton stands before a sold-out arena crowd of country music fans and offers his unfiltered opinion on guns. It goes over poorly.
��
Immediately, his career and marriage implode. Left with few choices or funds, he retreats to his rural Kentucky hometown. He’s resigned himself to has-been-dom, until a chance encounter at his town’s new farm-to-table restaurant gives him a second shot at a job working in the kitchen with Luann, his first love, who has undergone her own reinvention. Told through perspectives alternating between his senior year of high school, his time coming up with Duane as hungry musicians in Nashville, and the present, COLTON GENTRY’S THIRD ACT is a story of coming home, undoing past heartbreaks, and navigating grief, and is a reminder that there are next acts in life, no matter how unlikely they may seem.��]]> 400 Jeff Zentner 153875665X amelia 4 4.13 2024
author: Jeff Zentner
name: amelia
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves:
review:
A lovely story full of hope and acceptance and perfect word choices. I listened to this one, and other than the sheer amount of time committed to reading aloud menus, it was like being accompanied by a friend throughout my day. This felt like a book where the parts are greater than the sum of the whole, but it was such a pleasure I didn’t mind the predictability.
]]> 58885796 From the New York Times -bestselling author of Exit West , a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change.

One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’s skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different a chance at a kind of rebirth--an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew.
��
In Mohsin Hamid’s lyrical and urgent prose, The Last White Man powerfully uplifts our capacity for empathy and the transcendence over bigotry, fear, and anger it can achieve.]]> 192 Mohsin Hamid 0593538811 amelia 0 to-read 3.43 2022
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: amelia
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40961543
Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.

But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.]]> 228 Mohsin Hamid amelia 0 to-read 3.79 2007
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: amelia
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 194802722 A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé, Peter, told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it... right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned-up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex... right?]]> 400 Emily Henry amelia 3 4.21 2024
author: Emily Henry
name: amelia
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves:
review:
Can’t tell if it’s a sign of success that my favorite elements of this romance novel were the well-demonstrated, difficult inheritances of immature and selfish parents, but here we are. Did make me want to spend the summer in Michigan, which is nice!
]]> 50548197
A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) �� until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets.

There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate�� or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And beware of the monsters who lurk everywhere.

El is uniquely prepared for the school’s dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.]]> 320 Naomi Novik 0593128486 amelia 3
*of course I’m talking about The Fourth Wing. There can’t be tension if it’s only snark and constant exceptions to the stated rules of the universe! Ugh!]]> 3.93 2020
author: Naomi Novik
name: amelia
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves:
review:
At first, I had trouble getting past the awareness that this amount of world-building often comes at the cost of complete storytelling �� sometimes I don’t want to start a series! Please tell me a story with a beginning, middle, and end! But then the emotional arc started and actually clarified and supported decisions and personality, rather than cowing to attitude and working against the narrative.* I really liked it in the end, but the first half of the book was a struggle (and yes, I’m onto book two �� they got me).

*of course I’m talking about The Fourth Wing. There can’t be tension if it’s only snark and constant exceptions to the stated rules of the universe! Ugh!
]]> 17262366 One Summer Bill Bryson, one of our greatest and most beloved nonfiction writers, transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life.

The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Paris, he ignited an explosion of worldwide rapture and instantly became the most famous person on the planet. Meanwhile, the titanically talented Babe Ruth was beginning his assault on the home run record, which would culminate on September 30 with his sixtieth blast, one of the most resonant and durable records in sports history. In between those dates a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her corset-salesman lover garroted her husband, leading to a murder trial that became a huge tabloid sensation. Alvin “Shipwreck�� Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days—a new record. The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover. Calvin Coolidge interrupted an already leisurely presidency for an even more relaxing three-month vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The gangster Al Capone tightened his grip on the illegal booze business through a gaudy and murderous reign of terror and municipal corruption. The first true “talking picture,�� Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, was filmed and forever changed the motion picture industry. The four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually guaranteed a future crash and depression.
�������� All this and much, much more transpired in that epochal summer of 1927, and Bill Bryson captures its outsized personalities, exciting events, and occasional just plain weirdness with his trademark vividness, eye for telling detail, and delicious humor. In that year America stepped out onto the world stage as the main event, and One Summer transforms it all into narrative nonfiction of the highest order.]]> 456 Bill Bryson 0767919408 amelia 5
Note: it took me so long to finish this book because I kept putting it off - doling out listening sessions as a lil�� treat!]]> 4.08 2013
author: Bill Bryson
name: amelia
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/27
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves:
review:
Possibly the most enjoyable audiobook experience I’ve ever had. I cannot recommend this book enough! It placed so much of history in context for me, and I love Bryson’s lightly sardonic perspective. He’s funny and bemused, but always prioritizing clarity and facts. A pleasure through and through!

Note: it took me so long to finish this book because I kept putting it off - doling out listening sessions as a lil�� treat!
]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 amelia 4 3.54 2024
author: Miranda July
name: amelia
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 57109107 The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.]]> 576 Amor Towles 0735222355 amelia 4 4.18 2021
author: Amor Towles
name: amelia
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/14
shelves:
review:
Amor Towles imbues his characters with such clarity of purpose and thorough personality - it’s all so thoughtful! Filled with small moments and sentences about perspective that I loved. But good golly did this book stress me out - an agent of chaos impeding the well-earned fresh start?!? I found it genuinely hard to read for first half!
]]> 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang amelia 3 3.84 2023
author: R.F. Kuang
name: amelia
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/25
date added: 2024/07/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 59366123 Butts: A Backstory, reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributing editor Heather Radke is determined to find out.

Spanning nearly two centuries, this “whip-smart�� (Publishers Weekly, starred review) cultural history takes us from the performance halls of 19th-century London to the aerobics studios of the 1980s, the music video set of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back�� and the mountains of Arizona, where every year humans and horses race in a feat of gluteal endurance. Along the way, she meets evolutionary biologists who study how butts first developed; models whose measurements have defined jean sizing for millions of women; and the fitness gurus who created fads like “Buns of Steel.�� She also examines the central importance of race through figures like Sarah Bartmann, once known as the “Venus Hottentot,�� Josephine Baker, Jennifer Lopez, and other women of color whose butts have been idolized, envied, and despised.

Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion—and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others.]]> 311 Heather Radke 1982135484 amelia 4 3.74 2022
author: Heather Radke
name: amelia
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/25
date added: 2024/07/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire.��A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 amelia 5 4.12 2023
author: Daniel Mason
name: amelia
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/21
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves:
review:
I absolutely loved this book, and HIGHLY recommend the audiobook. A story of a plot of land told over the course of a handful of centuries by the (mostly temporary) occupants - from obsessive apple lovers to beetles to supernatural charlatans. Almost a series of vignettes, but woven together by the spirits and essence of place.
]]> 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 amelia 5
The setting and timing - Ireland, early aughts - frame the chaos and anchor it. The inescapable awareness of social progress and artistic momentum (indie sleaze lives!), coupled with a recession, government homophobia and punishing abortion laws - it was all beautifully integrated into a personal narrative. I loved it! Got me back into reading like an insatiable monster - finally!
]]> 4.06 2023
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: amelia
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/12
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves:
review:
A story about how even the smartest of us are complete idiots in our early 20s. The intoxication of love (platonic; romantic), the self-aggrandizement of ~becoming an adult~, the circumstantial need for maturity and the personal inability to rise to the occasion �� all treated with kindness and appropriate disgust. There’s a generosity to the recounting that tries to give grace, but never fully excuses. People can be awful for good reasons!

The setting and timing - Ireland, early aughts - frame the chaos and anchor it. The inescapable awareness of social progress and artistic momentum (indie sleaze lives!), coupled with a recession, government homophobia and punishing abortion laws - it was all beautifully integrated into a personal narrative. I loved it! Got me back into reading like an insatiable monster - finally!

]]> 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 amelia 0 to-read 4.17 2022
author: R.F. Kuang
name: amelia
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54798456 Laugh-out-loud, deeply insightful, and emotion-filled essays from multi-talented actress, comedian, podcaster, and writer Casey Wilson.

Casey Wilson has a lot on her mind and she isn’t afraid to share. In this dazzling collection of essays, skillfully constructed and brimming with emotion, she shares her thoughts on the joys and vagaries of modern-day womanhood and motherhood, introduces the not-quite-typical family that made her who she is, and persuasively argues that lowbrow pop culture is the perfect lens through which to understand human nature.

Whether she’s extolling the virtues of eating in bed, processing the humiliation over her father’s late in life perm, or exploring her pathological need to be liked, Casey is witty, candid, and full of poignant and funny surprises. Humorous dives into her obsessions and areas of personal expertise—Scientology and self-help, nice guys, reality television shows—are matched by touching meditations on female friendship, grief, motherhood, and identity.��

Reading The Wreckage of My Presence is like spending time with a close friend—a deeply passionate, full-tilt, joyous, excessive, compulsive, shameless, hungry-for-it-all, loyal, cheerleading friend. A friend who is ready for any big feeling that comes her way and isn’t afraid to embrace it.

Bed person --
The wreckage of my presence --
To all the boys I loved before --
Cool girl --
A saber story --
Send in the clowns --
Flyentology --
Hide your phones --
Expect a miracle --
Hiked out --
The BBQ --
Tears of a clown --
Happy endings --
My husband's just not that into me; or Afrin: a love story --
Grandpa's pretty girl --
It doesn't do --
What dis --
Open-door policy --
Mother's day --
People don't know how to act --
Gimme some sugar; or, the wreckage of my presence redux]]> 288 Casey Wilson 006296058X amelia 4 4.13 2021
author: Casey Wilson
name: amelia
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves:
review:
Really, really enjoyed this audiobook. Grief and joy and appreciation from a very funny person with great perspective on motherhood, success, and individuality.
]]> 30688435
Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.]]> 231 Mohsin Hamid 0735212171 amelia 5
Hamid’s writing style is both gorgeous and distracting, though - very curious if his abundant use of clauses and commas took anyone else out. I’d give 4.5 stars if I could - his style invokes a dreaminess and thoughtfulness that’s an incredible contrast to the horrific reality of the story, but those insights were interrupted each time I had to read a sentence six times to see what tense or clause we started in. But it’s clearly a deliberate stylistic choice! I’m so torn.]]> 3.74 2017
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: amelia
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/22
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves:
review:
The quietest, most lovely and reflective book to ever give me nightmares. An incredible work of perspective with perfect use of magical realism that has really, really stuck with me.

Hamid’s writing style is both gorgeous and distracting, though - very curious if his abundant use of clauses and commas took anyone else out. I’d give 4.5 stars if I could - his style invokes a dreaminess and thoughtfulness that’s an incredible contrast to the horrific reality of the story, but those insights were interrupted each time I had to read a sentence six times to see what tense or clause we started in. But it’s clearly a deliberate stylistic choice! I’m so torn.
]]> 1885 Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work "her own darling child" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679783268]]> 279 Jane Austen 1441341706 amelia 3
For the rest�� well, I’ve long had a Doree Shafrir quote saved that says “In fiction, if you’re just telling what happened, it’s really boring.�� But I’m grateful to finally get the references. ]]> 4.28 1813
author: Jane Austen
name: amelia
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1813
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/03
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves:
review:
A long overdue first Austen read (despite an 8th grade book report that might have suggested otherwise), and for the first third I couldn’t believe I’d waited so long. It was so funny! I was laughing out loud! It’s absurd and fun and active!

For the rest�� well, I’ve long had a Doree Shafrir quote saved that says “In fiction, if you’re just telling what happened, it’s really boring.�� But I’m grateful to finally get the references.
]]> 46002342 Me and White Supremacy teaches readers how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of colour, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.

When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #MeAndWhiteSupremacy, she never predicted it would spread as widely as it did. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, and she got it. Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and over 90,000 people downloaded the Me and White Supremacy Workbook.

The updated and expanded Me and White Supremacy takes the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources.

Awareness leads to action, and action leads to change. The numbers show that readers are ready to do this work - let's give it to them.]]> 238 Layla F. Saad 1728209803 amelia 5 4.33 2020
author: Layla F. Saad
name: amelia
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/18
date added: 2024/05/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 4965
Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition.

As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. ]]> 304 Geraldine Brooks 0142001430 amelia 5 4.00 2001
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: amelia
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/06
date added: 2024/05/18
shelves:
review:
I loved this beautiful, incredibly descriptive and moving downer of a book. I’ve rarely experienced such a clarifying portrayal of time and place beside a well-trodden topic - it was really illuminating, even if the last chapter used up all available creative license.
]]> 53285047 We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library]]> 305 Mona Awad 0525559752 amelia 4 3.43 2019
author: Mona Awad
name: amelia
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/04
date added: 2024/05/18
shelves:
review:
What in the world of academia!?! I don’t know if I fully think this book, uh, kept its own promises, but I sure enjoyed reading it and boy do I want to talk about it. The rare book I started re-reading the moment I finished.
]]> 61431922 Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders...

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile�� humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.

She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die]]> 498 Rebecca Yarros 1649374046 amelia 3
But also, like, a plucky heroine, annoyed dragons and (predictable) twists with enjoyable characters! Light reading that absolutely should not pretend it needs 650 pages, but really fun when it found its stride.
]]> 4.56 2023
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: amelia
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/14
date added: 2024/05/18
shelves:
review:
Sometimes a lot of fun with great world creation, sometimes so repetitive and poorly paced I lost interest. And because the pacing, explanations, and discovery were so uneven, it undermined the narrative suspense �� haphazard for a story that’s essentially a series of tests. The romance also got clunky - I’m so tired of the trope where the protagonist clings to a statement 200 pages back, while the story demonstrates progress. It negates the storytelling!

But also, like, a plucky heroine, annoyed dragons and (predictable) twists with enjoyable characters! Light reading that absolutely should not pretend it needs 650 pages, but really fun when it found its stride.

]]> 57185348 Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies.

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.

At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie's vision be bulwark enough?

Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff's new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.
]]> 260 Lauren Groff 1594634491 amelia 5 bookclub-s
Now, I’ve got a lot of historical googling to do. ]]> 3.64 2021
author: Lauren Groff
name: amelia
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/10
date added: 2024/04/10
shelves: bookclub-s
review:
I found this book basically impenetrable and for some reason that made me love it. A foreign world, concept of life, time, sense of self and understanding of the world maybe should feel at odds with my sensibilities! So atmospheric, cut with moments of personal clarity. I never know what Lauren Groff is getting me into, and I’m grateful for it.

Now, I’ve got a lot of historical googling to do.
]]> 9824 New York Public Library Book to Remember
PSLA Young Adult Top 40 Nonfiction Titles of the Year

"Engaging...a lively, informative compendium of facts, theories, and musings."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting! Robert Sullivan turns the lowly rat into the star of this most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant New York Times bestseller.

Love them or loathe them, rats are here to stay-they are city dwellers as much as (or more than) we are, surviving on the effluvia of our society. In Rats , the critically acclaimed bestseller, Robert Sullivan spends a year investigating a rat-infested alley just a few blocks away from Wall Street. Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat.

Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses-its herds-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.

With an all-new Afterword by the author]]> 272 Robert Sullivan 1582344779 amelia 4 3.73 2004
author: Robert Sullivan
name: amelia
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/19
date added: 2024/03/20
shelves:
review:
What fun! I loved the author's overall tone, the city history, and the way he somehow balanced repulsion, curiosity, and narrative. There were a few instances where I felt semi-facts/interviews/recollections made the writing unclear, but that's a small price to pay. (Do I have any concept of how many rats are in NYC? No. But I know how quickly they breed and how hard they are to kill, but also that they're killed a lot? Yes! The lack of finality on many, many issues was part of the charm.) A really enjoyable reading experience about vermin and their ratty history.
]]> 60784605 Shortlisted for the TikTok Book Awards in the Book of the Year, 2023 and the ŷ������ Debut and Fiction Book of the Year, 2023.

It’s fair to say that Maddie’s life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson’s. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting.

When her mum returns from her latest trip to Ghana, Maddie leaps at the chance to get out of the family home and finally start living. A self-acknowledged late bloomer, she’s ready to experience some important “firsts��: She finds a flat share, says yes to after-work drinks, pushes for more recognition in her career, and throws herself into the bewildering world of internet dating. But it's not long before tragedy strikes, forcing Maddie to face the true nature of her unconventional family, and the perils—and rewards—of putting her life on the line.

Smart, funny, and deeply affecting, Jessica George's Maame deals with the themes of our time with humor and poignancy: from familial duty and racism, to female pleasure, the complexity of love, and the life-saving power of friendship. Most important, it explores what it feels like to be torn between two homes and cultures―and it celebrates finally being able to find where you belong.]]> 320 Jessica George amelia 0 to-read 4.03 2023
author: Jessica George
name: amelia
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198563734
There aren’t enough labeled glass containers to contain the mess that is Ali Morris’s life. Her mom died two years ago, then her husband left, and she hasn’t worn pants with a zipper in longer than she cares to remember. She’s a professional organizer whose pantry is a disgrace.

No one is more surprised than Ali when the first time she takes off her wedding ring and puts on pants with hardware—overalls count, right?—she meets someone. Or rather, her dog claims a man for her in the same way he claimed his favorite of her three children: by peeing on him. Ethan smiles at Ali like her pants are just right—like he likes what he sees. The last thing Ali needs is to make her life messier, but there’s no harm in a little Summer Romance. Is there?]]> 321 Annabel Monaghan 0593714083 amelia 0 to-read 4.02 2024
author: Annabel Monaghan
name: amelia
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62919375
At first, Wren internally resists her husband’s fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis changes? Then, a glimpse of Lewis’s developing carnivorous nature activates long-repressed memories for Wren, whose story vacillates between her childhood living on a houseboat in Oklahoma, her time with her college ex-girlfriend, and her unusual friendship with a woman pregnant with twin birds.]]> 416 Emily Habeck 1668006499 amelia 5
Weirdly, the second book in a row I read that (heavily) references "Our Town." In this one, it made me laugh.

Important note: I listened to about five minutes of this audiobook and it was TERRIBLE -- an absolute disservice. It's silly and loses the power of the formatting and just -- no. Do not listen to this book. Read it!
]]> 3.96 2023
author: Emily Habeck
name: amelia
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/19
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:
I absolutely loved this book! I cried so much reading it, because I thought it was lovely and sad and reflecting on What Once Was makes me blubber, but the absurdity and use of format kept me from feeling manipulated. I laughed, I cried, I appreciated the commitment to its world and the characters within it. That said, there's a heavy-handed analogy about terminal illness and saying goodbye at the core, shrouded in magical realism -- I wouldn't recommend it if your life involves those things right now.

Weirdly, the second book in a row I read that (heavily) references "Our Town." In this one, it made me laugh.

Important note: I listened to about five minutes of this audiobook and it was TERRIBLE -- an absolute disservice. It's silly and loses the power of the formatting and just -- no. Do not listen to this book. Read it!

]]> 58988426 Nora's life is about to get a rewrite...

Nora Hamilton knows the formula for love better than anyone. As a romance channel screenwriter, it's her job. But when her too-good-to work husband leaves her and their two kids, Nora turns her marriage's collapse into cash and writes the best script of her life. No one is more surprised than her when it's picked up for the big screen and set to film on location at her 100-year-old-home. When former Sexiest Man Alive, Leo Vance, is cast as her ne'er-do-well husband Nora's life will never be the same.

The morning after shooting wraps and the crew leaves, Nora finds Leo on her porch with a half-empty bottle of tequila and a proposition. He'll pay a thousand dollars a day to stay for a week. The extra seven grand would give Nora breathing room, but it's the need in his eyes that makes her say yes. Seven days: it's the blink of an eye or an eternity depending on how you look at it. Enough time to fall in love. Enough time to break your heart.

Filled with warmth, wit, and wisdom, Nora Goes Off Script is the best kind of love story--the real kind where love is complicated by work, kids, and the emotional baggage that comes with life. For Nora and Leo, this kind of love is bigger than the big screen.]]> 272 Annabel Monaghan 0593420039 amelia 5
This book was recommended to me as a response to Romantic Comedy, which I (REALLY) did not like, and what a good call.]]> 4.03 2022
author: Annabel Monaghan
name: amelia
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:
This was a delight! Fully formed adults falling in love is fun, and the whimsical parts of this book were integrated well enough to keep me from being pulled out of the story. Which is all to say: really well-written, too-good-to-be-true storytelling is a joy. Recommend this book when you're in need of a pick-me-up or to get out of a rut.

This book was recommended to me as a response to Romantic Comedy, which I (REALLY) did not like, and what a good call.
]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X amelia 5
This book also finally got me to engage with "Our Town" - helpful!]]> 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: amelia
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/25
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:
What a gorgeous book about perspective, how time shapes our personal narratives, and the deep sweetness (and sadness!) of sharing your life's stories with your children. Earnestly, it's a shock to see how my babies are becoming children who are on the road to being actual separate people, and this book was such a lovely demonstration of how parenting means seeing all of those things in the people you love, all at once. Life is long! Anyhow, I loved how the story-within-the-story unfolded, and the reflections on how something or someone who is the MOST IMPORTANT at one point in life can become a mostly-forgotten memory in another.

This book also finally got me to engage with "Our Town" - helpful!
]]> 62039305
Hot dogs. Poor people created them. Rich people found a way to charge fifteen dollars for them. They’re high culture, they’re low culture, they’re sports food, they’re kids' food, they’re hangover food, and they’re deeply American, despite having no basis whatsoever in America's Indigenous traditions. You can love them, you can hate them, but you can’t avoid the great American hot dog.

Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs is part investigation into the cultural and culinary significance of hot dogs and part travelog documenting a cross-country road trip researching them as they’re served today. From avocado and spice in the West to ass-shattering chili in the East to an entire salad on a slice of meat in Chicago, Loftus, her pets, and her ex eat their way across the country during the strange summer of 2021. It’s a brief window into the year between waves of a plague that the American government has the resources to temper, but not the interest.

So grab a dog, lay out your picnic blanket, and dig into the delicious and inevitable product of centuries of violence, poverty, and ambition, now rolling around at your local 7-Eleven.]]> 301 Jamie Loftus 1250847745 amelia 5 3.90 2023
author: Jamie Loftus
name: amelia
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:
Absolutely loved the audiobook - a book about hot dogs, but really, a book about labor practices and America's deep love of mishandling the latter so we can all enjoy the former. Funny, informative, and moving, written by someone who delights in the absurdity of it all. The book's timing means it also explores the absolute clusterfuck of pandemic response -- so varied, so stupid! -- with a great combination of anger and disbelief. I truly loved this book!
]]> 61653268 From the New York Times bestselling author J. Ryan Stradal, a story of a couple from two very different restaurant families in rustic Minnesota, and the legacy of love and tragedy, of hardship and hope, that unites and divides them

Mariel Prager needs a break. Her husband Ned is having an identity crisis, her spunky, beloved restaurant is bleeding money by the day, and her mother Florence is stubbornly refusing to leave the church where she’s been holed up for more than a week. The Lakeside Supper Club has been in her family for decades, and while Mariel’s grandmother embraced the business, seeing it as a saving grace, Florence never took to it. When Mariel inherited the restaurant, skipping Florence, it created a rift between mother and daughter that never quite healed.

Ned is also an heir—to a chain of home-style diners—and while he doesn't have a head for business, he knows his family's chain could provide a better future than his wife's fading restaurant. In the aftermath of a devastating tragedy, Ned and Mariel lose almost everything they hold dear, and the hard-won victories of each family hang in the balance. With their dreams dashed, can one fractured family find a way to rebuild despite their losses, and will the Lakeside Supper Club be their salvation?

In this colorful, vanishing world of relish trays and brandy Old Fashioneds, J. Ryan Stradal has once again given us a story full of his signature honest, lovable yet fallible Midwestern characters as they grapple with love, loss, and marriage; what we hold onto and what we leave behind; and what our legacy will be when we are gone.]]> 340 J. Ryan Stradal 1984881078 amelia 4
Fun, though: great shout out to Kenyon College in this one, a place dear to my heart in a book about places dear to hearts!]]> 3.58 2023
author: J. Ryan Stradal
name: amelia
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/07
date added: 2024/03/12
shelves:
review:
A lovely book about the importance of place and family, and also what absolute shits family members can be -- whether because of misunderstanding, naïveté, grudges or perceptions. I was walloped by some of the loss in this book, and felt less resolution than in other Stradal books, which I unabashedly love and recommend all the dang time. An ongoing theme in this book is forgiveness and consideration, and thankfully neither are given consistently (because people don't, anywhere!) but I felt more sad than satiated in the end. Stradal is good at reminding you life doesn't provide neat bows for much, but I may have needed a couple more, personally.

Fun, though: great shout out to Kenyon College in this one, a place dear to my heart in a book about places dear to hearts!
]]> 15842439 Now a major motion picture from Summit Entertainment.

R is having a no-life crisis—he is a zombie. He has no memories, no identity, and no pulse, but he is a little different from his fellow Dead. He may occasionally eat people, but he’d rather be riding abandoned airport escalators, listening to Sinatra in the cozy 747 he calls home, or collecting souvenirs from the ruins of civilization.

And then he meets a girl.

First as his captive, then his reluctant guest, Julie is a blast of living color in R’s gray landscape, and something inside him begins to bloom. He doesn't want to eat this girl—although she looks delicious—he wants to protect her. But their unlikely bond will cause ripples they can’t imagine, and their hopeless world won’t change without a fight.]]> 256 Isaac Marion 147671746X amelia 4 3.87 2010
author: Isaac Marion
name: amelia
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/02/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.��Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 amelia 3
The author took a few stances that I found problematic and distracting, but overall the story was engaging and heartbreaking and lovely and only sometimes truly upsetting.

UPDATE: this has not aged well in my memory. What a load of writing choices that feel deeply icky. ]]> 4.28 2015
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: amelia
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2019/03/02
date added: 2024/02/07
shelves:
review:
I can't believe how devastatingly unpleasant this was to read, and how much I wanted to continue doing so.

The author took a few stances that I found problematic and distracting, but overall the story was engaging and heartbreaking and lovely and only sometimes truly upsetting.

UPDATE: this has not aged well in my memory. What a load of writing choices that feel deeply icky.
]]> 56269163 'A TASTE FOR POISON' reveals how eleven notorious poisons affect the body - through the murders in which they were used.

As any listener or reader of murder mysteries can tell you, poison is one of the most enduring - and popular - weapons of choice for a scheming murderer. It can be slipped into a drink, smeared onto the tip of an arrow or the handle of a door, even filtered through the air we breathe. But how exactly do these poisons work to break our bodies down, and what can we learn from the damage they inflict?

In a fascinating blend of popular science, medical history, and true crime, Dr. Neil Bradbury explores this most morbidly captivating method of murder from a cellular level. Alongside real-life accounts of murderers and their crimes - some notorious, some forgotten, some still unsolved - are the equally compelling stories of the poisons involved: eleven molecules of death that work their way through the human body and, paradoxically, illuminate the way in which our bodies function.

Drawn from historical records and current news headlines, A Taste for Poison weaves together the tales of spurned lovers, shady scientists, medical professionals and political assassins to show how the precise systems of the body can be impaired to lethal effect through the use of poison. From the deadly origins of the gin and tonic cocktail to the arsenic-laced wallpaper in Napoleon’s bedroom, 'A TASTE FOR POISON' leads listeners on a riveting tour of the intricate, complex systems that keep us alive - or don’t.]]> 304 Neil Bradbury 1250270758 amelia 2
But not for stories of poisoners! Highly recommend The Poisoner’s Handbook for a more contextual narrative of poisons, poisoners, and when authorities were like “maybe this is too many to ignore?”]]> 4.11 2022
author: Neil Bradbury
name: amelia
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/04
date added: 2024/01/20
shelves:
review:
Fine! Couldn’t quite grasp the tone �� the author’s asides were seemingly working towards something, but the end result was deeply uneven. Really cemented the truth that I don’t care about chemistry or biology, which I do feel bad about. So maybe my lack of enthusiasm is just�� my lack of enthusiasm.

But not for stories of poisoners! Highly recommend The Poisoner’s Handbook for a more contextual narrative of poisons, poisoners, and when authorities were like “maybe this is too many to ignore?��
]]> 49354511 Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium��, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid�� flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.]]> 384 Pip Williams 1925972593 amelia 2
All that said, the narrator of the audiobook is a dream and I loved listening to her say “slip.”]]> 3.97 2020
author: Pip Williams
name: amelia
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/18
date added: 2024/01/20
shelves:
review:
A book about suffragists, Victorian social mores, the brutality of war, and the casual, damning misogyny of recorded history�� all encountered by a frustratingly passive protagonist. Almost all key moments happen off-screen, including her personal growth, in a way that makes you question the awareness of both author and character. So odd that the author’s voice within the story (a fictional character in a historically accurate history!) seems to be unable to determine a stance, so much that it counters her discoveries. For example: she’s slow to comprehend the difference in her opportunities versus a bondmaid’s (even after it’s spelled out!), and then we have said indentured servant say “serving you is never work.�� What�� what is the takeaway here?

All that said, the narrator of the audiobook is a dream and I loved listening to her say “slip.��
]]> 40864002 ASIN B08H831J18 moved to the more recent edition

Centuries before, robots of Panga gained self-awareness, laid down their tools, wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend.

Now the life of the tea monk who tells this story is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They will need to ask it a lot. Chambers' series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?]]> 151 Becky Chambers amelia 3 4.25 2021
author: Becky Chambers
name: amelia
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/21
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves:
review:
Perfectly fine! A great initial premise -- robot sentience = freedom = nature �� that sort of became a dull buddy road trip story. Mostly made me think about how The Wild Robot and the Murderbot series are more fun to read.
]]> 256008 Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.]]> 960 Larry McMurtry 067168390X amelia 5
]]> 4.53 1985
author: Larry McMurtry
name: amelia
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/18
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves:
review:
I listened to 37 hours of this book and enjoyed approximately 36.5 of them. What a feat of storytelling and character work. I laughed! I cried! I appreciated what happened off-screen and what took center stage - never predictable, even after 37 hours. May have to listen to the next book(s) because I miss taking walks with my cowboy friends.


]]> 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]> 336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 amelia 5
But I do need a diagram of that beehive.]]> 3.69 2023
author: Jen Beagin
name: amelia
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/18
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves:
review:
Made me laugh out loud a bunch AND consider the way our perceptions sometimes allow us to tell the stories we choose over reality. Pretty great! Looking forward to reading more by this author - I love an unreliable narrator!

But I do need a diagram of that beehive.
]]> 58065033 390 Bonnie Garmus amelia 4 4.23 2022
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: amelia
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/07
date added: 2023/11/13
shelves:
review:
This book was a really engaging read, though not nearly as fluffy as the cover would suggest (a disservice to the narrative, honestly). Somewhere between a fantastical wish-fulfillment fairy tale and a brutally frank demonstration of sexism and abuse, where most threads are neatly bowed by the (appropriately satisfying) end. A fair amount of telling, not showing, when it came to personal relationships and character growth, which really stands out when you have the dog’s motives more clearly described than the protagonist’s. But since it was fun to read, it’s much easier to push all my unanswered questions to the side and wonder if the author works for Big Rowing.
]]> 59089710
Laurie is told that the duck has no financial value. But after it disappears under suspicious circumstances, she feels compelled to figure out why anyone would steal a wooden duck--and why Dot kept it hidden away in the first place. Suddenly Laurie finds herself swept up in a righteous caper that has her negotiating with antiques dealers and con artists, going on after-hours dates at the local library, and reconnecting with her oldest friend and first love. Desperate to uncover her great-aunt's secrets, Laurie must reckon with her past, her future, and ultimately embrace her own vision of flying solo.

A woman returns to her small Maine hometown, uncovering family secrets that take her on a journey of self-discovery and new love, in this warm and charming novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over.]]> 320 Linda Holmes 0525619275 amelia 3 3.55 2022
author: Linda Holmes
name: amelia
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2023/11/13
shelves:
review:
Ooh, Linda Holmes does dialogue and character description so well! In this case, in service of a perfectly fine story. Pleasant and well-written, but I didn’t find it particularly engaging �� finishing it was a to-do, rather than an inevitability.
]]> 18693644
The Hundred-Year House unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer.]]> 338 Rebecca Makkai 052542668X amelia 5 3.44 2014
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: amelia
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/17
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves:
review:
What a beautifully interwoven pleasure. So many satisfying interlocking pieces and explanations, without an actual mystery (thank you) �� just an atmospheric, magnetic sense of place with fully formed characters moving through and interacting with their own version of reality. Clever and engaging, with wonderful social commentary reflecting each era and the people within it. A meal after reading a lot of soggy appetizers.
]]> 60435878 Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular.

By the time Carrie retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed twenty Slam titles. And if you ask her, she is entitled to every one. She sacrificed nearly everything to become the best, with her father as her coach.

But six years after her retirement, Carrie finds herself sitting in the stands of the 1994 US Open, watching her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning, British player named Nicki Chan.

At thirty-seven years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement and be coached by her father for one last year in an attempt to reclaim her record. Even if the sports media says that they never liked the 'Battle-Axe' anyway. Even if her body doesn't move as fast as it did. And even if it means swallowing her pride to train with a man she once almost opened her heart to: Bowe Huntley. Like her, he has something to prove before he gives up the game forever.

In spite of it all: Carrie Soto is back, for one epic final season. In this riveting and unforgettable novel, Taylor Jenkins Reid tells a story about the cost of greatness and a legendary athlete attempting a comeback.]]> 384 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0593158687 amelia 2 ]]> 4.19 2022
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: amelia
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2023/09/15
date added: 2023/10/10
shelves:
review:
How strange to read a character-driven novel where the protagonist’s growth is *almost* what a 12-year-old girl manages in the first half of seventh grade. So much tennis, so many withered attempts at commentary on sexism in sports, and the kind of book that wants you to question your own threshold for an unlikable female protagonist as a sort of meta-commentary. Instead, it reinforces how dull the character is, and how repetitive the story. It’s not a gotcha! It’s just underwhelming.

]]> 54221749 Marie Benedict, the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Only Woman in the Room, uncovers the untold story of Agatha Christie’s mysterious eleven day disappearance.

In December 1926, Agatha Christie goes missing. Investigators find her empty car on the edge of a deep, gloomy pond, the only clues some tire tracks nearby and a fur coat left in the car �� strange for a frigid night. Her husband and daughter have no knowledge of her whereabouts, and England unleashes an unprecedented manhunt to find the up-and-coming mystery author. Eleven days later, she reappears, just as mysteriously as she disappeared, claiming amnesia and providing no explanations for her time away.

The puzzle of those missing eleven days has persisted. With her trademark exploration into the shadows of history, acclaimed author Marie Benedict brings us into the world of Agatha Christie, imagining why such a brilliant woman would find herself at the center of such a murky story.

What is real, and what is mystery? What role did her unfaithful husband play, and what was he not telling investigators?

A master storyteller whose clever mind may never be matched, Agatha Christie’s untold history offers perhaps her greatest mystery of all.]]> 272 Marie Benedict 1492682721 amelia 2
As I read and pushed to get to the solution (woof), I kept thinking the best way to describe this book would be “skimmable.�� Faint praise. ]]> 3.66 2020
author: Marie Benedict
name: amelia
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2023/10/10
date added: 2023/10/10
shelves:
review:
What a bummer of a storytelling choice. A fascinating true historical mystery about a talented, clever woman leads to a book spent almost entirely with�� a haughty, dull man. Even the reveal is lackluster - spoiler, it’s simply what the reader has already trudged through. Archie is a small, judgmental, pompous man, and I just spent an entire book in his unpleasant company. The comeuppance, if you could even call it that, might have been satisfying to experience as a person, but we are only reading this story. And as such, we’ve read a dreary one.

As I read and pushed to get to the solution (woof), I kept thinking the best way to describe this book would be “skimmable.�� Faint praise.
]]> 58283080 friends? Bizarre. But he likes her too much to risk a fling, so platonic pals it is.

Now, Hannah's in town for work, crashing in Fox's spare bedroom. She knows he's a notorious ladies' man, but they're definitely just friends. In fact, she's nursing a hopeless crush on a colleague and Fox is just the person to help with her lackluster love life. Armed with a few tips from Westport's resident Casanova, Hannah sets out to catch her coworker's eye... yet the more time she spends with Fox, the more she wants him instead. As the line between friendship and flirtation begins to blur, Hannah can't deny she loves everything about Fox, but she refuses to be another notch on his bedpost.

Living with his best friend should have been easy. Except now she's walking around in a towel, sleeping right across the hall, and Fox is fantasizing about waking up next to her for the rest of his life and... and... man overboard! He's fallen for her, hook, line, and sinker. Helping her flirt with another guy is pure torture, but maybe if Fox can tackle his inner demons and show Hannah he's all in, she'll choose him instead?

In the follow-up to It Happened One Summer, Tessa Bailey delivers another deliciously fun rom-com about a former player who accidentally falls for his best friend while trying to help her land a different man...]]> 353 Tessa Bailey 0063045699 amelia 0 currently-reading 3.88 2022
author: Tessa Bailey
name: amelia
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 58064046 Everything casts a shadow. Even the world we live in. And as with every shadow, there is a place where it must touch. A seam, where the shadow meets its source.

Olivia Prior has grown up in Merilance School for girls, and all she has of her past is her mother’s journal—which seems to unravel into madness. Then, a letter invites Olivia to come home—to Gallant. Yet when Olivia arrives, no one is expecting her. But Olivia is not about to leave the first place that feels like home, it doesn’t matter if her cousin Matthew is hostile or if she sees half-formed ghouls haunting the hallways.

Olivia knows that Gallant is hiding secrets, and she is determined to uncover them. When she crosses a ruined wall at just the right moment, Olivia finds herself in a place that is Gallant—but not. The manor is crumbling, the ghouls are solid, and a mysterious figure rules over all. Now Olivia sees what has unraveled generations of her family, and where her father may have come from.

Olivia has always wanted to belong somewhere, but will she take her place as a Prior, protecting our world against the Master of the House? Or will she take her place beside him?]]> 338 Victoria E. Schwab 0062835777 amelia 2 bookclub-s
That said, the audiobook narration was wonderful and really made for a pleasant experience!]]> 3.70 2022
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: amelia
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2023/08/26
date added: 2023/08/29
shelves: bookclub-s
review:
The atmosphere and protagonist are engaging, kinda, but beyond that the book has to constantly explain itself and the rules of the world we find ourselves in (incompletely, to boot). There's very little world-building, but instead ongoing explanations or "realizations" framed as reveals that rarely answer the questions posed (I repeatedly tried to re-read thinking I'd missed a connection or explanation - nope). I know it's YA, and I appreciate some of the plot's ambiguity, but otherwise it felt most like someone explaining an idea, rather than crafting a story. The overall narrative felt underdeveloped.

That said, the audiobook narration was wonderful and really made for a pleasant experience!
]]> 63246652
Johannes, a free dog, lives in an urban park by the sea. His job is to be the Eyes—to see everything that happens within the park and report back to the park’s elders, three ancient Bison. His friends—a seagull, a raccoon, a squirrel, and a pelican—work with him as the Assistant Eyes, observing the humans and other animals who share the park and making sure the Equilibrium is in balance.��

But changes are afoot. More humans, including Trouble Travelers, arrive in the park. A new building, containing mysterious and hypnotic rectangles, goes up. And then there are the goats—an actual boatload of goats—who appear, along with a shocking revelation that changes Johannes’s view of the world.]]> 256 Dave Eggers 152476423X amelia 0 to-read 4.23 2023
author: Dave Eggers
name: amelia
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40195211
Rebecca Makkai, Charles FInch, Renee Rosen, Dave Kelly, Kathleen Rooney, C. Russell Price, Lauren Emily, Adam Morgan, Christine Sneed, Mary Robinette Kowal, Megan Stielstra and many more!]]> 116 Rebecca Makkai 0692106286 amelia 0 to-read 3.74
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: amelia
average rating: 3.74
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61053829
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.]]> 438 Rebecca Makkai 0593490142 amelia 0 to-read 3.57 2023
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: amelia
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 30288282 If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?

It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.

The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.

A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.]]> 346 Chloe Benjamin 0735213186 amelia 3
SPOILERS aka what I don’t want to forget before book club:

- Every side character has their own tragedy (save Eddie, kinda), and we hear them all. Why? Raj accuses Daniel of elevating the Gold family’s suffering, which feels apt, but�� why? “Bad stuff happens to everyone�� is not an arc!

- Judaism vs mysticism vs superstition vs God vs practice vs belief (so much!) come up a lot, but there’s never quite a comparison or investigation. And all the children sort of unceremoniously drop Judaism, but still focus on it�� kinda. A dropped thread! But also how can a thread be dropped when it comes up ALL the time?!

- generally, I like when authors reveal explanatory info slowly, but the “reveals�� here were so uneven, and so unhelpful, it just felt like another instance of telling us how the characters are, rather than demonstrating (thinking Gertie & Vanya’a relationship)

- the later in life we “meet�� the characters, the less complete they feel, which stinks

- Gertie?! How can we get so little yet so much of this (dominating? Powerful? Misunderstood?) character?! At one point we start, and then it just�� stops

- what in the world was Daniel’s mental shift?

- like that Ruth Ozeki book we just read, always good to know mental illness can be solved off-screen, phew

- Saul died so young but is treated as SUCH an old man character �� strange there’s no reflection by Daniel or Varya on age

- seriously, how tall is everyone ]]> 3.68 2018
author: Chloe Benjamin
name: amelia
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/13
date added: 2023/08/14
shelves:
review:
The premise of this novel is great, but it lacks a cohesiveness in the storytelling and character development to truly become the story it suggests it is. (Can it really be a family saga if we don’t see how they relate to one another?) I enjoyed reading this book, but I keep asking myself if it can really be well-written if the narrative never actually reaches the height of what we’re being told it is.

SPOILERS aka what I don’t want to forget before book club:

- Every side character has their own tragedy (save Eddie, kinda), and we hear them all. Why? Raj accuses Daniel of elevating the Gold family’s suffering, which feels apt, but�� why? “Bad stuff happens to everyone�� is not an arc!

- Judaism vs mysticism vs superstition vs God vs practice vs belief (so much!) come up a lot, but there’s never quite a comparison or investigation. And all the children sort of unceremoniously drop Judaism, but still focus on it�� kinda. A dropped thread! But also how can a thread be dropped when it comes up ALL the time?!

- generally, I like when authors reveal explanatory info slowly, but the “reveals�� here were so uneven, and so unhelpful, it just felt like another instance of telling us how the characters are, rather than demonstrating (thinking Gertie & Vanya’a relationship)

- the later in life we “meet�� the characters, the less complete they feel, which stinks

- Gertie?! How can we get so little yet so much of this (dominating? Powerful? Misunderstood?) character?! At one point we start, and then it just�� stops

- what in the world was Daniel’s mental shift?

- like that Ruth Ozeki book we just read, always good to know mental illness can be solved off-screen, phew

- Saul died so young but is treated as SUCH an old man character �� strange there’s no reflection by Daniel or Varya on age

- seriously, how tall is everyone
]]> 61718053
They broke up six months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends.

Which is how they find themselves sharing the largest bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blue week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.

Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends�� hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week�� in front of those who know you best?

A couple who broke up months ago make a pact to pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.]]> 400 Emily Henry 0593441273 amelia 5 3.95 2023
author: Emily Henry
name: amelia
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/03
date added: 2023/08/06
shelves:
review:
My favorite Emily Henry yet. At the risk of being annoyingly earnest, this is a great story to read while in love with the person who has long improved your quality of life and sense of self.
]]> 62628727 A comedy writer thinks she’s sworn off love, until a dreamily handsome pop star flips the script on all her assumptions. Romantic Comedy is a hilarious, observant and deeply tender novel from New York Times–bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld.

Sally Milz is a sketch writer for "The Night Owls," the late-night live comedy show that airs each Saturday. With a couple of heartbreaks under her belt, she’s long abandoned the search for love, settling instead for the occasional hook-up, career success, and a close relationship with her stepfather to round out a satisfying life.

But when Sally’s friend and fellow writer Danny Horst begins dating Annabel, a glamorous actor who guest-hosted the show, he joins the not-so-exclusive group of talented but average-looking and even dorky men at the show—and in society at large—who’ve gotten romantically involved with incredibly beautiful and accomplished women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch called the "Danny Horst Rule," poking fun at this phenomenon while underscoring how unlikely it is that the reverse would ever happen for a woman.

Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models, who signed on as both host and musical guest for this week’s show. Dazzled by his charms, Sally hits it off with Noah instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder whether there might actually be sparks flying. But this isn’t a romantic comedy; it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her...right?

With her keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age.]]> 309 Curtis Sittenfeld 0399590943 amelia 2 3.60 2023
author: Curtis Sittenfeld
name: amelia
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/07/28
date added: 2023/08/06
shelves:
review:
Remarkably joyless for a story about love and comedy! This book frustrated me so much I had trouble sleeping.
]]> 55659629
Piper hasn’t even been in Westport for five minutes when she meets big, bearded sea captain Brendan, who thinks she won’t last a week outside of Beverly Hills. So what if Piper can’t do math, and the idea of sleeping in a shabby apartment with bunk beds gives her hives. How bad could it really be? She’s determined to show her stepfather—and the hot, grumpy local—that she’s more than a pretty face.

Except it’s a small town and everywhere she turns, she bumps into Brendan. The fun-loving socialite and the gruff fisherman are polar opposites, but there’s an undeniable attraction simmering between them. Piper doesn’t want any distractions, especially feelings for a man who sails off into the sunset for weeks at a time. Yet as she reconnects with her past and begins to feel at home in Westport, Piper starts to wonder if the cold, glamorous life she knew is what she truly wants. LA is calling her name, but Brendan—and this town full of memories—may have already caught her heart.��

Tessa Bailey is back with a Schitt’s Creek-inspired rom-com about a Hollywood “It Girl�� who is cut off from her wealthy family and exiled to a small Pacific Northwest beach town... where she butts heads with a surly, sexy local who thinks she doesn’t belong.��]]> 397 Tessa Bailey 0063045656 amelia 4 3.91 2021
author: Tessa Bailey
name: amelia
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/03
date added: 2023/08/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 60473073 Pageboy is a groundbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.]]> 271 Elliot Page amelia 3 3.72 2023
author: Elliot Page
name: amelia
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/30
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves:
review:

]]>