Sandy's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 07 Aug 2024 16:14:43 -0700 60 Sandy's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800]]> 36241087 Memoirs,Ěýspanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looks back on the already bygoneĚýworld of his youth. He recounts the history of his aristocratic family and the firstĚýrumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls playing games on the beachesĚýof Saint-Malo, wandering in the woods near his father’s castle in Combourg,Ěýhunting with King Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first heads carried onĚýpikes through the streets of Paris, meeting with George Washington in Philadelphia,Ěýand falling hopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlotte in the smallĚýSuffolk town of Bungay. The volume ends with Chateaubriand’s return to FranceĚýafter eight years of exile in England.

In this new edition (the first unabridged translation of any portion of the ˛Ń±đłľ´Çľ±°ů˛őĚýto be published in more than a century), Chateaubriand emerges as a writer ofĚýgreat wit and clarity, a self-deprecating egoist whose meditations on the meaningĚýof history, memory, and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsy andĚýmemorable gloom.]]> 571 1681371308 Sandy 0 to-read 4.37 1849 Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800
author: François-René de Chateaubriand
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1849
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> Star Child 18263465
“You will be plunged into Earth’s river of time,� his elders tell the Star Child.

“There will be so much for you to learn and so much for you to feel—pleasure and fear, joy and disappointment, sadness and wonder.�

Through spare, artful text and intricate illustrations, Claire A. Nivola celebratesĚýthe cycle of life.ĚýĚý

A Frances Foster Book]]> 40 Claire A. Nivola 0374371822 Sandy 0 to-read 4.38 2014 Star Child
author: Claire A. Nivola
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> Run 80566
Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his ability to keep his children—all his children—safe.]]> 295 Ann Patchett 0061340634 Sandy 4 3.60 2007 Run
author: Ann Patchett
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/11/17
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]]> These Precious Days: Essays 56922687 The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays.ĚýĚý

“Any story that starts will also end.â€� As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.Ěý

At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a suprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.â€� When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanksâ€� short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman—Tom’s brilliant assistant Sooki—with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both.Ěý

A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be.Ěý

From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author’s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark—and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.]]> 320 Ann Patchett 0063092786 Sandy 5 4.40 2021 These Precious Days: Essays
author: Ann Patchett
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/11/15
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]]> The Shipping News 7354
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why E. Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
(back cover)]]> 337 Annie Proulx 0743225422 Sandy 4 3.88 1993 The Shipping News
author: Annie Proulx
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/10/31
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Struggle, Book 1 (The My Struggle Series)]]> 61309983
I en borende prosa som oppsøker det sårbare, det pinlige og det eksistensielt betydningsbærende, blir dette en dypt personlig roman, selvutprøvende og kontroversiell. Et eksistensielt omdreiningspunkt er farens død, et annet er kanskje hovedpersonens debut som forfatter.]]> Karl Ove Knausgård 1664703985 Sandy 5 4.33 2009 My Struggle, Book 1 (The My Struggle Series)
author: Karl Ove KnausgĂĄrd
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/10/13
shelves:
review:

]]> How To Catch A Mole 40718364 The Secret Life of Cows

A life-affirming book about the British countryside, the cycle of nature, solitude and contentment, through the prism of a brilliant new nature writer’s experience working as a traditional mole-catcher, and why he gave it up.

I have been catching moles in gardens and farms for years and I have decided that I am not going to do it any more. Molecatching is a traditional skill that has given me a good life but I am old now and tired of hunting and it has taught me what I needed to learn.

Although common, moles are mysterious: their habits are inscrutable, they are anatomically bizarre, and they live completely alone. Marc Hamer has come closer to them than most, both through his long working life out in the Welsh countryside, and his experiences of rural homelessness as a boy, sleeping in hedgerows.

Over the years, Marc has learned a great deal about these small, velvet creatures who live in the dark beneath us, and the myths that surround them, and his work has also led him to a wise and uplifting acceptance of the inevitable changes that we all face. In this beautiful and meditative book, Marc tells his story and explores what moles, and a life in nature, can tell us about our own humanity and our search for contentment.

How to Catch a Mole is a gem of nature writing, beautifully illustrated by Joe McLaren, which celebrates living peacefully and finding wonder in the world around us.]]> 256 Marc Hamer 1787301249 Sandy 0 to-read 4.17 2019 How To Catch A Mole
author: Marc Hamer
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Ideal Bakery 1161598 160 Donald Hall 0060971665 Sandy 0 to-read 3.71 1987 The Ideal Bakery
author: Donald Hall
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Feast of Love 119290 The Feast of Love is a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined A Midsummer Night's Dream, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones.

In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart Their voices resonate with each other—disparate people joined by the meanderings of love—and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life.]]> 308 Charles Baxter 037570910X Sandy 4 3.71 2000 The Feast of Love
author: Charles Baxter
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/03
date added: 2023/10/03
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]]> How to Stop Time 45152372 "She smiled a soft, troubled smile and I felt the whole world slipping away, and I wanted to slip with it, to go wherever she was going... I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words."

Tom Hazard has just moved back to London, his old home, to settle down and become a high school history teacher. And on his first day at school, he meets a captivating French teacher at his school who seems fascinated by him. But Tom has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. Tom has lived history--performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life.

Unfortunately for Tom, the Albatross Society, the secretive group which protects people like Tom, has one rule: Never fall in love. As painful memories of his past and the erratic behavior of the Society's watchful leader threaten to derail his new life and romance, the one thing he can't have just happens to be the one thing that might save him. Tom will have to decide once and for all whether to remain stuck in the past, or finally begin living in the present.

How to Stop Time tells a love story across the ages--and for the ages--about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live. It is a bighearted, wildly original novel about losing and finding yourself, the inevitability of change, and how with enough time to learn, we just might find happiness.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch.]]> 339 Matt Haig 0525522891 Sandy 4
What I like about his science fiction is that makes you think about time - our present time as well as our past and future. I like his philosophical leanings -- how the author's love of philosophy and history are big parts of his books. The relationships in his books are really what his stories are about - intimacy - questioning how we live life and asking his readers to stop and think about the meaning of life. What is the most important in our lives? It is love and our relationships to those we love. ]]> 3.78 2018 How to Stop Time
author: Matt Haig
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/03
date added: 2023/10/03
shelves:
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Yes, I really enjoyed it until close to the ending, then I was wanting more or maybe less. I would still recommend reading it but I would choose The Humans over this one and also The Midnight Library -- I gave both of those novels 5 stars.

What I like about his science fiction is that makes you think about time - our present time as well as our past and future. I like his philosophical leanings -- how the author's love of philosophy and history are big parts of his books. The relationships in his books are really what his stories are about - intimacy - questioning how we live life and asking his readers to stop and think about the meaning of life. What is the most important in our lives? It is love and our relationships to those we love.
]]> Addicted to Time 123271879 252 Steven Decker Sandy 0 to-read 4.27 Addicted to Time
author: Steven Decker
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.27
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon]]> 2067
For a growing number of people, there is nothing more important than religion. It is an integral part of their marriage, child rearing, and community. In this daring new book, distinguished philosopher Daniel C. Dennett takes a hard look at this phenomenon and asks why. Where does our devotion to God come from and what purpose does it serve? Is religion a blind evolutionary compulsion or a rational choice? In "Breaking the Spell," Dennett argues that the time has come to shed the light of science on the fundamental questions of faith. In a spirited narrative that ranges widely through history, philosophy, and psychology, Dennett explores how organized religion evolved from folk beliefs and why it is such a potent force today. Deftly and lucidly, he contends that the "belief in belief" has fogged any attempt to rationally consider the existence of God and the relationship between divinity and human need.

"Breaking the Spell" is not an antireligious screed but rather an eyeopening exploration of the role that belief plays in our lives, our interactions, and our country. With the gulf between rationalists and adherents of "intelligent design" widening daily, Dennett has written a timely and provocative book that will be read and passionately debated by believers and nonbelievers alike.]]> 464 Daniel C. Dennett 067003472X Sandy 0 to-read 3.89 2006 Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
author: Daniel C. Dennett
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Foundling 59366094
It’s 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age . She’s immediately in awe of her employer—brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel.

Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women’s suffrage. Now, at age forty, Dr. Vogel runs one of the largest and most self-sufficient public asylums for women in the country. Mary deeply admires how dedicated the doctor is to the poor and vulnerable women under her care.

Soon after she’s hired, Mary learns that a girl from her childhood orphanage is one of the inmates. Mary remembers Lillian as a beautiful free spirit with a sometimes-tempestuous side. Could she be mentally disabled? When Lillian begs Mary to help her escape, alleging the asylum is not what it seems, Mary is faced with a terrible choice. Should she trust her troubled friend with whom she shares a dark childhood secret? Mary’s decision triggers a hair-raising sequence of events with life-altering consequences for all.

Inspired by a true story about the author’s grandmother, The Foundling offers a rare look at a shocking chapter of American history. This gripping page-turner will have readers on the edge of their seats right up to the stunning last page…asking themselves, “Did this really happen here ?”]]> 336 Ann Leary 198212038X Sandy 0 to-read 3.81 2022 The Foundling
author: Ann Leary
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> Demon Copperhead 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 Sandy 5
I keep thinking about the character who said people only have so much "juice" and you should not waste it on things that are no matter to you bc it breaks you, makes you sad. The book is incredibly wonderful, sad, painful and beautiful. I related in many ways even though I have never been a foster child or a person troubled with addictions. I think it was more of how deeply the author made you care about the characters, their human essence, birth, life, love and death. Demon was resilient! I was rooting for him the whole way through.]]> 4.46 2022 Demon Copperhead
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/11
date added: 2023/08/13
shelves:
review:
One of the best novels I have ever read. Her writing is so beautiful....and FUNNY. I laughed out loud quite often reading this book. The characters are real, heartbreakingly real. Lee County, Virginia at times reminded me of growing up in Jackson County, Iowa. Beautiful country. Took me a long time to finally leave it behind and move on with my life. Demon says something to the effect that the greatest sin a person can make is leaving their home in Lee County. You are expected to stay. To exist.

I keep thinking about the character who said people only have so much "juice" and you should not waste it on things that are no matter to you bc it breaks you, makes you sad. The book is incredibly wonderful, sad, painful and beautiful. I related in many ways even though I have never been a foster child or a person troubled with addictions. I think it was more of how deeply the author made you care about the characters, their human essence, birth, life, love and death. Demon was resilient! I was rooting for him the whole way through.
]]> Hang the Moon 61272702
Most folk thought Sallie Kincaid was a nobody who’d amount to nothing. Sallie had other plans.

Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie is her father’s daughter, sharp-witted and resourceful, Eddie is his mother’s son, timid and cerebral. When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out.

Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That’s a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger.

You will fall in love with Sallie Kincaid, a feisty and fearless, terrified and damaged young woman who refuses to be corralled.]]> 368 Jeannette Walls 1501117297 Sandy 0 to-read 3.67 2023 Hang the Moon
author: Jeannette Walls
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> Another Country 38474
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.]]> 448 James Baldwin 0141186372 Sandy 5 4.32 1962 Another Country
author: James Baldwin
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/07/27
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]]> <![CDATA[The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)]]> 52263433
With the clues leading back to Holly’s close-knit group of friends, to their rival clique, and to the tangle of relationships that bound them all to the murdered boy, the private underworld of teenage girls turns out to be more mysterious and more dangerous than the detectives imagined.

An alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.]]> 541 Tana French 0143127519 Sandy 3
Another reason (in addition to the unauthentic conversations) I was put off my the book was that it felt (to me) much of the time to be incredibly mean-spirited. This happened through-out the book in various relationships including the two detectives.

I did enjoy it but felt like it was trying too hard. And I will say, this is my first Tana French book. Wondering if I should read more....]]> 3.85 2014 The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)
author: Tana French
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/07/24
shelves:
review:
First off, I am not a mystery reader but my friends loved this book so I read it. The mystery of who done it kept me going. I liked the relationships within the book --lots of them! However, sometimes the conversations between or among the girls just put me off. The author was very witty, very, very witty. I felt that bc of how incredibly witty everyone was, it did not always ring true. At times, I would just skim through several paragraphs trying to get somewhere.

Another reason (in addition to the unauthentic conversations) I was put off my the book was that it felt (to me) much of the time to be incredibly mean-spirited. This happened through-out the book in various relationships including the two detectives.

I did enjoy it but felt like it was trying too hard. And I will say, this is my first Tana French book. Wondering if I should read more....
]]> Dear Edward 45294613
Edward's story captures the attention of the nation, but he struggles to find a place for himself in a world without his family. He continues to feel that a piece of him has been left in the sky, forever tied to the plane and all of his fellow passengers. But then he makes an unexpected discovery--one that will lead him to the answers of some of life's most profound questions: When you've lost everything, how do find yourself? How do you discover your purpose? What does it mean not just to survive, but to truly live?

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.]]> 340 Ann Napolitano 198485478X Sandy 0 to-read 4.03 2020 Dear Edward
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Hello Beautiful 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano Sandy 0 to-read 4.14 2023 Hello Beautiful
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> By the Iowa Sea: A Memoir 12626842
Joe Blair always had big plans. As a child, he would lie on his bed and study the Easy Rider poster stapled to his wall, dreaming of the day he could wear a leather jacket and be free. In his early twenties, he and his new bride jumped on a motorcycle and rode across America to chase their destiny. Fifteen years later, Joe finds himself in Iowa, working as a heating and air conditioning repairman who reluctantly owns a house, two cars, and a dog. His marriage is failing, and his four children—one of whom is severely autistic—are struggling. “Our history,� he writes, “gains more weight day by day. And the future seems more and more unlikely to be anything cool at all.� Joe believes it would take an act of great faith or courage to revive in him the hope and passion that once seemed so easy to come by. What it takes, he discovers, is a flood.

With a genuine narrative voice like Rick Bragg’s and the raw, emotional power of Rafe Yglesias’s novel, A Happy Marriage, this is a wrenching, unsentimental account an ordinary man’s struggle to live an authentic life. Joe Blair lays bare the heartbreaking and hopeful story of a river that became an ocean and of a great love that was lost and then found again, By the Iowa Sea.

]]> 288 Joe Blair 1451636059 Sandy 5 3.53 2012 By the Iowa Sea: A Memoir
author: Joe Blair
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2014/03/29
date added: 2023/07/17
shelves:
review:
Like his style of writing - it was written very honestly and openly. Joe Blair gives the reader deeply felt emotion and curiosity about why we are the way we are. He has a philosophical and personal viewpoint on his own life. It is a book that speaks about love. How everything is part of everything and we are just tiny specks trying our hardest to just live and love. I think my favorite parts of this book were his honest musings about being human.
]]> The Magician's Assistant 16055 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781857028157

Sabine-- twenty years a magician's assistant to her handsome, charming husband-- is suddenly a widow. In the wake of his death, she finds he has left a final trick; a false identity and a family allegedly lost in a tragic accident but now revealed as very much alive and well. Named as heirs in his will, they enter Sabine's life and set her on an adventure of unraveling his secrets, from sunny Los Angeles to the windswept plains of Nebraska, that will work its own sort of magic on her.]]> 357 Ann Patchett Sandy 3 3.68 1997 The Magician's Assistant
author: Ann Patchett
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/10
date added: 2023/07/10
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]]> Fahrenheit 451 13079982 Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.� But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.]]> 194 Ray Bradbury Sandy 4 3.97 1953 Fahrenheit 451
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/07/06
shelves:
review:

]]> Nightbitch 55835474
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. She had imagined - what was it she had imagined? Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.

Instead, quite suddenly, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. Sharper canines. Strange new patches of hair. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice...

With its clear eyes on contemporary womanhood and sharp take on structures of power, Nightbitch is an outrageously original, joyfully subversive read that will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. Addictive enough to be devoured in one sitting, this is an unforgettable novel from a blazing new talent.]]> 256 Rachel Yoder 0385546815 Sandy 0 to-read 3.47 2021 Nightbitch
author: Rachel Yoder
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Humans 16130537
He is disgusted by the way humans look, what they eat, and the wars they witness on the news, and is totally baffled by concepts such as love and family. But as time goes on, he starts to realize there may be more to this weird species than he has been led to believe. He drinks wine, reads Emily Dickinson, listens to Talking Heads, and begins to bond with the family he lives with, in disguise. In picking up the pieces of the professor's shattered personal life, the narrator sees hope and redemption in the humans' imperfections and begins to question the very mission that brought him there--a mission that involves not only thwarting human progress...but murder.]]> 285 Matt Haig 1476727910 Sandy 5 4.05 2013 The Humans
author: Matt Haig
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/25
date added: 2023/06/25
shelves:
review:
I loved it! It took several pages to really get into it and at one point I thought I did not want to continue. But as the story goes on, it is a hard book to put down. It's a book I plan to read again.
]]> Interior Chinatown 44436221 A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration�Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.]]> 288 Charles Yu Sandy 3 3.95 2020 Interior Chinatown
author: Charles Yu
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 3
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date added: 2023/06/25
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]]> All Adults Here 51907346
Astrid’s youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is intentionally pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his adult life according to standards no one else shares. But who gets to decide, so many years later, which long-ago lapses were the ones that mattered? Who decides which apologies really count? It might be that only Astrid’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love the most.

In All Adults Here, Emma Straub’s unique alchemy of wisdom, humor, and insight come together in a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood, whether we like them to or not.]]> 356 Emma Straub 1594634696 Sandy 0 to-read 3.54 2020 All Adults Here
author: Emma Straub
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> This Time Tomorrow 59089704 What if you could take a vacation to your past?

With her celebrated humor, insight, and heart, beloved New York Times bestseller Emma Straub offers her own twist on traditional time travel tropes, and a different kind of love story.

On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice's life isn't terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn't exactly the one she expected. She's happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her 16th birthday. But it isn't just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush, it's her dad: the vital, charming, 40-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything that she would change if she could?]]> 310 Emma Straub 052553900X Sandy 4 3.78 2022 This Time Tomorrow
author: Emma Straub
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/06/25
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review:

]]> A Gentleman in Moscow 34066798 The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers—Now a Paramount+ with Showtime series starring Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Rostov

From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.]]> 462 Amor Towles Sandy 0 currently-reading 4.28 2016 A Gentleman in Moscow
author: Amor Towles
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/19
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> A Girl's Story 53443227 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize–shortlisted author of The Years.

In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season fifty years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another’s will and desire. In the summer of 1958, eighteen-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man’s, and then he moves on, leaving her without a “master,� bereft. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life.]]> 160 Annie Ernaux Sandy 4 4.01 2016 A Girl's Story
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/05/26
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Team Spirit: Memories of Being a Freshman Cheerleader for the Basketball Team]]> 37857792 20 Donna Tartt Sandy 0 to-read 4.36 Team Spirit: Memories of Being a Freshman Cheerleader for the Basketball Team
author: Donna Tartt
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.36
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[A Killing in Iowa: A Daughter's Story of Love and Murder]]> 13096925 42 Rachel. Corbett Sandy 0 to-read 3.16 2011 A Killing in Iowa: A Daughter's Story of Love and Murder
author: Rachel. Corbett
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.16
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin]]> 34068511 320 Rachel Corbett 039335492X Sandy 0 to-read 4.09 2016 You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin
author: Rachel Corbett
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> My Struggle (3 Book Series) 39323821 From Book 1: My Struggle: Book One introduces American readers to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues—death, love, art, fear—and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.]]> Karl Ove Knausgård Sandy 5
These books are more than someone's life story. They are a testament to what it means to be alive in this world. It is rare for anyone to write so intimately, let alone a man. I related to his experiences; I empathized, was engrossed in every small detail. His writing gave me more insight into the human condition. In addition to his musings about his everyday life with his wife and children and his time alone, Knausgaard loves to analyze and reflect (he on numerous phenomena and factual events including aggressive, antisocial elephants, who were traumatized as babies by authorities in South Africa. All of the adult elephants were shot and the little ones were captured and relocated to a different part of the country. As adults these elephants display all of the "symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder".

My favorite books were 1, 2 and 3. My least favorite was his final book as I felt he was in a hurry to just end his philosophic journey into the past and to move on. But I will say I learned a lot about Hitler and I value what I learned. Knausgaard is definitely one of the best writers out there -- I always eagerly looked forward to losing myself in his writing.]]> 4.24 2009 My Struggle (3 Book Series)
author: Karl Ove KnausgĂĄrd
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2019/02/19
date added: 2023/05/16
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review:
This man writes without hesitation. I have never ever read such beautifully written prose before. Knausgaard reveals what most of us keep hidden. These books are very honestly and intimately written about the ordinary, the everyday, but his insight, his depth of examination of his life is extraordinary.

These books are more than someone's life story. They are a testament to what it means to be alive in this world. It is rare for anyone to write so intimately, let alone a man. I related to his experiences; I empathized, was engrossed in every small detail. His writing gave me more insight into the human condition. In addition to his musings about his everyday life with his wife and children and his time alone, Knausgaard loves to analyze and reflect (he on numerous phenomena and factual events including aggressive, antisocial elephants, who were traumatized as babies by authorities in South Africa. All of the adult elephants were shot and the little ones were captured and relocated to a different part of the country. As adults these elephants display all of the "symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder".

My favorite books were 1, 2 and 3. My least favorite was his final book as I felt he was in a hurry to just end his philosophic journey into the past and to move on. But I will say I learned a lot about Hitler and I value what I learned. Knausgaard is definitely one of the best writers out there -- I always eagerly looked forward to losing myself in his writing.
]]> The Position 534821
Crackling with intelligence and humor, The Position is the masterful story of one extraordinary family at the hilarious height of the sexual revolution—and through the thirty-year hangover that followed.

In 1975, Paul and Roz Mellow write a bestselling Joy of Sex -type book that mortifies their four school-aged children and ultimately changes the shape of the family forever. Thirty years later, as the now dispersed family members argue over whether to reissue the book, we follow the complicated lives of each of the grown children and their conflicts in love, work, marriage, parenting, and, of course, sex—all shadowed by the indelible specter of their highly sexualized parents. Insightful, panoramic, and compulsively readable, The Position is an American original.]]> 307 Meg Wolitzer 0743261801 Sandy 4 3.31 2005 The Position
author: Meg Wolitzer
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/05/07
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review:

]]> The Female Persuasion 44564172
Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the women’s movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world. Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greer—madly in love with her boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she can’t quite place—feels her inner world light up. And then, astonishingly, Faith invites Greer to make something out of that sense of purpose, leading Greer down the most exciting path of her life as it winds toward and away from her meant-to-be love story with Cory and the future she’d always imagined.

Charming and wise, knowing and witty, Meg Wolitzer delivers a novel about power and influence, ego and loyalty, womanhood and ambition. At its heart, The Female Persuasion is about the flame we all believe is flickering inside of us, waiting to be seen and fanned by the right person at the right time. It’s a story about the people who guide and the people who follow (and how those roles evolve over time), and the desire within all of us to be pulled into the light.]]> 480 Meg Wolitzer 0399573232 Sandy 0 to-read 3.50 2018 The Female Persuasion
author: Meg Wolitzer
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Midnight Library 52578297
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.

The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren't always what she imagined they'd be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.

Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?]]> 288 Matt Haig 0525559477 Sandy 5 3.96 2020 The Midnight Library
author: Matt Haig
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/29
date added: 2023/04/29
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One of my most favorite stories I have ever read. Lots of philosophical notes. Magical. String Theory record store. I could not stop reading it.
]]> Crying in H Mart 54814676
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band � and meeting the man who would become her husband � her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.

It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.]]> 243 Michelle Zauner 0525657746 Sandy 0 to-read 4.25 2021 Crying in H Mart
author: Michelle Zauner
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (Adrian Mole, #1)]]> 51070 272 Sue Townsend 0060533994 Sandy 4 3.88 1982 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (Adrian Mole, #1)
author: Sue Townsend
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/03/27
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]]> The Years 34355387 WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written� by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I� for the “we� (or “they�, or “one�) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents� generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents� generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we� and impersonal pronouns.”]]> 256 Annie Ernaux Sandy 0 currently-reading 4.23 2008 The Years
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/19
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> ł˘&˛ą±č´Ç˛ő;Ă©±ąĂ©˛Ô±đłľ±đ˛ÔłŮ 819954 130 Annie Ernaux 2070419231 Sandy 0 to-read 4.36 2000 L'Ă©vĂ©nement
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> A Woman's Story 399254
She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she to portray her as the individual she was. She writes, "I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world."]]> 96 Annie Ernaux 1583225757 Sandy 4 4.20 1988 A Woman's Story
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/03/05
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Daddy-Long-Legs (Daddy-Long-Legs, #1)]]> 1499952 Daddy Long-Legs is a 1912 epistolary novel by the American writer Jean Webster. It follows the protagonist, a young girl named Jerusha "Judy" Abbott, through her college years. She writes the letters to her benefactor, a rich man whom she has never seen.]]> 249 Jean Webster Sandy 0 to-read 4.12 1912 Daddy-Long-Legs (Daddy-Long-Legs, #1)
author: Jean Webster
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1912
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> Flowers for Algernon 18373 Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.
Ěý
Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence � a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment appears to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance, until Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie?]]> 311 Daniel Keyes 015603008X Sandy 0 to-read 4.19 1966 Flowers for Algernon
author: Daniel Keyes
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> Their Eyes Were Watching God 37415 238 Zora Neale Hurston 0061120065 Sandy 0 to-read 3.98 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1937
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 14891 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.]]> 496 Betty Smith 0061120073 Sandy 0 to-read 4.29 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
author: Betty Smith
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2)]]> 60526802
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.]]> 190 Cormac McCarthy 0307269000 Sandy 3 3.83 2022 Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2)
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/02/14
shelves:
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]]> Erasure 355862 We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

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

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk -- or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh -- is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.]]> 280 Percival Everett 0786888156 Sandy 0 to-read 4.17 2001 Erasure
author: Percival Everett
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Childhood (The Copenhagen Trilogy #1)]]> 43685219 The first volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, the searing portrait of a woman's journey through love, friendship, ambition and addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers

Tove knows she is a misfit, whose childhood is made for a completely different girl. In her working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, she is enthralled by her wild, red-headed friend Ruth, who initiates her into adult secrets. But Tove cannot reveal her true self to her or to anyone else. For 'long, mysterious words begin to crawl across my soul', and she comes to realize that she has a vocation, something unknowable within her - and that she must one day, painfully but inevitably, leave the narrow street of her childhood behind.

Childhood, the first volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a visceral portrait of girlhood and female friendship, told with lyricism and vivid intensity.]]> 99 Tove Ditlevsen 0241391938 Sandy 5 4.15 1967 Childhood (The Copenhagen Trilogy #1)
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/28
date added: 2023/01/02
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review:

]]> Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 340 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Sandy 4 3.71 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/02
date added: 2023/01/02
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]]> The Trees 56269278 309 Percival Everett 164445064X Sandy 4 4.06 2021 The Trees
author: Percival Everett
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/31
shelves:
review:
Fantastic writer. Loved this book. The only reason I am giving it 4 stars is bc it was a bit confusing. Maybe this is exactly what the author hoped for. I thought we would figure out more by the end of the book than we did. Still, there is so much history in this book about the south - black and white. The conversations were brilliant. Lots of humor in his writing and especially in the conversations. I enjoyed this book tremendously.
]]> Poor Things 72355 Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter - a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of Bella, but his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for Baxter's creation.

The hilarious tale of love and scandal that ensues would be "the whole story" in the hands of a lesser author (which in fact it is, for this account is actually written by Dr. McCandless). For Gray, though, this is only half the story, after which Bella (a.k.a. Victoria McCandless) has her own say in the matter. Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, Poor Things is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking duel between the desires of men and the independence of women, from one of Scotland's most accomplished authors.]]> 318 Alasdair Gray 0747562288 Sandy 0 to-read 3.92 1992 Poor Things
author: Alasdair Gray
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> Rest is Resistance 59988411
From the founder and creator of The Nap Ministry,ĚýRest Is ResistanceĚýis a battle cry, a guidebook, a map for a movement, and a field guide for the weary and hopeful. It is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. With captivating storytelling and practical advice, all delivered in Hersey's lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology, activism, and performance art,ĚýRest Is ResistanceĚýis a call to action and manifesto for those who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of Grind Culture.]]> Tricia Hersey Sandy 0 to-read 4.25 2022 Rest is Resistance
author: Tricia Hersey
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> A Frozen Woman 399260 A Frozen Woman charts Ernaux's teenage awakening, and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is thirty years old, a teacher married to an executive, mother of two infant sons. She looks after their nice apartment, raises her children. And yet, like millions of other women, she has felt her enthusiasm and curiosity, her strength and her happiness, slowly ebb under the weight of her daily routine. The very condition that everyone around her seems to consider normal and admirable for a woman is killing her.

While each of Ernaux's books contain an autobiographical element, A Frozen Woman, one of Ernaux's early works, concentrates the spotlight piercingly on Annie herself. Mixing affection, rage and bitterness, A Frozen Woman shows us Ernaux's developing art when she still relied on traditional narrative, before the shortened form emerged that has since become her trademark.]]> 192 Annie Ernaux Sandy 4 4.06 1981 A Frozen Woman
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1981
rating: 4
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date added: 2022/12/19
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]]> Never Let Me Go 6334
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.]]> 288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 Sandy 5 3.85 2005 Never Let Me Go
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2021/06/12
date added: 2022/11/22
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]]> Shame 399256
"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame , the probing story of the 12 year old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life.

With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.]]> 112 Annie Ernaux 1583220186 Sandy 4 to-read 3.72 1997 Shame
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Used World 15173 It was mid-December in Jonah, Indiana, a place where Fate can be decided by the weather, and a storm was gathering overhead.

So Haven Kimmel, bestselling author of A Girl Named Zippy, prepares us to enter The Used World -- a world where big hearts are frequently broken and sometimes repaired; where the newfangled and the old-fashioned battle it out in daily encounters both large and small; where wondrous things unfold just beneath the surface of everyday life; and where the weather is certainly biblical and might just be prophetic.

Hazel Hunnicutt's Used World Emporium is a sprawling antique store that is "the station at the end of the line for objects that sometimes appeared tricked into visiting there." Hazel, the proprietor, is in her sixties, and it's a toss-up as to whether she's more attached to her mother or her cats. She's also increasingly attached to her two employees: Claudia Modjeski -- freakishly tall, forty-odd years old -- who might finally be undone by the extreme loneliness that's dogged her all of her life; and Rebekah Shook, pushing thirty, still living in her fervently religious father's home, and carrying the child of the man who recently broke her heart. The three women struggle -- separately and together, through relationships, religion, and work -- to find their place in this world. And it turns out that they are bound to each other not only by the past but also by the future, as not one but two babies enter their lives, turning their formerly used world brand-new again.

Astonishing for what it reveals about the human capacity for both grace and mischief, The Used World forms a loose trilogy with Kimmel's two previous novels, The Solace of Leaving Early and Something Rising (Light and Swift). This is a book about all of America by way of a single midwestern town called Jonah, and the actual breathing histories going on as Indiana's stark landscape is transformed by dying small-town centers and proliferating big-box stores and SUVs. It's about generations of deception, anguish, and love, and the idiosyncratic ways spirituality plays out in individual lives. By turns wise and hilarious, tender and fierce, heartrending and inspiring, The Used World charts the many meanings of the place we call home.]]> 320 Haven Kimmel 0743247787 Sandy 3 3.63 2007 The Used World
author: Haven Kimmel
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2007
rating: 3
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date added: 2022/11/18
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]]> Lucy by the Sea (Amgash #4) 60657583
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we're apart--the pain of a beloved daughter's suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.]]> 291 Elizabeth Strout 0593446062 Sandy 0 to-read 3.80 2022 Lucy by the Sea (Amgash #4)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/11/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Observatory Mansions 329326 356 Edward Carey 0375709231 Sandy 4
You can tell the author is a playwright. He sets up each scene and the conversations are more like when you read a play. I also wonder if this book isn't somewhat autobiographical. I kept looking at his author photo and can picture him being Frances , the very eccentric main character in a book of strange characters.

I think one of the reasons we find these characters strange and eccentric is because people tend to hide their weirdness and in this story, no one is hiding their inner sometimes secret worlds. It is well-worth reading especially if you enjoyed the book called Little.
]]> 3.93 2000 Observatory Mansions
author: Edward Carey
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/11/13
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review:
Strange world in the Observatory Mansion. Author goes back and forth in time so sometimes it is hard to keep up with. I liked it and went right through it but liked "Little" a whole lot more.

You can tell the author is a playwright. He sets up each scene and the conversations are more like when you read a play. I also wonder if this book isn't somewhat autobiographical. I kept looking at his author photo and can picture him being Frances , the very eccentric main character in a book of strange characters.

I think one of the reasons we find these characters strange and eccentric is because people tend to hide their weirdness and in this story, no one is hiding their inner sometimes secret worlds. It is well-worth reading especially if you enjoyed the book called Little.

]]> Drop City 24724 497 T. Coraghessan Boyle 0142003808 Sandy 3 3.82 2003 Drop City
author: T. Coraghessan Boyle
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2022/11/13
date added: 2022/11/13
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It is a pretty male-centric book but I realize it was about the 1960s and 70s so it would be.
]]> Little 38649806
In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and... at the wax museum, heads are what they do.

In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel—a story of art, class, determination, and how we hold on to what we love.]]> 448 Edward Carey 0525534326 Sandy 5
Like a fairy tale in some ways -- I kept thinking of the wicked step mother in Cinderella. The tiny sketches in the book were exquisite. Still seeing them in my head many days after reading the book. Definitely contributed to how much I enjoyed this book.]]> 3.99 2018 Little
author: Edward Carey
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/17
date added: 2022/10/19
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My! So beautifully written! Love reading books written in the first person. Could not wait to read it every night... I always looked forward to it. Knew nothing much about the French Revolution and I am not a history person but was so intrigued with the story that I spent quite a bit of time learning more about this time in France -- lots of heads on pikes.

Like a fairy tale in some ways -- I kept thinking of the wicked step mother in Cinderella. The tiny sketches in the book were exquisite. Still seeing them in my head many days after reading the book. Definitely contributed to how much I enjoyed this book.
]]> The Things We Cannot Say 40899464
Since she was nine years old, Alina Dziak knew she would marry her best friend, Tomasz. Now fifteen and engaged, Alina is unconcerned by reports of Nazi soldiers at the Polish border, believing her neighbors that they pose no real threat, and dreams instead of the day Tomasz returns from college in Warsaw so they can be married. But little by little, injustice by brutal injustice, the Nazi occupation takes hold, and Alina’s tiny rural village, its families, are divided by fear and hate. Then, as the fabric of their lives is slowly picked apart, Tomasz disappears. Where Alina used to measure time between visits from her beloved, now she measures the spaces between hope and despair, waiting for word from Tomasz and avoiding the attentions of the soldiers who patrol her parents� farm. But for now, even deafening silence is preferable to grief.

Slipping between Nazi-occupied Poland and the frenetic pace of modern life, Kelly Rimmer creates an emotional and finely wrought narrative that weaves together two women’s stories into a tapestry of perseverance, loyalty, love and honor. The Things We Cannot Say is an unshakable reminder of the devastation when truth is silenced…and how it can take a lifetime to find our voice before we learn to trust it.]]> 448 Kelly Rimmer 1525831518 Sandy 0 to-read 4.51 2019 The Things We Cannot Say
author: Kelly Rimmer
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/09/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> Rabbit Cake 30304223 332 Annie Hartnett 194104056X Sandy 0 to-read 3.95 2017 Rabbit Cake
author: Annie Hartnett
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/08/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over]]> 37774050
Old in Art School represents an ongoing exploration of such questions, one that ultimately honors curiosity, openness, and joy—the joy of embracing creativity, dreams, the importance of hard work, and the stubborn determination of your own value. Nell Irvin Painter's journey is filled with surprises, even as she brings to bear the incisiveness of her insights from two careers, which combine in new ways even as they take very different approaches—one searching for facts and cohesion, the other seeking the opposite. She travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, such as Alice Neel, Faith Ringgold, or Maira Kalman, even as she comes to understand how they are undervalued; and struggles with the ever-changing balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived.]]> 331 Nell Irvin Painter 1640090614 Sandy 0 to-read 3.46 2018 Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
author: Nell Irvin Painter
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Sense of an Ending 10746542 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.

This intense novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about - until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes's oeuvre.]]> 150 Julian Barnes 0224094157 Sandy 0 to-read 3.73 2011 The Sense of an Ending
author: Julian Barnes
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> A Time for Everything 6705926 In the sixteenth century, Antinous Bellori, a boy of eleven, is lost in a dark forest and stumbles upon two glowing beings, one carrying a spear, the other a flaming torch . . . This event is decisive in Bellori’s life, and he thereafter devotes himself to the pursuit and study of angels, the intermediaries of the divine. Beginning in the Garden of Eden and soaring through to the present, A Time for Everything reimagines pivotal encounters between humans and angels: the glow of the cherubim watching over Eden; the profound love between Cain and Abel despite their differences; Lot’s shame in Sodom; Noah’s isolation before the flood; Ezekiel tied to his bed, prophesying ferociously; the death of Christ; and the emergence of sensual, mischievous cherubs in the seventeenth century. Alighting upon these dramatic scenes � from the Bible and beyond � Knausgaard’s imagination takes flight: the result is a dazzling display of storytelling at its majestic, spellbinding best. Incorporating and challenging tradition, legend, and the Apocrypha, these penetrating glimpses hazard chilling questions: can the nature of the divine undergo change, and can the immortal perish?

]]> 499 Karl Ove KnausgĂĄrd 098003308X Sandy 0 to-read 4.15 2004 A Time for Everything
author: Karl Ove KnausgĂĄrd
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/08/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Youth 15836839
Forced to leave school early, Tove embarks on a chequered career in a string of low-paid, menial jobs. But she is hungry: for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As Europe slides into war, she must navigate exploitative bosses, a Nazi landlady and unwelcome sexual encounters on the road to hard-won independence. Yet she remains ruthlessly determined in the pursuit of her poetic vocation - until at last the miracle she has always dreamed of appears to be within reach.

Youth, the second volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a strikingly honest and immersive portrait of adolescence, filled with biting humour, vulnerability and poeticism.]]> 132 Tove Ditlevsen 0241405556 Sandy 5 4.23 1967 Youth
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1967
rating: 5
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Outstanding Writer/Poet. Loved every page.
]]> All the Light We Cannot See 18143977
In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here]]> 544 Anthony Doerr 1476746583 Sandy 4 4.31 2014 All the Light We Cannot See
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/16
date added: 2022/08/16
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]]> <![CDATA[Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole]]> 58734811 In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon Quiet reveals the power of a bittersweet outlook on life, and why we’ve been so blind to its value.

With Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality, and love.

Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. A song in a minor key, an elegiac poem, or even a touching television commercial all can bring us to this sublime, even holy, state of mind—and, ultimately, to greater kinship with our fellow humans.

But bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a way of being, a storied heritage. Our artistic and spiritual traditions—amplified by recent scientific and management research—teach us its power.

Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain. If we don’t acknowledge our own sorrows and longings, she says, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other. And we can learn to transform our own pain into creativity, transcendence, and connection.

At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.]]> 310 Susan Cain 0451499786 Sandy 0 to-read 3.96 2022 Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole
author: Susan Cain
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/07/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522131 Sandy 0 to-read 3.62 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/07/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> Cloud Cuckoo Land 56783258 When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.

How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.

Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.

Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?

Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.

Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.]]> 626 Anthony Doerr 1982168439 Sandy 0 to-read 4.24 2021 Cloud Cuckoo Land
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/07/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> Cokie: A Life Well Lived 56922582 272 Steven V. Roberts 0062851470 Sandy 0 to-read 4.13 2021 Cokie: A Life Well Lived
author: Steven V. Roberts
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/07/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> Amy and Isabelle 167216
In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. That they eat, sleep, and work side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Falls—a location fans of Strout will recognize from her critically acclaimed novel, The Burgess Boys—only increases the tension. And just when it appears things can't get any worse, Amy's sexuality begins to unfold, causing a vast and icy rift between mother and daughter that will remain unbridgeable unless Isabelle examines her own secretive and shameful past.
A Reader's Guide is included in the paperback edition of this powerful first novel by the author who brought Olive Kitteridge to millions of readers.]]> 304 Elizabeth Strout 0375705198 Sandy 4 3.82 1998 Amy and Isabelle
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1998
rating: 4
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date added: 2022/06/22
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]]> Girlhood 53138199 A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society.

In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them.

When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defenses she’d developed over years of trying to meet others� expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.

Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.

Written with Febos� characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.]]> 320 Melissa Febos 1635572525 Sandy 4 4.23 2021 Girlhood
author: Melissa Febos
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/22
date added: 2022/06/22
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]]> Tenth of December 13641208 Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet.

In the taut opening, "Victory Lap," a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In "Home," a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antique store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders' signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.

Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.

Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov's dictum that art should "prepare us for tenderness."]]> 251 George Saunders 0812993802 Sandy 4 3.98 2013 Tenth of December
author: George Saunders
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/09
date added: 2022/06/09
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]]> The Secret History 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Sandy 4 4.17 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/01
date added: 2022/04/06
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Copenhagen Trilogy (The Copenhagen Trilogy, #1-3)]]> 53317528 Called a masterpiece by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing

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

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

Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class, female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors, with Tove fever gripping readers.]]> 371 Tove Ditlevsen 0374602395 Sandy 5 4.36 1967 The Copenhagen Trilogy (The Copenhagen Trilogy, #1-3)
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/27
date added: 2022/03/07
shelves:
review:
Read the Trilogy. Will read these fascinating and well-written books again. Sometimes I felt like I was reading my own diary.
]]> The Tortilla Curtain 24731 355 T. Coraghessan Boyle Sandy 4 3.65 1995 The Tortilla Curtain
author: T. Coraghessan Boyle
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/02/22
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]]> Running with Scissors 242006 336 Augusten Burroughs 031242227X Sandy 2 3.77 2002 Running with Scissors
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2002
rating: 2
read at: 2022/01/26
date added: 2022/01/26
shelves:
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]]> Oh William! (Amgash, #3) 56294820
So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.� There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart.

At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,� Lucy says: “the many things we do not know until it is too late.”]]> 240 Elizabeth Strout 0812989430 Sandy 4 3.79 2021 Oh William! (Amgash, #3)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/17
date added: 2022/01/17
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]]> Shuggie Bain 52741293 Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings.

Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good--her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits--all the family has to live on--on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs.

Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie.

A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Edouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell.]]> 430 Douglas Stuart 0802148042 Sandy 4 4.29 2020 Shuggie Bain
author: Douglas Stuart
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/15
date added: 2022/01/15
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]]> The Sentence 56816904
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written]]> 387 Louise Erdrich 006267112X Sandy 0 to-read 3.92 2021 The Sentence
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Solace of Leaving Early 534274
What draws these difficult—if not impossible—people together are two wounded little girls who call themselves Immaculata and Epiphany. They are the daughters of Langston’s childhood friend and the witnesses to her murder. And their need for love is so urgent that neither Langston nor Amos can resist it, though they do their best to resist each other. Deftly walking the tightrope between tragedy and comedy, The Solace of Leaving Early is a joyous story about finding one’s better self through accepting the shortcomings of others.]]> 288 Haven Kimmel 1400033349 Sandy 4 3.79 2002 The Solace of Leaving Early
author: Haven Kimmel
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> The Haunting of Hill House 89717 182 Shirley Jackson 0143039989 Sandy 3 3.85 1959 The Haunting of Hill House
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1959
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/22
date added: 2021/11/22
shelves:
review:
Interesting. Not scary. Weird. Well-written. Sort of enjoyed it and prefer the author's short stories.
]]> <![CDATA[Olive Kitteridge / Olive Again]]> 49049275 Please Note That The Following Individual Books As Per Original ISBN and Cover Image In this Listing shall be Dispatched Collectively:

Elizabeth Strout Collection 2 Books Set:

Olive Kitteridge:
Olive Kitteridge might be described by some as a battle axe or as brilliantly pushy, by others as the kindest person they had ever met. Olive herself has always been certain that she is 100% correct about everything - although, lately, her certitude has been shaken. This indomitable character appears at the centre of these narratives that comprise Olive Kitteridge. In each of them, we watch Olive, a retired schoolteacher, as she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life and the lives of those around her - always with brutal honesty, if sometimes painfully.

Olive Again [Hardcover]:
Olive, Again follows the blunt, contradictory yet deeply loveable Olive Kitteridge as she grows older, navigating the second half of her life as she comes to terms with the changes - sometimes welcome, sometimes not - in her own existence and in those around her. Olive adjusts to her new life with her second husband, challenges her estranged son and his family to accept him, experiences loss and loneliness, witnesses the triumphs and heartbreaks of her friends and neighbours in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine - and, finally, opens herself to new lessons about life.]]> 100 Elizabeth Strout 9123925825 Sandy 5 4.33 Olive Kitteridge / Olive Again
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/11/07
shelves:
review:

]]> The Burgess Boys 15823461
With a rare combination of brilliant storytelling, exquisite prose, and remarkable insight into character, Elizabeth Strout has brought to life two deeply human protagonists whose struggles and triumphs will resonate with readers long after they turn the final page. Tender, tough-minded, loving, and deeply illuminating about the ties that bind us to family and home, The Burgess Boys is Elizabeth Strout's newest and perhaps most astonishing work of literary art.]]> 320 Elizabeth Strout 1400067685 Sandy 5 3.58 2013 The Burgess Boys
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/07
date added: 2021/11/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)]]> 46756 Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.]]> 389 Margaret Atwood Sandy 3 4.01 2003 Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/10/15
shelves:
review:

]]> Pedagogy of the Oppressed 72657 Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm. With a substantive new introduction on Freire's life and the remarkable impact of this book by writer and Freire confidant and authority Donaldo Macedo, this anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.]]> 183 Paulo Freire 0826412769 Sandy 0 to-read 4.30 1968 Pedagogy of the Oppressed
author: Paulo Freire
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Einstein’s Dreams 14376 Einstein's Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.

Now translated into thirty languages, Einstein's Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes, it explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.]]> 140 Alan Lightman 140007780X Sandy 4 4.08 1993 Einstein’s Dreams
author: Alan Lightman
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/10/12
shelves:
review:

]]> The Stories of John Cheever 11686
Goodbye, my brother --
The common day --
The enormous radio --
O city of broken dreams --
The Hartleys --
The Sutton Place story --
The summer farmer --
Torch song --
The pot of gold --
Clancy in the Tower of Babel --
Christmas is a sad season for the poor --
The season of divorce --
The chaste Clarissa --
The cure --
The superintendent --
The children --
The sorrows of gin --
O youth and beauty! --
The day the pig fell into the well --
The five-forty-eight --
Just one more time --
The housebreaker of Shady Hill --
The bus to St. James's --
The worm in the apple --
The trouble of Marcie Flint --
The bella lingua --
The Wrysons --
The country husband --
The duchess --
The scarlet moving van --
Just tell me who it was --
Brimmer --
The golden age --
The lowboy --
The music teacher --
A woman without a country --
The death of Justina --
Clementina --
Boy in Rome --
A miscellany of characters that will not appear --
The chimera --
The seaside houses --
The angel of the bridge --
The brigadier and the golf widow --
A vision of the world --
Reunion --
An educated American woman --
Metamorphoses --
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin --
Montraldo --
The ocean --
Marito in cittĂ  --
The geometry of love --
The swimmer --
The world of apples --
Another story --
Percy --
The fourth alarm --
Artemis, the honest well digger --
Three stories --
The jewels of the Cabots.]]> 693 John Cheever 0375724427 Sandy 0 to-read 4.27 1978 The Stories of John Cheever
author: John Cheever
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> How High? � That High 57314198 The Paris Review), deliver moments of extraordinary beauty and wisdom.]]> 128 Diane Williams 1641293063 Sandy 0 to-read 2.80 2021 How High? — That High
author: Diane Williams
name: Sandy
average rating: 2.80
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate: Stories]]> 525892 0 Diane Williams 0888783000 Sandy 0 to-read 4.21 1990 This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate: Stories
author: Diane Williams
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Under the Whispering Door 53205888 Welcome to Charon's Crossing.
The tea is hot, the scones are fresh, and the dead are just passing through.

When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own funeral, Wallace begins to suspect he might be dead.

And when Hugo, the owner of a peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace decides he’s definitely dead.

But even in death he’s not ready to abandon the life he barely lived, so when Wallace is given one week to cross over, he sets about living a lifetime in seven days.

Hilarious, haunting, and kind, Under the Whispering Door is an uplifting story about a life spent at the office and a death spent building a home.]]> 376 T.J. Klune 1250217342 Sandy 0 to-read 4.11 2021 Under the Whispering Door
author: T.J. Klune
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/10/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Love of a Good Woman 111151 **Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature**

Alice Munro has a genius for entering the lives of ordinary people and capturing the passions and contradictions that lie just below the surface. In this brilliant new collection she takes mainly the lives of women - unruly, ungovernable, unpredictable, unexpected, funny, sexy and completely recognisable - and brings their hidden desires bubbling to the surface. The love of a good woman is not as pure and virtuous as it seems: as in her title story it can be needy and murderous. Here are women behaving badly, leaving husbands and children, running off with unsuitable lovers, pushing everyday life to the limits, and if they don't behave badly, they think surprising and disturbing thoughts.]]> 352 Alice Munro 0099287862 Sandy 0 to-read 4.07 1998 The Love of a Good Woman
author: Alice Munro
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Olive, Again (Olive Kitteridge, #2)]]> 43984883 San Francisco Chronicle).ĚýTheĚýNew YorkerĚýhas said that Elizabeth Strout “animates the ordinary with an astonishing force,â€� and she has never done so more clearly than in these pages, where the iconic Olive struggles to understand not only herself and her own life but the lives of those around her in the town of Crosby, Maine. Whether with a teenager coming to terms with the loss of her father, a young woman about to give birth during a hilariously inopportune moment, a nurse who confesses a secret high school crush, or a lawyer who struggles with an inheritance she does not want to accept, the unforgettable Olive will continue to startle us, to move us, and to inspireĚýus—in Strout’s words—“to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”]]> 289 Elizabeth Strout 0812996542 Sandy 5
Her writing style is superb in my world. She does not over-write as some of the authors I read, do. When writers over-write, I tend to skim because I do not need nearly as much description as some like prefer to write. Strout is clear. Focused. Sharp. Smart. Authentic. She is an observer of small-town culture and she definitely gets it. She goes deep into trying to understand the human condition -- why we do what we do, why we feel what we do and are who we are.

Her Olive books are like written like many short fragments, chapters which I really enjoyed. A few of her books like My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible read a lot like memoirs. I love her writing style and the way she tells her stories.

NPR has a quote on the back of one of her books I like: "Stout is a master of the story cycle form.. She paints cumulative portraits of the heartache and soul of small-town America." And this might be a big part of why I never want her books to end... because I grew up on a farm in Iowa, went to a tiny public school K-12 in a tiny small-town American town. She is the real deal.

Another author I really love is Alice Munro. And in reading Strout's books, I found out that Strout is a big fan of her stories as well. Ah! ]]> 4.06 2019 Olive, Again (Olive Kitteridge, #2)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2021/04/07
date added: 2021/09/21
shelves:
review:
Elizabeth Strout is my favorite contemporary author. When I first read Olive Kitteridge several years ago, I liked it very much but did not love it. When Olive, Again came out, I decided to read Olive Kitteridge one more time. This time, I loved it and I think I may love Olive, Again even more. After those two books, I began reading every book of hers I could find.

Her writing style is superb in my world. She does not over-write as some of the authors I read, do. When writers over-write, I tend to skim because I do not need nearly as much description as some like prefer to write. Strout is clear. Focused. Sharp. Smart. Authentic. She is an observer of small-town culture and she definitely gets it. She goes deep into trying to understand the human condition -- why we do what we do, why we feel what we do and are who we are.

Her Olive books are like written like many short fragments, chapters which I really enjoyed. A few of her books like My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible read a lot like memoirs. I love her writing style and the way she tells her stories.

NPR has a quote on the back of one of her books I like: "Stout is a master of the story cycle form.. She paints cumulative portraits of the heartache and soul of small-town America." And this might be a big part of why I never want her books to end... because I grew up on a farm in Iowa, went to a tiny public school K-12 in a tiny small-town American town. She is the real deal.

Another author I really love is Alice Munro. And in reading Strout's books, I found out that Strout is a big fan of her stories as well. Ah!
]]> What We Keep 226858 Talk Before Sleep and The Pull of the Moon, a reunion between two sisters and their mother reveals how the secrets and complexities of the past have shaped the lives of the women in a family.

Ginny Young is on a plane, en route to see her mother, whom she hasn't seen or spoken to for thirty-five years. She thinks back to the summer of 1958, when she and her sister, Sharla, were young girls. At that time, a series of dramatic events--beginning with the arrival of a mysterious and sensual next-door neighbor--divided the family, separating the sisters from their mother. Moving back and forth in time between the girl she once was and the woman she's become, Ginny at last confronts painful choices that occur in almost any woman's life, and learns surprising truths about the people she thought she knew best.

Emotional honesty and a true understanding of people and relationships are combined in this moving and deeply satisfying new book by the novelist who "writes with humor and a big heart about resilience, love and hope. And the transcendence that redeems" (Andre Dubus).]]> 304 Elizabeth Berg 0345423291 Sandy 0 to-read 3.90 1998 What We Keep
author: Elizabeth Berg
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Range of Motion 237232 260 Elizabeth Berg 0099451735 Sandy 4 3.93 1994 Range of Motion
author: Elizabeth Berg
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/10
date added: 2021/09/21
shelves:
review:

]]> All About Love: New Visions 218042 “The word “love� is most often defined as a noun, yet� we would all love better if we used it as a verb,� writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a society bereft with lovelessness.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explore the question “What is love?�, her answers strike at both the mind and heart. In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for the individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the �100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.� All About Love is a powerful affirmation of just how profoundly she can.

Librarian note: There is an alternate cover edition of this book here.]]> 238 bell hooks 0060959479 Sandy 5 3.89 1999 All About Love: New Visions
author: bell hooks
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/09/19
shelves:
review:

]]> The Little Friend 775346
The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents� yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet - unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss.]]> 624 Donna Tartt 1400031699 Sandy 4 3.47 2002 The Little Friend
author: Donna Tartt
name: Sandy
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/19
date added: 2021/09/19
shelves:
review:
I read Goldfinch and really enjoyed it especially its philosophical bent. The Little Friend does not include such insights but offers fascinating segments about racism in Mississippi, its culture and more. I liked how Harriet was in between. As a 12 year old between adults and children and thinking doing differently from the generation ahead of her and Also the generation before as in her grandmother Edie and the Aunts and the housekeeper Ida. Lots of layers help form Harriet. Also thought of how fiercely independent and private she was. Harriet the Spy!!! My trouble with the book is that the author over~writes. She absolutely is in love with long descriptive sentences. Very poetic I think. But I skimmed bc For me these descriptions went overboard. All in all I recommend it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2)]]> 42975172 The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her--freedom, prison or death.

With The Testaments, the wait is over.

Margaret Atwood's sequel picks up the story more than fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.

In this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades.

"Dear Readers: Everything you've ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we've been living in." --Margaret Atwood

An alternate cover edition of ISBN 978-0385543781 can be found here.]]> 422 Margaret Atwood Sandy 5 4.16 2019 The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2)
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/08/31
shelves:
review:

]]> The Lottery 6219656
“The Lottery� stands out as one of the most famous short stories in American literary history. Originally published in The New Yorker, the author immediately began receiving letters from readers who demanded an explanation of the story’s meaning. “The Lottery� has been adapted for stage, television, radio and film.
]]> 30 Shirley Jackson 1563127873 Sandy 5 to-read 4.08 1948 The Lottery
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Sandy
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1948
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/08/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>