en-US Wed, 16 Apr 2025 22:52:01 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 17974984 The bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake returns with a wondrous collection of dreamy, strange, and magical stories.

Truly beloved by readers and critics alike, Aimee Bender has become known as something of an enchantress whose lush prose is “moving, fanciful, and gorgeously strange� (People), “richly imagined and bittersweet� (Vanity Fair), and “full of provocative ideas� (The Boston Globe). In her deft hands, “relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities� (The Wall Street Journal).

In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex, and family—while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. Two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds.

In these deeply resonant stories—evocative, funny, beautiful, and sad—we see ourselves reflected as if in a funhouse mirror. Aimee Bender has once again proven herself to be among the most imaginative, exciting, and intelligent writers of our time.]]> 240 Aimee Bender 0385534906 Meg 0 currently-reading 3.79 2013
author: Aimee Bender
name: Meg
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2013
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]]> 6556578 New York Times Bestselling author of Running With Scissors comes the story of one man trying to out-drink his memories, outlast his demons, and outrun his past.

"I was addicted to 'Bewitched' as a kid. I worshipped Darren Stevens the First. When he'd come home from work and Samantha would say, 'Darren, would you like me to fix you a drink?' He'd always rest his briefcase on the table below the mirror in the foyer, wipe his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief and say, 'Better make it a double.'"(from Chapter Two)

You may not know it, but you've met Augusten Burroughs. You've seen him on the street, in bars, on the subway, at a twentysomething guy, nice suit, works in advertising. Regular. Ordinary. But when the ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the drain by having twelve; when the ordinary person went home at midnight, Augusten never went home at all. Loud, distracting ties, automated wake-up calls and cologne on the tongue could only hide so much for so long. At the request (well, it wasn't really a request) of his employers, Augusten lands in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Robert Downey Jr. are immediately dashed by grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. But when Augusten is forced to examine himself, something actually starts to click and that's when he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. Because when his thirty days are up, he has to return to his same drunken Manhattan life--and live it sober. What follows is a memoir that's as moving as it is funny, as heartbreaking as it is true. Dry is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power.]]> 320 Augusten Burroughs 1429967803 Meg 4 4.21 2003
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Meg
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/09/20
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]]> 210040939 A New York Times Nonfiction Book to Read this Fall
A People magazine Best Book of September
The Week Five Riveting Books to Take You Through September

Mary Trump grew up in a family divided by its patriarch’s relentless drive for money and power. The daughter of Freddy Trump, son of wealthy real-estate developer Fred Trump, and Linda Clapp, a flight attendant from a working-class family, Mary lived in the shadow of Freddy’s humiliation at the hands of his father.

Fred Trump embodied the ethos of the zero-sum game, and among his five children there could only be one winner. That was supposed to be Freddy, his namesake, but Fred found him wanting—too sensitive, too kind, too interested in pursuits beyond the realm of the real-estate empire he was meant to inherit. In Donald, Fred found a kindred spirit, a “killer,� who would stop at nothing to get his way. Even after Freddy’s short-lived career as a professional pilot for TWA came to an end, he never stopped trying to gain his father’s approval.

In Who Could Ever Love You, Mary Trump brings readers inside the twisted family whose patriarch ignored, froze out, and eventually destroyed his own. Freddy Trump’s descent into alcoholism and illness, along with Linda’s suffering after their divorce, left Mary dangerously vulnerable as a young girl. Inadequately and only conditionally loved, there were no adults in her life except for the father she loved but lost before she could know him; and a mother abandoned by her ex-husband’s rich and powerful family who demanded her loyalty but left her with nothing.

With searching insight, poignant detail, and unsparing prose, Mary Trump reveals the cold, selfish cruelty that has come to define the Trump family thanks in large part to her uncle, whose malignant ambition has riven America and threatens the world.]]> 288 Mary L. Trump 1250278481 Meg 0 currently-reading 4.13 2024
author: Mary L. Trump
name: Meg
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
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]]> 50607773 The first novel in ten years from the author of the beloved New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake, a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the world

On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see.
Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents -- her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact -- she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world.
As Francie conjures her past and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is, What do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood?
Told in the lush, lilting prose that led the San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language," The Butterfly Lampshade is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child.]]> 304 Aimee Bender 0385534876 Meg 0 currently-reading 3.54 2020
author: Aimee Bender
name: Meg
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 85918176 0 Aimee Bender Meg 0 to-read 4.00
author: Aimee Bender
name: Meg
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 12425845 The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise. Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can’t stop doing is She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar.BONUS This edition includes an excerpt from Aimee Bender's The Color Master.]]> 258 Aimee Bender Meg 5 3.82 2000
author: Aimee Bender
name: Meg
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2000
rating: 5
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]]> 46205 The New York Times Book Review
Aimee Bender s Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman's children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.]]> 224 Aimee Bender 0385720971 Meg 0 to-read 4.02 2005
author: Aimee Bender
name: Meg
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> 7850
Contents:
The rememberer --
Call my name --
What you left in the ditch --
The bowl --
Marzipan --
Quiet please --
Skinless --
Fugue --
Drunken Mimi --
Fell this girl --
The healer --
Loser --
Legacy --
Dreaming in Polish --
The ring --
The girl in the flamable skirt.]]> 192 Aimee Bender 0385492162 Meg 0 to-read 3.90 1998
author: Aimee Bender
name: Meg
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1998
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]]> 7048800
On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents� attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.

The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender’s place as “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language� (San Francisco Chronicle).]]> 292 Aimee Bender 0385501129 Meg 5 3.24 2010
author: Aimee Bender
name: Meg
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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]]> 74865477 In this immersive, spell-binding memoir, an acclaimed screenwriter tells the story of her childhood growing up with the infamous Lyman Family cult—and the complicated and unexpected pain of leaving the only home she’d ever known

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

On January 5, 1975, the world was supposed to end. Under strict instructions, six-year-old Guinevere Turner put on her best dress, grabbed her favorite toy, and waited with the rest of her community for salvation—a spaceship that would take them to live on Venus. But the spaceship never came.

Guinevere did not understand that her family was a cult. She spent most of her days on a compound in Kansas, living apart from her mother with dozens of other children who worked in the sorghum fields and roved freely through the surrounding pastures, eating mulberries and tending to farm animals. But there was a dark side to this bucolic existence. Guinevere was part of the Lyman Family, a secluded cult spearheaded by Mel Lyman, a self-proclaimed savior, committed to isolation from a World he declared had lost its way. When Guinevere caught the attention of Jessie, the woman everyone in the Family called the Queen, her status was elevated—suddenly she was traveling with the inner circle among communities in Los Angeles, Boston, and Martha’s Vineyard.

But before long, the life Guinevere had known ended. Her mother, from whom she had been separated since age three, left the Family with another disgraced member, and Guinevere and her four-year-old sister were forced to leave with them. Traveling outside the bounds of her cloistered existence, Guinevere was thrust into public school for the first time, a stranger in a strange land wearing homemade clothes, and clueless about social codes. Now out in the World she’d been raised to believe was evil, she faced challenges and horrors she couldn’t have imagined.

Drawing from the diaries that she kept throughout her youth, Guinevere Turner’s memoir is an intimate and heart-wrenching chronicle of a childhood touched with extraordinary beauty and unfathomable ugliness, the ache of yearning to return to a lost home—and the slow realization of how harmful that place really was.]]> 323 Guinevere Turner 0593237609 Meg 5 3.89 2023
author: Guinevere Turner
name: Meg
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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]]> 24937 Wicked

Wicked: The Grimmerie is the behind-the-scenes story of the hit that has captivated Broadway—and now the world. Designed to resemble the ancient book of spells that changes Ozian history, Wicked: The Grimmerie includes profiles of the cast and creative team, the complete, illustrated lyrics to all the songs, and more than 200 full-color photographs. Packed with thrillifying details, Wicked: The Grimmerie is also full of bonus features that will delight fans of the show, from an Ozian Glossararium and an Oz travelogue to a step-by-step look at how Elphaba gets green. No need for innuendo or outuendo: This is a must-have for Wicked fans of all ages.]]> 191 David Cote 1401308201 Meg 0 4.19 2005
author: David Cote
name: Meg
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> 61419634 240 Nancy Schoenberger 0062947176 Meg 0 to-read 3.92 2023
author: Nancy Schoenberger
name: Meg
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/13
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]]> 19204851 367 David Cassidy Meg 0 4.07 2007
author: David Cassidy
name: Meg
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> 60965426 From the legendary music producer, a master at helping people connect with the wellsprings of their creativity, comes a beautifully crafted book many years in the making that offers that same deep wisdom to all of us.

"A gorgeous and inspiring work of art on creation, creativity, the work of the artist. It will gladden the hearts of writers and artists everywhere, and get them working again with a new sense of meaning and direction. A stunning accomplishment." --Anne Lamott

"I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be." --Rick Rubin

Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn't, he has learned that being an artist isn't about your specific output, it's about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone's life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities.

The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distills the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime's work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments--and lifetimes--of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.]]> 406 Rick Rubin 0593652886 Meg 0 to-read 4.00 2023
author: Rick Rubin
name: Meg
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 55857390
This latest book of essays from legendary theatre director Anne Bogart, considers the creation of resonance in the artistic endeavour, with a focus on the performing arts.

The word 'resonance' comes from the Latin meaning to 're-sound' or 'sound together'. From music to physics, resonance is a common thread that evokes a response and, in general, is understood as a quality that makes something personally meaningful and valuable.

For Bogart, curiosity is a key personal quality to be nurtured throughout life and that very same curiosity, as an artist, thinker and human being.

Creating pathways between performance theory, art history, neuroscience, music, architecture and the visual arts, and consistently forging new thought-paths, the writing draws upon Anne Bogart's own life and artistic journeys to illuminate potent philosophical ideas.

Woven with personal anecdotes, stories and reflections, this is a book that will be of interest to any theatre artist and anyone who reflects on the power of the arts, of theatre-making and what it means to be engaged in the artistic process.]]> 184 Anne Bogart 1350155888 Meg 0 to-read 4.17
author: Anne Bogart
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]]> 10100889 Psychological Subtleties 2 picks up where the first book ends. Whereas Psychological Subtleties was not a book of tricks and routines, this book contains complete routines from professionals who understood the value and impact of those ideas in the first book.]]> 206 Banachek 0970643829 Meg 0 to-read 4.00 2007
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name: Meg
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]]> 258863 The routines encompass 12 major Effects with Billets and Pellets; Envelope Necromancy; Publicity Effects; Miracle Slate Routines; Dead or Alive; Money Mentalism; Book Tests; Blindfold Reading; Thought Foretold; Mentalism with Cards; Miscellaneous Mental Masterpieces; and Psychic Codes.
Theodore Annemann, through his own performances and editorship of Jinx magazine, probably did more than anyone else to popularize this branch of entertainment. Now, his extensive knowledge, experience, and know-how are at your fingertips in this comprehensive collection. Here are the closely guarded tricks of the trade behind such astonishing effects as Pseudo-Psychometry , one of the greatest one-man psychic effects ever achieved; Who Killed Mr. X? � a classic routine that combines both magic and mind reading with a triple mystery and a novel presentation; and The Swami Test , a demonstration of prophecy first popularized around 1920. Annemann himself came up with some 16 variations on this popular and much-practiced effect. My Own Swami Test is one of his best.
These and scores of other crowd-pleasers are here, each thoroughly explained and diagrammed, with insiders' tips on techniques, staging, patter, plants and confederates, diversions � everything you need to make any trick a foolproof success. No special equipment is required; just traditional magic props and a willingness to learn from one of magic's legendary figures. Although written for professional magicians, the step-by-step detail, clarity and inclusiveness of this collection, along with the author's intimate knowledge of the stage performer's needs, make this a volume that will benefit magicians at every level of expertise.]]> 336 Theodore Annemann 0486244261 Meg 0 to-read 4.01 1983
author: Theodore Annemann
name: Meg
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1983
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]]> 1264677 13 escalones del mentalismo. You will learn how to read minds and predict headlines. Techniques include pen reading, lip reading, predictions, blindfolds, telepathy, and many others. In this extensive study of memory systems, you’ll find the keys needed to read spectator’s past, present, and future.]]> 424 Corinda Meg 0 to-read 4.23 1958
author: Corinda
name: Meg
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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]]> 16045084 One of Slate's and Kirkus Review's Best Books of 2013 and The New York Times, National Public Radio , and Indie Bound bestseller: "Lookaway, Lookaway is a wild romp through the South, and therefore the history of our nation, written by an absolute ringmaster of fiction." ―Alice Sebold, New York Times bestselling author of The Lovely Bones

Jerene Jarvis Johnston and her husband Duke are exemplars of Charlotte, North Carolina's high society, where old Southern money―and older Southern secrets―meet the new wealth of bankers, boom-era speculators, and carpetbagging social climbers. Steely and implacable, Jerene presides over her family's legacy of paintings at the Mint Museum; Duke, the one-time college golden boy and descendant of a Confederate general, whose promising political career was mysteriously short-circuited, has settled into a comfortable semi-senescence as a Civil War re-enactor. Jerene's brother Gaston is an infamously dissolute bestselling historical novelist who has never managed to begin his long-dreamed-of literary masterpiece, while their sister Dillard is a prisoner of unfortunate life decisions that have made her a near-recluse.

As the four Johnston children wander perpetually toward scandal and mishap. Annie, the smart but matrimonially reckless real estate maven; Bo, a minister at war with his congregation; Joshua, prone to a series of gay misadventures, and Jerilyn, damaged but dutiful to her expected role as debutante and eventual society bride. Jerene must prove tireless in preserving the family's legacy, Duke's fragile honor, and what's left of the dwindling family fortune. She will stop at nothing to keep what she has―but is it too much to ask for one ounce of cooperation from her heedless family?

In Lookaway, Lookaway , Wilton Barnhardt has written a headlong, hilarious narrative of a family coming apart, a society changing beyond recognition, and an unforgettable woman striving to pull it all together.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013]]> 361 Wilton Barnhardt 1250020832 Meg 0 to-read 3.15 2013
author: Wilton Barnhardt
name: Meg
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2013
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]]> 22628 offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see
what it looks like from the dance floor.

This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative new voice in contemporary fiction: The Perks of Being A WALLFLOWER

This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that the perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite.

Through Charlie, Stephen Chbosky has created a deeply affecting coming-of-age story, a powerful novel that will spirit you back to those wild and poignant roller coaster days known as growing up.

(back cover)]]> 213 Stephen Chbosky Meg 5 4.24 1999
author: Stephen Chbosky
name: Meg
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1999
rating: 5
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]]> 55338982
What makes “cults� so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . .

Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.� But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day.

Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,� revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish� everywhere.]]> 309 Amanda Montell 0062993151 Meg 0 to-read 3.82 2021
author: Amanda Montell
name: Meg
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2021
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]]> 150111 569 James R. Mellow 0395344123 Meg 0 3.71 1984
author: James R. Mellow
name: Meg
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1984
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]]> 150107 512 Sally Cline 1559707186 Meg 0 3.98 2003
author: Sally Cline
name: Meg
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2003
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]]> 19661547 Save Me the Waltz) and dancer has been appreciated by biographers and feminist critics who rescued her from her famous husband's shadow, her painting is less well known. This remarkable album, which accompanies a touring exhibition, reproduces 80 of her paintings and includes family photos, drawings and memorabilia among its 140 illustrations (114 in color). Zelda's exuberant, fanciful cityscapes of New York and Paris in the 1940s radiate irresistible charm and energy. Her flower still life's are jewels of organic unfolding, while her serene landscapes of North Carolina seem a respite from the mental illness that plagued her until her death at age 48 in a midnight fire in a North Carolina mental hospital in 1948. Also reproduced are her almost hallucinatory biblical allegories (she embraced born-again Christianity), her paper dolls and her wildly imaginative paintings based on fairy tales and Alice in Wonderland.

Novelist/biographer Kurth portrays her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of mutual support along with alcoholic self-destructiveness. Art historian Livingston argues that Zelda's best painting belongs to a conservative, even anti-modernist tradition. Lanahan, Zelda's granddaughter, provides an affectionate introduction.]]> 127 Zelda Fitzgerald Meg 0 4.38 1996
author: Zelda Fitzgerald
name: Meg
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1996
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]]> 54081499
Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents� large, imposing house in the heart of Queens, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr. and Donald.

A first-hand witness to countless holiday meals and family interactions, Mary brings an incisive wit and unexpected humor to sometimes grim, often confounding family events. She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for re-gifting to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.

Numerous pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have sought to parse Donald J. Trump’s lethal flaws. Mary L. Trump has the education, insight, and intimate familiarity needed to reveal what makes Donald, and the rest of her clan, tick. She alone can recount this fascinating, unnerving saga, not just because of her insider’s perspective but also because she is the only Trump willing to tell the truth about one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families.]]> 225 Mary L. Trump 1982141468 Meg 5 3.76 2020
author: Mary L. Trump
name: Meg
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2020
rating: 5
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]]> 39305740
She often said she would be criticized for staying the same or changing, so why not take the less boring option? Her earthy, poetic lyrics (“the geese in chevron flight� in “Urge for Going�), the phrases that are now part of the culture (“They paved paradise, put up a parking lot�), and the unusual melodic intervals traced by that lissome voice earned her the status of a pop legend. Fearless experimentation ensured that she will also be seen as one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century.

Joni on Joni is an authoritative, chronologically arranged anthology of some of Mitchell’s most illuminating interviews, spanning the years 1966 to 2014. It includes revealing pieces from her early years in Canada and Detroit along with influential articles such as Cameron Crowe’s never-before-anthologized Rolling Stone piece. Interspersed throughout the book are key quotes from dozens of additional Q&As. Together, this material paints a revealing picture of the artist� bragging and scornful, philosophical and deep, but also a beguiling flirt.]]> 416 Susan Whitall 0914090356 Meg 4 3.73
author: Susan Whitall
name: Meg
average rating: 3.73
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rating: 4
read at: 2020/05/15
date added: 2021/04/03
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]]> 43522576 Christopher is the new kid in town.
Christopher has an imaginary friend.

We can swallow our fear or let our fear swallow us.

Single mother Kate Reese is on the run. Determined to improve life for her and her son, Christopher, she flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night with her child. Together, they find themselves drawn to the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. It's as far off the beaten track as they can get. Just one highway in, one highway out.

At first, it seems like the perfect place to finally settle down. Then Christopher vanishes. For six long days, no one can find him. Until Christopher emerges from the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not unchanged. He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build a treehouse in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again.

Twenty years ago, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower made readers everywhere feel infinite. Now, Chbosky has returned with an epic work of literary horror, years in the making, whose grand scale and rich emotion redefine the genre. Read it with the lights on.]]> 705 Stephen Chbosky 1538731339 Meg 0 to-read 3.52 2019
author: Stephen Chbosky
name: Meg
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/04/03
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]]> 35068536 528 Andrew Lloyd Webber 006242422X Meg 4 3.73 2018
author: Andrew Lloyd Webber
name: Meg
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/17
date added: 2021/01/17
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]]> 140502 � Publishers Weekly "Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting is not only pitched on a high artistic level but it is full of homely, practical information by a superb craftswoman. crafts-woman. An illuminating discussion of the standards and techniques of enlightened stage acting."
� Brooks Atkinson "Hagen adds to the large corpus of titles on acting with vivid dicta drawn from experience, skill, and a sense of personal and professional worth. Her principal asset in this treatment is her truly significant imagination. Her �object exercises� display a wealth of detail with which to stimulate the student preparing a scene for presentation."
� Library Journal "Respect for Acting is a simple, lucid and sympathetic statement of actors' problems in the theatre and basic tenets for their training wrought from the personal experience of a fine actress and teacher of acting."
� Harold Clurman "Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting…is a relatively small book. But within it Miss Hagen tells the young actor about as much as can be conveyed in print of his craft."
� Los Angeles Times "Uta Hagen is our greatest living actor; she is, moreover, interested and mystified by the presence of talent and its workings; her third gift is a passion to communicate the mysteries of the craft to which she has given her life. There are almost no American actors uninfluenced by her."
� Fritz Weaver "This is a textbook for aspiring actors, but working thespians can profit much by it. Anyone with just a casual interest in the theater should also enjoy its behind-the-scenes flavor. Respect for Acting is certainly a special book, perhaps for a limited readership, but of its "How-To" kind I'd give it four curtain calls, and two hollers of "Author, Author
� King Features Syndicate]]> 227 Uta Hagen 0025473905 Meg 0 4.19 1973
author: Uta Hagen
name: Meg
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/01/17
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]]> 4671 The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher.

This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author’s own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]> 180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 Meg 0 3.93 1925
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Meg
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 0
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]]> 912956 96 Sandy Dennis 1576010015 Meg 0 4.08 1997
author: Sandy Dennis
name: Meg
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/07/27
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]]> 29705
With an introduction by Zadie Smith and brand-new stories from over twenty of the bet writers of their generation from both sides of the Atlantic, "The Book of Other People" is as dazzling and inventive as its authors, and as vivid and wide-ranging as its characters.]]> 289 Zadie Smith 0143038184 Meg 0 to-read 3.48 2008
author: Zadie Smith
name: Meg
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/04/26
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]]> 40861864 From one of America's most inspiring political leaders, a book about the core truths that unite us, and the long struggle to discern what those truths are and how best to act upon them, in her own life and across the life of our country.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris's commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents--an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India--met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a prosecutor out of law school, a deputy district attorney, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. She progressed rapidly to become the elected District Attorney for San Francisco, and then the chief law enforcement officer of the state of California as a whole. Known for bringing a voice to the voiceless, she took on the big banks during the foreclosure crisis, winning a historic settlement for California's working families. Her hallmarks were applying a holistic, data-driven approach to many of California's thorniest issues, always eschewing stale "tough on crime" rhetoric as presenting a series of false choices. Neither "tough" nor "soft" but smart on crime became her mantra. Being smart means learning the truths that can make us better as a community, and supporting those truths with all our might. That has been the pole star that guided Harris to a transformational career as the top law enforcement official in California, and it is guiding her now as a transformational United States Senator, grappling with an array of complex issues that affect her state, our country, and the world, from health care and the new economy to immigration, national security, the opioid crisis, and accelerating inequality.

By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in The Truths We Hold a master class in problem-solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times. Through the arc of her own life, on into the great work of our day, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values. In a book rich in many home truths, not least is that a relatively small number of people work very hard to convince a great many of us that we have less in common than we actually do, but it falls to us to look past them and get on with the good work of living our common truth. When we do, our shared effort will continue to sustain us and this great nation, now and in the years to come.]]> 336 Kamala Harris Meg 0 to-read 4.05 2019
author: Kamala Harris
name: Meg
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/07/01
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]]> 42584179 A darkly funny and life-affirming debut novel for readers of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine the story of one man who is offered a second chance at life and love when he develops an unexpected friendship--if he can expose the white lie he told years ago that grew into so much more.

Andrew's day-to-day is a little grim, searching for next of kin for those who die alone. Thankfully, he has a loving family waiting for him when he gets home, to help wash the day's cares away. At least, that's what his coworkers believe.

Andrew didn't mean for the misunderstanding to happen, yet he's become trapped in his own white lie. The fantasy of his wife and two kids has become a pleasant escape from his lonely one bedroom with only his Ella Fitzgerald records for company. But when new employee Peggy breezes into his life like a breath of fresh air, Andrew is shaken out of his routine. She doesn't notice the wall he's been safely hiding behind and their friendship promises to break it down.

Andrew must choose: Does he tell the truth and start really living his life, but risk losing his friendship with Peggy? Or will he stay safe and alone, behind the façade? How Not to Die Alone is about the importance of taking a chance in those moments when we have the most to lose. Sharp and funny, warm and real, it's the kind of big-hearted story we all need.]]> 321 Richard Roper 0525539883 Meg 0 to-read 3.63 2019
author: Richard Roper
name: Meg
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/07/01
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]]> 41954476 286 William Dameron 154204474X Meg 0 to-read 3.76 2019
author: William Dameron
name: Meg
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/07/01
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]]> 23453099 So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys� prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.]]> 260 Ottessa Moshfegh 1594206627 Meg 0 to-read 3.57 2015
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Meg
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/06/17
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]]> 37955748
One of the most celebrated, beloved, and enduring actors of our time, Sally Field has an infectious charm that has captivated the nation for more than five decades, beginning with her first TV role at the age of seventeen.

With raw honesty and with all the humility and authenticity her fans have come to expect, Field brings readers behind-the-scenes for not only the highs and lows of her star-studded early career in Hollywood, but deep into the truth of her lifelong relationships--including her complicated love for her own mother. Powerful and unforgettable, In Pieces is an inspiring account of life as a woman in the second half of the twentieth century.

]]> Sally Field 1549143077 Meg 5 3.85 2018
author: Sally Field
name: Meg
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2019/06/17
date added: 2019/06/17
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]]> 43263491 From the number one New York Times bestselling author comes another stunning memoir that is tender, touching...and just a little spooky.

"Here’s a partial list of things I don’t believe in: God. The Devil. Heaven. Hell. Bigfoot. Ancient Aliens. Past lives. Life after death. Vampires. Zombies. Reiki. Homeopathy. Rolfing. Reflexology. Note that 'witches' and 'witchcraft' are absent from this list. The thing is, I wouldn’t believe in them, and I would privately ridicule any idiot who did, except for one thing: I am a witch."

For as long as Augusten Burroughs could remember, he knew things he shouldn't have known. He manifested things that shouldn't have come to pass. And he told exactly no one about this, save one person: his mother. His mother reassured him that it was all perfectly normal, that he was descended from a long line of witches, going back to the days of the early American colonies. And that this family tree was filled with witches. It was a bond that he and his mother shared--until the day she left him in the care of her psychiatrist to be raised in his family (but that's a whole other story). After that, Augusten was on his own. On his own to navigate the world of this tricky power; on his own to either use or misuse this gift.

From the hilarious to the terrifying, Toil & Trouble is a chronicle of one man's journey to understand himself, to reconcile the powers he can wield with things with which he is helpless. There are very few things that are coincidences, as you will learn in Toil & Trouble. Ghosts are real, trees can want to kill you, beavers are the spawn of Satan, houses are alive, and in the end, love is the most powerful magic of all.]]> 320 Augusten Burroughs 1250019958 Meg 0 to-read 3.91 2019
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Meg
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2019
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date added: 2019/04/22
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]]> 40639315
ONE OF TIME ’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019

� All the tawdry details I’m dying for are in these stories, but they’re given out like old sweaters—without shame, without guile. Amy Hempel is the writer who makes me feel most affiliated with other humans; we are all living this way—hiding, alone, obsessed—and that’s ok.� —Miranda July

From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection—her first in over a decade.

Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first since her Collected Stories published more than a decade ago, is a literary event.

These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,� a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,� a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,� the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences.]]> 149 Amy Hempel 1982109114 Meg 0 to-read 3.66 2019
author: Amy Hempel
name: Meg
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/03/26
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]]> 1098486
Saks was only eight, and living an otherwise idyllic childhood in sunny 1960s Miami, when her first symptoms appeared in the form of obsessions and night terrors. But it was not until she reached Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar that her first full-blown episode, complete with voices in her head and terrifying suicidal fantasies, forced her into a psychiatric hospital.

Saks would later attend Yale Law School where one night, during her first term, she had a breakdown that left her singing on the roof of the law school library at midnight. She was taken to the emergency room, force-fed antipsychotic medication, and tied hand-and-foot to the cold metal of a hospital bed. She spent the next five months in a psychiatric ward.

So began Saks's long war with her own internal demons and the equally powerful forces of stigma. Today she is a chaired professor of law who researches and writes about the rights of the mentally ill. She is married to a wonderful man.

In The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks discusses frankly and movingly the paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, and the voices in her head insisting she do terrible things, as well as the many obstacles she overcame to become the woman she is today. It is destined to become a classic in the genre.]]> 340 Elyn R. Saks 140130138X Meg 5 4.29 2007
author: Elyn R. Saks
name: Meg
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2007
rating: 5
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date added: 2019/02/10
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]]> 38511216 From the New York Times bestselling author of A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning comes Katerina, James Frey’s highly anticipated new novel set in 1992 Paris and contemporary Los Angeles.

A kiss, a touch. A smile and a beating heart. Love and sex and dreams, art and drugs and the madness of youth. Betrayal and heartbreak, regret and pain, the melancholy of age. Katerina, the explosive new novel by America’s most controversial writer, is a sweeping love story alternating between 1992 Paris and Los Angeles in 2018.

At its center are a young writer and a young model on the verge of fame, both reckless, impulsive, addicted, and deeply in love. Twenty-five years later, the writer is rich, famous, and numb, and he wants to drive his car into a tree, when he receives an anonymous message that draws him back to the life, and possibly the love, he abandoned years prior. Written in the same percussive, propulsive, dazzling, breathtaking style as A Million Little Pieces, Katerina echoes and complements that most controversial of memoirs, and plays with the same issues of fiction and reality that created, nearly destroyed, and then recreated James Frey in the American imagination.]]> 320 James Frey 198210144X Meg 0 to-read 3.61 2018
author: James Frey
name: Meg
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/07/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 21412400 No One Belongs Here More Than You, a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny � so Miranda July � readers will be blown away.

Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people's babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense non-profit where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.

When Cheryl's bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl's eccentrically-ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee � the selfish, cruel blond bombshell � who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.

Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July's first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic and important voice today, and a writer for all time. The First Bad Man is dazzling, disorienting, and unforgettable.]]> 288 Miranda July 1439172560 Meg 0 3.67 2015
author: Miranda July
name: Meg
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2018/02/25
date added: 2018/02/25
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]]> 20604350
When television producers approached Alan Cumming to appear on a popular celebrity genealogy show, he hoped to solve the mystery of his maternal grandfather's disappearance that had long cast a shadow over his family. But this was not the only mystery laid before Alan.

Alan grew up in the grip of a man who held his family hostage, someone who meted out violence with a frightening ease, who waged a silent war with himself that sometimes spilled over onto everyone around him. That man was Alex Cumming, Alan's father, whom Alan had not seen or spoken to for more than a decade when he reconnected just before filming for Who Do You Think You Are? began. He had a secret he had to share, one that would shock his son to his very core and set into motion a journey that would change Alan's life forever.

With ribald humor, wit, and incredible insight, Alan seamlessly moves back and forth in time, integrating stories from his childhood in Scotland and his experiences today as the celebrated actor of film, television, and stage. At times suspenseful, at times deeply moving, but always incredibly brave and honest, Not My Father's Son is a powerful story of embracing the best aspects of the past and triumphantly pushing the darkness aside.]]> 294 Alan Cumming 0062225065 Meg 0 3.95 2014
author: Alan Cumming
name: Meg
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2018/02/25
date added: 2018/02/25
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]]> 17286770
Torment Saint draws on Schultz's careful, deeply knowledgeable readings and insights, as well as on more than 150 hours of interviews with close friends from Texas to Los Angeles, lovers, bandmates, music peers, managers, label owners, and recording engineers and producers. This book unravels the remaining mysteries of Smith's life and his shocking, too early end. It will be, for Smith's legions of fans and readers still discovering his songbook, an indispensable examination of his life and legacy.]]> 368 William Todd Schultz 1608199738 Meg 0 3.70 2013
author: William Todd Schultz
name: Meg
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2018/02/25
date added: 2018/02/25
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]]> 908053 432 Andrew Morton 0671024124 Meg 0 3.79 1993
author: Andrew Morton
name: Meg
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2018/02/25
date added: 2018/02/25
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]]> 34114362 “In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting my guard down.� —Hillary Rodham Clinton, from the introduction of What Happened

For the first time, Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history. Now free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules. This is her most personal memoir yet.

In these pages, she describes what it was like to run against Donald Trump, the mistakes she made, how she has coped with a shocking and devastating loss, and how she found the strength to pick herself back up afterward. With humor and candor, she tells readers what it took to get back on her feet—the rituals, relationships, and reading that got her through, and what the experience has taught her about life. She speaks about the challenges of being a strong woman in the public eye, the criticism over her voice, age, and appearance, and the double standard confronting women in politics.

She lays out how the 2016 election was marked by an unprecedented assault on our democracy by a foreign adversary. By analyzing the evidence and connecting the dots, Hillary shows just how dangerous the forces are that shaped the outcome, and why Americans need to understand them to protect our values and our democracy in the future.

The election of 2016 was unprecedented and historic. What Happened is the story of that campaign and its aftermath—both a deeply intimate account and a cautionary tale for the nation.]]> 512 Hillary Rodham Clinton Meg 0 3.92 2017
author: Hillary Rodham Clinton
name: Meg
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2018/02/25
date added: 2018/02/25
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]]> 187633 122 David Bayles 0961454733 Meg 3 3.77 1994
author: David Bayles
name: Meg
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2017/11/19
date added: 2017/11/19
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]]> 29806089
When a whispered comment overheard by her rebellious teenage daughter forces Ginger to reveal a long-held family secret, the Tangles� carefully constructed web of lies begins to unravel. Upon the death of Glory, the family’s colorful matriarch, and the return of long-estranged Callie, Ginger resolves to return to Martha’s Vineyard and piece together what really happened on that calamitous day when a shadow fell over four sun-kissed siblings playing at the shore. Along with Ginger’s newfound understanding come the keys to reconciliation: with her mother, with her sisters, and with her daughter.

At turns heartbreaking, humorous, and hopeful, Sisters One, Two, Three explores not only the consequences of secrets—even secrets kept out of love—but also the courage it takes to speak the truth, to forgive, and to let go.]]> 352 Nancy Star 1503937461 Meg 4 3.43 2017
author: Nancy Star
name: Meg
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2017
rating: 4
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date added: 2017/10/30
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]]> 923950
Most of us feel overstimulated every once in a while, but for the HSP, it's a way of life. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Elaine Aron, a clinical psychologist, workshop leader, and an HSP herself, shows you how to identify this trait in yourself and make the most of it in everyday situations. Drawing on her many years of research and hundreds of interviews, she shows how you can better understand yourself and your trait to create a fuller, richer life.]]> 251 Elaine N. Aron 0553062182 Meg 0 3.86 1996
author: Elaine N. Aron
name: Meg
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2017/10/30
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]]> 2386611 332 Sal Mendaglio 0910707847 Meg 0 to-read 4.29 2007
author: Sal Mendaglio
name: Meg
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2017/10/30
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]]> 19838803
And what of Fall River? Few recollect its once-glorious past when it was hailed as the Spindle City, largest producer of cotton cloth in the United States; in this immesely lucrative textile center, the fabric that spewed from its mills generated great wealth, at the same time creating even greater poverty.

Here is their story, as it has never been told. In Parallel Lives, a picture is woven of Fall River during the 19th and early-20th centuries, the city that Lizzie knew and called "home." With that city as a backdrop, Lizzie's tale unfolds.

In researching this volume, the authors were permitted unprecendented access to myriad resources pertaining to Lizzie, held privately for generations. Drawing on this important, previously unpublished material, including rare letters and photographs, this book is a breakthrough as a dual history of Fall River and its most infamous citizen. Its pages reveal more new material than all other books on the subject have done before - combined!

Heretofore, Lizzie has been presented as a one-dimensional character, defined by legend, innuendo, and outright lies. Now, for the first time, we meet her as a far more complex, complete individual whose personal life, albeit private, was one of grace and dignity. Meet a different Lizzie A. Borden, who was anything but the ogre fabricated by those who did not know her personally. This is the story of the city and the woman who, for 66 years, shared Parallel Lives.]]> 1138 Michael Martins Meg 4 4.50 2011
author: Michael Martins
name: Meg
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2014/08/27
date added: 2017/03/24
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]]> 30956087 The Polygamist's Daughter is also the heart-cry of a fatherless girl and her search for love, faith, and a safe place to call home.]]> 320 Anna LeBaron 1496417550 Meg 0 to-read 3.62 2017
author: Anna LeBaron
name: Meg
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2017/02/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 23754479
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother � her only family � is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.

Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world � including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.

Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters � Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers � and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.]]> 563 Jonathan Franzen 0374239215 Meg 0 3.62 2015
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Meg
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2016/08/02
date added: 2016/08/02
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]]> 321468 256 Gordon Theisen 0312333420 Meg 4 3.65 2006
author: Gordon Theisen
name: Meg
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2016/08/02
date added: 2016/08/02
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]]> 25663652 Running with Scissors. Then came Dry. Now, there's Lust & Wonder.

In chronicling the development and demise of the different relationships he's had while living in New York, Augusten Burroughs examines what it means to be in love, what it means to be in lust, and what it means to be figuring it all out. With Augusten's unique and singular observations and his own unabashed way of detailing both the horrific and the humorous, Lust and Wonder is an intimate and honest memoir that his legions of fans have been waiting for.]]> 304 Augusten Burroughs 0312342039 Meg 0 to-read 3.80 2016
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Meg
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/04/05
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]]> 8621462
At seven minutes past midnight, thirteen-year-old Conor wakes to find a monster outside his bedroom window. But it isn't the monster Conor's been expecting - he's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the nightmare he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments. The monster in his backyard is different. It's ancient. And wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It wants the truth.

From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd - whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself - Patrick Ness has spun a haunting and darkly funny novel of mischief, loss, and monsters both real and imagined.]]> 226 Patrick Ness 1406311529 Meg 0 to-read 4.35 2011
author: Patrick Ness
name: Meg
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/04/04
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]]> 16176440
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, Lowell, Rosemary and her unusual sister Fern. Rosemary begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “Until Fern’s expulsion...,� Rosemary says, “she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her.� As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence.

In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler weaves her most accomplished work to date—a tale of loving but fallible people whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.]]> 310 Karen Joy Fowler 0399162097 Meg 0 3.70 2013
author: Karen Joy Fowler
name: Meg
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2016/03/15
date added: 2016/03/15
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]]> 12334
From years of exhaustive research, Nancy Milford brings alive the tormented, elusive personality of Zelda and clarifies as never before her relationship with Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda traces the inner disintegration of a gifted, despairing woman, torn by the clash between her husband's career and her own talent.]]> 426 Nancy Milford 0060910690 Meg 5 3.82 1970
author: Nancy Milford
name: Meg
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2015/06/26
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]]> 38700 Rabbit Hole has been hailed as an artistic breakthrough for the highly regarded Lindsay-Abaire. A drama of what comes after tragedy, it captures “the awkwardness and pain of thinking people faced with an unthinkable situation—and eventually, their capacity for survival.� -USA Today

David Lindsay-Abaire is the Pulitzer-winning author of Rabbit Hole, which was made into a feature film. He is the author of Good People, Fuddy Meers, Wonder of the World, A Devil Inside and Kimberly Akimbo, as well as the book and lyrics to Shrek the Musical. He has written the screenplays for Rabbit Hole, Rise of the Guardians and Oz: The Great and Powerful. Born in South Boston, he now lives in Brooklyn.
]]> 157 David Lindsay-Abaire 1559362901 Meg 3 4.06 2006
author: David Lindsay-Abaire
name: Meg
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2006
rating: 3
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date added: 2015/02/15
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]]> 72159 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of brothers vying for their dying father’s inheritance amid a whirlwind of sexuality, untethered in the person of Maggie the Cat. The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt. In spite of the public controversy Cat stirred up, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for that year. Williams, as he so often did with his plays, rewrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for many years—the present version was originally produced at the American Shakespeare Festival in 1974 with all the changes that made Williams finally declare the text to be definitive, and was most recently produced on Broadway in the 2003�2004 season. This definitive edition also includes Williams&rsquoi; essay “Person-to-Person,� Williams� notes on the various endings, and a short chronology of the author’s life. One of America’s greatest living playwrights, as well as a friend and colleague of Williams, Edward Albee has written a concise introduction to the play from a playwright’s perspective, examining the candor, sensuality, power, and impact of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof then and now.]]> 208 Tennessee Williams 0811216012 Meg 4 4.07 1955
author: Tennessee Williams
name: Meg
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1955
rating: 4
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]]> 161915 72 Tennessee Williams 0822210940 Meg 4 3.95 1958
author: Tennessee Williams
name: Meg
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1958
rating: 4
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]]> 848522
With more than 800,000 copies sold since it was first published thirty years ago, The Inner Game of Tennis became a touchstone for hundreds of thousands of people. Now, the bestselling co-author delivers a book designed to help musicians overcome obstacles, improve concentration, and reduce nervousness, allowing them to reach new levels of performing excellence and musical artistry.]]> 225 Barry Green 0385231261 Meg 0 3.95 1986
author: Barry Green
name: Meg
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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]]> 15815333
The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules's now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.

Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.]]> 468 Meg Wolitzer 1594488398 Meg 5 3.58 2013
author: Meg Wolitzer
name: Meg
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2013
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/02/15
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Amazing! I couldn't put this down and was so sad to finish it. One of the most compelling books I've read in a long time.
]]> 20821376
She certainly wouldn’t be at The WoodenĚýBarn, a therapeutic boarding school in ruralĚýVermont, living with a weird roommate, andĚýsigned up for an exclusive, mysterious classĚýcalled Special Topics in English.

But life isn’t fair, and Reeve Maxfield is dead.

Until a journal-writing assignment leads JamĚýto Belzhar, where the untainted past is restored,Ěýand Jam can feel Reeve’s arms aroundĚýher once again. But there are hidden truths onĚýJam’s path to reclaim her loss.

From New York Times bestselling author MegĚýWolitzer comes a breathtaking and surprisingĚýstory about first love, deep sorrow, and theĚýpower of acceptance.]]> 264 Meg Wolitzer 0525423052 Meg 4 3.46 2014
author: Meg Wolitzer
name: Meg
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2015/02/15
date added: 2015/02/15
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]]> 20893511
“Rogers made history.� � Sports Illustrated

Robbie Rogers knows better than most that keeping secrets can crush you. But for much of his life Robbie lived in paralyzing fear that sharing his big secret would cost him the love of his family and his career as a professional soccer player. So he never told anyone what was destroying his soul, both on and off the field.

While the world around Robbie was changing with breathtaking speed, he knew that for a gay man playing a professional team sport it might as well be 1958. He could be a professional soccer player.Ěý Or he could be an out gay man. He couldn’t do both.Ěý

Then last year, at the age of twenty-five and after nearly stepping away from a brilliant career—one that included an NCAA Championship, winning the MLS Cup, and competing in the Olympics—he chose to tell the truth. But instead of facing the rejection he feared, he was embraced—by his family, by his teammates, and his fans.Ěý

In Coming Out to Play, Robbie takes readers on his incredible journey from terrified teenager to a trailblazing out and proud professional soccer player for the L.A. Galaxy, who has embraced his new identity as a role model and champion for those still struggling with the secrets that keep them from living their dreams.]]> 240 Robbie Rogers 014312661X Meg 4 4.05 2014
author: Robbie Rogers
name: Meg
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2014/12/14
date added: 2014/12/14
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]]> 13547180 New York Times bestseller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is the powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity.

When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?

In a swift and breathtaking narrative, Cahalan tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn’t happen.]]> 250 Susannah Cahalan 145162137X Meg 4 4.06 2012
author: Susannah Cahalan
name: Meg
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2012
rating: 4
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]]> 13526165
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces--which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades. Where'd You Go Bernadette is an ingenious and unabashedly entertaining novel about a family coming to terms with who they are and the power of a daughter's love for her mother.]]> 330 Maria Semple 0316204277 Meg 5 3.87 2012
author: Maria Semple
name: Meg
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2014/12/06
date added: 2014/12/06
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]]> 16073145
The King of Good Intentions was originally to have been published by Henry Rollins’s 2.13.61 press in 1999. When Rollins decided henceforth to publish only his own work, Fredrick set the novel aside to focus on his musical and teaching career. Now it will finally make its long overdue debut.]]> 272 John Andrew Fredrick 1891241109 Meg 0 to-read 4.21 1999
author: John Andrew Fredrick
name: Meg
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2014/12/06
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]]> 450573 108 Neil Simon 0573613311 Meg 2 4.04 1965
author: Neil Simon
name: Meg
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1965
rating: 2
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]]> 628992 200 Sharon Pollock 1896300642 Meg 5 3.60 2002
author: Sharon Pollock
name: Meg
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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]]> 96647 New York Times bestseller by one of rock's most provocative figures Scar Tissue is Anthony Kiedis's searingly honest memoir of a life spent in the fast lane.

In 1983, four self-described "knuckleheads" burst out of the mosh-pitted mosaic of the neo-punk rock scene in L.A. with their own unique brand of cosmic hardcore mayhem funk. Over twenty years later, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, against all odds, have become one of the most successful bands in the world. Though the band has gone through many incarnations, Anthony Kiedis, the group's lyricist and dynamic lead singer, has been there for the whole roller-coaster ride. Whether he's recollecting the influence of the beautiful, strong women who have been his muses, or retracing a journey that has included appearances as diverse as a performance before half a million people at Woodstock or an audience of one at the humble compound of the exiled Dalai Lama, Kiedis shares a compelling story about the price of success and excess.

Scar Tissue is a story of dedication and debauchery, of intrigue and integrity, of recklessness and redemption--a story that could only have come out of the world of rock.]]> 465 Anthony Kiedis 1401307450 Meg 4 4.11 2004
author: Anthony Kiedis
name: Meg
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2004
rating: 4
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]]> 2998
Mary Lennox, a spoiled, ill-tempered, and unhealthy child, comes to live with her reclusive uncle in Misselthwaite Manor on England’s Yorkshire moors after the death of her parents. There she meets a hearty housekeeper and her spirited brother, a dour gardener, a cheerful robin, and her wilful, hysterical, and sickly cousin, Master Colin, whose wails she hears echoing through the house at night.

With the help of the robin, Mary finds the door to a secret garden, neglected and hidden for years. When she decides to restore the garden in secret, the story becomes a charming journey into the places of the heart, where faith restores health, flowers refresh the spirit, and the magic of the garden, coming to life anew, brings health to Colin and happiness to Mary.]]> 331 Frances Hodgson Burnett 0517189607 Meg 4 4.16 1911
author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
name: Meg
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1911
rating: 4
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]]> 92517
The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by the editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Robert Bray, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes."
(back cover)]]> 104 Tennessee Williams 0811214044 Meg 5 3.73 1945
author: Tennessee Williams
name: Meg
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1945
rating: 5
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]]> 4584593 85 Don Nigro 0573628114 Meg 3 3.40
author: Don Nigro
name: Meg
average rating: 3.40
book published:
rating: 3
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]]> 12928700 Unnaturally Green is the humorous account of the entire journey, from her pit-stain-filled audition to the bittersweet closing night. Author Felicia Ricci wears her heart on her sleeve as she tackles the role of Elphaba, the musical's green-skinned heroine. She leaps countless hurdles, both professional and personal: conquering the "Songs of Death," weathering a trans-continental "Week I Didn't Poop," enduring the artistic limbo of understudying, and--worst of all!--meeting the man of her dreams. All the while, she learns, time and again, what it means to be "green." Hop into the mind of an over-sharer as she discovers Broadway's Man Behind the Curtain--and the thrill and terror of personal growth.]]> 286 Felicia Ricci 0615533337 Meg 5 4.12 2011
author: Felicia Ricci
name: Meg
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2014/08/27
date added: 2014/08/27
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]]> 183363 416 David Beckham 0007157320 Meg 0 3.68 1998
author: David Beckham
name: Meg
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2014/08/27
date added: 2014/08/27
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]]> 44885 376 Jon Krampner 0823088472 Meg 5 3.81 2006
author: Jon Krampner
name: Meg
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2006
rating: 5
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date added: 2014/07/16
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There was so much about Ms Stanley's life that I didn't know and reading this only made me more interested in this incredible actress. I only wish I would have lived in the time when I could have seen her live.
]]> 12220 Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams� essay “The World I Live In.�

It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared�57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams� A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the �40s and �50s.]]> 107 Tennessee Williams 0822210894 Meg 5 3.98 1947
author: Tennessee Williams
name: Meg
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1947
rating: 5
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date added: 2014/07/16
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]]> 92484
Author of Lookaway, Lookaway

Wilton Barnhardt's novel of coming of age in New York City brims with energy, surprise, irresistible humor, and the heady rush of youth. Its hero, Gil Freeman, a midwestern aspiring actor, comes to the city in search of stardom―but instead encounters the perils of Alphabet City, the desperation of off-off-off-Broadway theater...and the exhilarating, exasperating, absolutely unique Emma, around whom his life comes to turn. Charming and engaging, quintessentially American, Emma Who Saved My Life is one of the extraordinary fiction debuts of our time.]]> 496 Wilton Barnhardt 0312191189 Meg 5 3.81 1989
author: Wilton Barnhardt
name: Meg
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1989
rating: 5
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date added: 2014/07/16
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]]> 6169434 0 Carol Loeb Shloss 3813502570 Meg 4 4.12 2003
author: Carol Loeb Shloss
name: Meg
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/06/15
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Fascinating look at James Joyce's talented and troubled daughter. What an incredible world she lived in, sadly in a time when dealing with any mental illness or trouble meant locking one up in an institution indefinitely.
]]> 113430 11 Miranda July 0976047829 Meg 0 to-read 4.04 2005
author: Miranda July
name: Meg
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/05/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 45787
From McCullers's birth in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 to her death in upstate New York in 1967, The Lonely Hunter thoroughly covers every significant event in, and aspect of, the writer's her rise as a young literary sensation; her emotional, artistic, and sexual eccentricities and entanglements; her debilitating illnesses; her travels in America and Europe; and the provenance of her works from their earliest drafts through their book, stage, and film versions.

To research her subject, Virginia Spencer Carr visited all of the important places in McCullers's life, read virtually everything written by or about her, and interviewed hundreds of McCullers's relatives, friends, and enemies. The result is an enduring, distinguished portrait of a brilliant, but deeply troubled, writer.]]> 676 Virginia Spencer Carr 0820325228 Meg 4 4.24 1975
author: Virginia Spencer Carr
name: Meg
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2014/03/24
date added: 2014/03/24
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]]> 13167087 Ěý
This is How.]]> 230 Augusten Burroughs 0312563558 Meg 4 3.66 2012
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Meg
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2014/03/24
date added: 2014/03/24
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]]> 6340168 Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock, Sherrill Grace has written the story of Pollock’s life from her family roots in New Brunswick through her pioneering years as a Canadian playwright to the present as she continues to make theatre. It focuses attention on Pollock’s distinguished career as a playwright, director, actor and artistic director, and it places her story in the context of what is the flowering of Canadian theatre—the four decades from 1967 to the present. Grace also discusses each of Pollock’s major plays and many of their most interesting productions in Canada, as well as their productions in the United States, Japan and England. In her research for this volume, Grace interviewed theatre people across the globe and visited archives from coast to coast.

Sharon Pollock has won the Governor General’s Award for Drama twice (for Blood Relations and Doc), received several honorary doctorates, and won numerous other prizes and awards. She has also paved the way for the creation of new Canadian plays by championing the work of younger playwrights and mentoring their work across the country, but especially during her years at Banff.

While readers interested in Canadian theatre and in theatre history will find this biography of great value, those more interested in the personal story of a writer’s commitment to her craft and discipline will find Pollock’s story fascinating. While she has often called her family past a “ghost story,� over the course of her career she has had to cope with many challenges much more corporeal. As a woman in a male dominated field, as a mother of six children, as the survivor of an abusive marriage, she has managed to slay what Virginia Woolf once called the “angel in the house� to become one of Canada’s greatest living writers.]]> 480 Sherrill Grace 0889225869 Meg 0 to-read 3.50 2008
author: Sherrill Grace
name: Meg
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> 90987 128 Adam Rapp 0865479682 Meg 4 3.30 2007
author: Adam Rapp
name: Meg
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2007
rating: 4
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]]> 90982
So begins Adam Rapp's highly acclaimed play Nocturne , in which a 32-year-old former piano prodigy recounts the tragic events that tore his family apart.

With a keen eye for human relationships and a deft ear for language, Rapp explores the aftershock of this unimaginable event. The father is so incapable of forgiveness he puts a gun in his son's mouth; the mother so shattered, she deserts the family and eventually takes leave of her sanity altogether; the son--only 17 years old at the time--sets out for New York City. There, he seeks an uneasy refuge in books and reinvents himself as a writer. Across the decade and a half that follows he tries to cope with the ramifications of his own anguish and estrangement while making a desperate search for redemption.
A devastating, elegant, and gripping dissection of the American dream, Nocturne signals a brave new voice in American theater.]]> 81 Adam Rapp 0571211321 Meg 4 4.01 2002
author: Adam Rapp
name: Meg
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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]]> 167708 Red Light Winter is a play of sexual intrigue that explores the myriad and misguided ways we seek to fill the empty spaces inside us.
]]> 97 Adam Rapp 0865479542 Meg 4 3.71 2005
author: Adam Rapp
name: Meg
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/03/21
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]]> 1671048 Don Nigro 0573694613 Meg 5 4.47
author: Don Nigro
name: Meg
average rating: 4.47
book published:
rating: 5
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date added: 2014/03/21
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]]> 490624 This fine work in the Pendragon cycle of plays enjoyed a sold out, critically acclaimed production at the world famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The play is set in a beach bungalow. The young man who lives there has pulled a lost young woman from the ocean. Soon, she finds herself trapped in his life and torn between her need to come to rest somewhere and her certainty that all human relationships turn eventually into nightmares. The struggle between his tolerant and gently ironic approach to life and her strategy of suspicion and attack becomes a kind of war about love and creation which neither can afford to lose. This is an offbeat, wonderful love story. Note: The play contains a wealth of excellent monologue and scene material.

]]> 66 Don Nigro 0573619727 Meg 5 4.02 1985
author: Don Nigro
name: Meg
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1985
rating: 5
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date added: 2014/03/21
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]]> 13446655
In this book, Galaxy tells the poignant story of his thirteen-year relationship with a petite gray-and-white short-haired cat named Benny, and gives singular advice for living with, caring for, and loving the feline in your home.]]> 304 Jackson Galaxy 1585429376 Meg 5 3.94 2012
author: Jackson Galaxy
name: Meg
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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]]> 1711654 Kirkus ReviewsCatherine Jamesâ neglect by her young, beautiful mother cast a shadow over her Los Angeles childhood and made her long not for normalcy, but just for escape. Escape to her beloved grandmother Mimi, or to her Aunt Claire, a former beauty queen who'd had a glamorous life with ex-husband Busby Berkeley. Escape to her father, a race car driver who had been out of her life almost since the day she was born. Escape even to school, where she would at least be taken care of. Instead, Catherine was finally abandoned by her furious mother to become a ward of the state before she reached her teens.A chance meeting with a very young Bob Dylan inspired Catherine to run away with only one to get to Greenwich Village. Dandelion follows Catherineâ s extraordinary life, as she is entranced by Eric Clapton; taken up by the beautiful people in Andy Warholâ s Factory; and begins romances with rockers Jackson Browne and Jimmy Page.While raising her son, whose father was Denny Laine of the Moody Blues and Wings, Catherine finally returns to her West Coast roots, reconnects with her family and discovers that her mother hasnâ t changed but her father heâ s become a heartbreakingly garish transsexual. Moving and shocking by turns, Dandelion is a completely different view of a celebrated pop culture scene, and a fractured mother-daughter relationship. â Jamesâ storyâ ¦take[s] this movingly written autobiography well beyond the realm of sex, drugs and rock & roll.â â Music Connection]]> 240 Catherine James 0312367813 Meg 0 to-read 3.59 2007
author: Catherine James
name: Meg
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2014/03/21
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]]> 7445 THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.]]> 288 Jeannette Walls 074324754X Meg 5 4.32 2005
author: Jeannette Walls
name: Meg
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
rating: 5
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]]> 14462 384 Ken Mandelbaum 0312082738 Meg 3 A lot of fun! 3.99 1991
author: Ken Mandelbaum
name: Meg
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1991
rating: 3
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A lot of fun!
]]> 1060289 224 David Craig 1557830436 Meg 5 3.41 1978
author: David Craig
name: Meg
average rating: 3.41
book published: 1978
rating: 5
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date added: 2012/05/13
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]]> 6172859 A revealing, lyrical book that uses Joni Mitchell's groundbreaking albums of the 1970s to explore the development of autobiographical songwriting.]]> 240 Michelle Mercer 1416559299 Meg 4 3.49 2009
author: Michelle Mercer
name: Meg
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2009
rating: 4
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date added: 2012/05/13
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]]> 11266880 PennySaver, the iconic classifieds booklet that reached everywhere and seemed to come from nowhere. Who was the person selling the “Large leather Jacket, $10�? It seemed important to find out—or at least it was a great distraction from the screenplay.

Accompanied by photographer Brigitte Sire, July crisscrossed Los Angeles to meet a random selection of PennySaver sellers, glimpsing thirteen surprisingly moving and profoundly specific realities, along the way shaping her film, and herself, in unexpected ways.

Elegantly blending narrative, interviews, and photographs with July’s off-kilter honesty and deadpan humor, this is a story of procrastination and inspiration, isolation and connection, and grabbing hold of the invisible world.]]> 218 Miranda July 1936365014 Meg 4 3.98 2011
author: Miranda July
name: Meg
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2012/05/13
shelves:
review:
Very quick read and, as always with Miranda July, I love the directness and the honesty that she brings to the table. It made me realize how there are so many interesting people living in this city (Los Angeles) and yet, how very rarely we even bother to stop and realize that each person you meet has his own story and usually, even the most mundane person has amazing things that have happened in their life.
]]> 920330 Blackbird will carry your heart away.

To young Jenny, the house on Mary Street was home -- the place where she was loved, a blue-sky world of Barbies, Bewitched, and the Beatles. Even her mother's pain from her mysterious illness could be patted away with powder and a kiss on the cheek. But when everything that Jenny had come to rely on begins to crumble, an odyssey of loss, loneliness, and a child's will to survive takes flight....]]> 432 Jennifer Lauck 0671042564 Meg 4 4.04 2000
author: Jennifer Lauck
name: Meg
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2012/05/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 141209 208 Pema Chödrön 0007190611 Meg 4 4.25 1991
author: Pema Chödrön
name: Meg
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2012/05/13
shelves:
review:
Very helpful book about how to be more at peace with your world. I typically get turned off by many such books as the author feels patronizing but Pema Chodron speaks with such humbleness that any wisdom she bestows feels warranted.
]]> 873332 176 Carson McCullers 0877971889 Meg 5 3.31 1958
author: Carson McCullers
name: Meg
average rating: 3.31
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2012/05/13
shelves:
review:
Such a beautiful play! I am currently working on the show, so I'm probably a bit biased. But, as one of my favorite authors, Carson McCullers deals so beautifully with the complexities of love in this play. I feel it was way ahead of it's time in 1957 and that its poetic language, deeply interesting and complex characters and use of black humor makes it a classic.
]]> 505586 72 Jean-Claude van Itallie 082221587X Meg 5 4.40 1897
author: Jean-Claude van Itallie
name: Meg
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1897
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2012/01/27
shelves:
review:

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