Melinda's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 11 May 2025 10:55:53 -0700 60 Melinda's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Mighty Red 199793431
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.

Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.

Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own.

Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.]]> 384 Louise Erdrich 0063277050 Melinda 0 currently-reading, fiction 3.78 2024 The Mighty Red
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/11
shelves: currently-reading, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #3)]]> 86525
At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done.

It was during these years that all Johnson’s experience—from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine—came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues of the country were thrashed out. And how, by the time Johnson arrived, it had dwindled into a body that merely responded to executive initiatives, all but impervious to the forces of change. Caro anatomizes the genius for political strategy and tactics by which, in an institution that had made the seniority system all-powerful for a century and more, Johnson became Majority Leader after only a single term-the youngest and greatest Senate Leader in our history; how he manipulated the Senate’s hallowed rules and customs and the weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues to change the “unchangeable� Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a whirring legislative machine under his own iron-fisted control.

Caro demonstrates how Johnson’s political genius enabled him to reconcile the unreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust—or at least the cooperation—of the liberals, led by Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, without whom he could not achieve his goal of winning the presidency. He shows the dark side of Johnson’s ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds. And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. In a breathtaking tour de force, Caro details Johnson’s amazing triumph in maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875.

Master of the Senate, told with an abundance of rich detail that could only have come from Caro’s peerless research, is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself—the titan of Capital Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing—and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings and personal and legislative power.]]> 1167 Robert A. Caro 0394720954 Melinda 5 4.40 2002 Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #3)
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/11
date added: 2025/05/11
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pain Killer: A Wonder Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death]]> 1226104 336 Barry Meier 1579546382 Melinda 0 to-read 3.96 2003 Pain Killer: A Wonder Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death
author: Barry Meier
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Melinda 5 epidemics-public-health 4.49 2025 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
author: John Green
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: epidemics-public-health
review:

]]> The Hierarchies 49226584
Sylv.ie is a synthetic woman. A fully sentient robot, designed to cater to her Husband's every whim. She lives alone on the top floor of his luxurious home, her existence barely tolerated by his human wife and concealed from their child. Between her Husband's visits, deeply curious about the world beyond her room, Sylv.ie watches the family in the garden—hears them laugh, cry, and argue. Longing to experience more of life, she confides her hopes and fears only to her diary. But are such thoughts allowed? And if not, what might the punishment be?

As Sylv.ie learns more about the world and becomes more aware of her place within it, something shifts inside her. Is she malfunctioning, as her Husband thinks, or coming into her own? As their interactions become increasingly fraught, she fears he might send her back to the factory for reprogramming. If that happens, her hidden diary could be her only link to everything that came before. And the only clue that she is in grave danger.

Set in a recognizable near future and laced with dark, sly humor, Ros Anderson's deeply observant debut novel is less about the fear of new technology than about humans' age-old talent for exploitation. In a world where there are now two classes of women—“born� and “created”—the growing friction between them may have far-reaching consequences no one could have predicted.]]> 352 Ros Anderson 0593182871 Melinda 3 fiction 3.62 2020 The Hierarchies
author: Ros Anderson
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)]]> 208324
Here, Johnson’s almost mythic personality—part genius, part behemoth, at once hotly emotional and icily calculating—is seen at its most nakedly ambitious. This multifaceted book carries the President-to-be from the aftermath of his devastating defeat in his 1941 campaign for the Senate-the despair it engendered in him, and the grueling test of his spirit that followed as political doors slammed shut-through his service in World War II (and his artful embellishment of his record) to the foundation of his fortune (and the actual facts behind the myth he created about it).

The culminating drama—the explosive heart of the book—is Caro’s illumination, based on extraordinarily detailed investigation, of one of the great political mysteries of the century. Having immersed himself in Johnson’s life and world, Caro is able to reveal the true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election, for years shrouded in rumor, which Johnson was not believed capable of winning, which he “had to� win or face certain political death, and which he did win-by 87 votes, the �87 votes that changed history.�

Telling that epic story “in riveting and eye-opening detail,� Caro returns to the American consciousness a magnificent lost hero. He focuses closely not only on Johnson, whom we see harnessing every last particle of his strategic brilliance and energy, but on Johnson’s “unbeatable� opponent, the beloved former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, who embodied in his own life the myth of the cowboy knight and was himself a legend for his unfaltering integrity. And ultimately, as the political duel between the two men quickens—carrying with it all the confrontational and moral drama of the perfect Western—Caro makes us witness to a momentous turning point in American the tragic last stand of the old politics versus the new—the politics of issue versus the politics of image, mass manipulation, money and electronic dazzle.]]> 522 Robert A. Caro 067973371X Melinda 5 4.26 1990 Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/07
date added: 2025/02/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #1)]]> 86524
The Path to Power, Book One, reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson’s political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered.

We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate—coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon—raised in one of the country’s most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father’s slide into failure and financial ruin—lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate “impossible� goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be.

We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We see him carrying out, before his thirtieth year, his first great political inspiration: tapping-and becoming the political conduit for-the money and influence of the new oil men and contractors who were to grow with him to immense power. We follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam� Rayburn (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR himself. And we follow the dramas of his emotional life-the intensities and complications of his relationships with his family, his contemporaries, his girls; his wooing and winning of the shy Lady Bird; his secret love affair, over many years, with the mistress of one of his most ardent and generous supporters . . .

Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself . . . Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty . . . Johnson maneuvering to dethrone the unassailable old Jack Garner (then Vice President of the United States) as the New Deal’s “connection� in Texas, and seize the power himself . . . Johnson raging . . . Johnson hugging . . . Johnson bringing light and, indeed, life to the worn Hill Country farmers and their old-at-thirty wives via the district’s first electric lines.

We see him at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness� of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ.

Here is Lyndon Johnson—his Texas, his Washington, his America—in a book that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.]]> 882 Robert A. Caro 0679729453 Melinda 5 4.39 1982 The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #1)
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> Rabbits (Rabbits, #1) 55481226 Conspiracies abound in this surreal and yet all-too-real technothriller in which a deadly underground alternate reality game might just be altering reality itself, set in the same world as the popular Rabbits podcast.

It's an average work day. You've been wrapped up in a task, and you check the clock when you come up for air�4:44 pm. You go to check your email, and 44 unread messages have built up. With a shock, you realize it is April 4th�4/4. And when you get in your car to drive home, your odometer reads 44,444. Coincidence? Or have you just seen the edge of a rabbit hole?

Rabbits is a mysterious alternate reality game so vast it uses our global reality as its canvas. Since the game first started in 1959, ten iterations have appeared and nine winners have been declared. Their identities are unknown. So is their reward, which is whispered to be NSA or CIA recruitment, vast wealth, immortality, or perhaps even the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe itself. But the deeper you get, the more deadly the game becomes. Players have died in the past—and the body count is rising.

And now the eleventh round is about to begin. Enter K—a Rabbits obsessive who has been trying to find a way into the game for years. That path opens when K is approached by billionaire Alan Scarpio, the alleged winner of the sixth iteration. Scarpio says that something has gone wrong with the game and that K needs to fix it before Eleven starts or the whole world will pay the price.

Five days later, Scarpio is declared missing. Two weeks after that, K blows the deadline and Eleven begins. And suddenly, the fate of the entire universe is at stake.]]> 422 Terry Miles 1984819658 Melinda 4 fiction 3.60 2021 Rabbits (Rabbits, #1)
author: Terry Miles
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Truly Madly Guilty 27831371 The electrifying new novel from the international bestselling author, Liane Moriarty

Despite their differences, Erika and Clementine have been best friends since they were children. So when Erika needs help, Clementine should be the obvious person to turn to. Or so you'd think.

For Clementine, as a mother of a two desperately trying to practise for the audition of a lifetime, the last thing she needs is Erika asking for something, again.

But the barbecue should be the perfect way to forget their problems for a while. Especially when their hosts, Vid and Tiffany, are only too happy to distract them.

Which is how it all spirals out of control...

]]> 517 Liane Moriarty 1250069815 Melinda 4 fiction 3.59 2016 Truly Madly Guilty
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop]]> 133938826 should feel successful—but all she feels is drained. Haunted by an abandoned dream, she takes a leap of faith and leaves her old life behind. Quitting her job and divorcing her husband, Yeongju moves to a quiet residential neighborhood outside the city and opens the Hyunam-dong Bookshop.

The transition isn’t easy. For months, all Yeongju can do is cry. But as the long hours in the shop stretch on, she begins to reflect on what makes a good bookseller and a meaningful store. She throws herself into reading voraciously, hosting author events, and crafting her own philosophy on bookselling. Gradually, Yeongju finds her footing in her new surroundings.

Surrounded by friends, writers, and the books that bind them, Yeongju begins to write a new chapter in her life. The Hyunam-dong Bookshop evolves into a warm, welcoming haven for lost souls—a place to rest, heal, and remember that it’s never too late to scrap the plot and start over.]]> 307 Hwang Bo-Reum Melinda 3 asian-studies, fiction 3.93 2022 Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop
author: Hwang Bo-Reum
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: asian-studies, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America]]> 776215 Leviathan selected as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Providence Journal. Leviathan was also chosen by Amazon.com's editors as one of the 10 best history books of 2007.

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme," proclaimed Herman Melville, and the vivid story of whaling is one of the mightiest themes in American history. Indeed, much of America's culture, economy, and even its spirit were literally and figuratively rendered from the bodies of whales. In Leviathan, the first one-volume history of American whaling in many decades, historian Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the epic battle between man and the sea � and, in this case, between man and beast � an often-violent struggle that animates the imagination and stirs our emotions. Beginning his engrossing narrative with Captain John Smith's botched whaling expedition to the New World in 1614, Dolin traces the rise of this burgeoning industry-from its rapid expansion in the colonial era and its brutal struggles during and after the Revolutionary War, to its Golden Age in the mid-1800s, when more than 60 ports got into the whaling business and the sails of America's whaleships whitened the seven seas. American whale oil lit the world and greased the gears of the industrial revolution. Baleen cut from the mouths of whales shaped the course of feminine fashion. Spermaceti, from sperm whales, produced amazingly brilliant and clean-burning candles, while ambergris gave perfumes great staying power and was worth its weight in gold. And the profits from whaling created great fortunes and helped fuel the nation's growth. Leviathan teems with fascinating vignettes, from the Pilgrims' frustrating encounters with whales, to the Candle Wars that pitted eighteenth-century New England Industrialists against each other, to the heroic cruise of Captain David Porter and the USS Essex, in which Porter and his men valiantly protected American whaleships during the War of 1812 until they themselves were captured by the British. Then there is the violent tale of Cyrus Plumer, a notorious troublemaker whose mutiny on the whaleship Junior is thrillingly retold. Among the most amazing accounts is that of the Shenandoah, a Confederate raider, which burned 22 of the 26 Union whaleships it captured, most after the Civil War had already ended. In the waning years of the nineteenth century, we witness the agonizingly slow death of an American industry, as the discovery of oil, tragic disasters in the Arctic, and changes in female fashion combine to transform the American whalemen into an historical relic. The final scene comes in 1924, as the whaleship Wanderer, wrecked on the shore of Cuttyhunk Island, provides the last glimpse of a bygone era. Through it all, those "iron men in wooden boats" created a legacy of dramatic, poignant, and at times horrific stories. This sprawling, maritime saga is filled with these tales, as well as rich, lyrical descriptions of whales and the sea. Original, stirring, and authoritative, Leviathan delivers the 300-year history of American whaling in vibrant detail, integrating literary, social, and economic history into an epic account of this once-vital industry.

(W. W. Norton, 480 pp., 90 illustrations. Also available in Audiobook format from Tantor Audiobooks.)]]> 479 Eric Jay Dolin 0393060578 Melinda 3 4.03 2007 Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
author: Eric Jay Dolin
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Someone You Can Build a Nest In]]> 182506390 Discover this creepy, charming monster-slaying fantasy romance—from the perspective of the monster—by Nebula Award-winning debut author John Wiswell

Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she's fallen in love.

Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.

However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.

Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?

Eating her girlfriend isn’t an option. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.

And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.]]> 310 John Wiswell 0756418852 Melinda 5 fiction 3.96 2024 Someone You Can Build a Nest In
author: John Wiswell
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Melinda 4 memoir 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/08
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: memoir
review:

]]> You Dreamed of Empires 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

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

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

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 Álvaro Enrigue 059354479X Melinda 5 fiction 3.74 2022 You Dreamed of Empires
author: Álvaro Enrigue
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Husband's Secret 17802724 At the heart of The Husband’s Secret is a letter that’s not meant to be read

My darling Cecilia, if you’re reading this, then I’ve died...

Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive. . . .

Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all—she’s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia—or each other—but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband’s secret.

Acclaimed author Liane Moriarty has written a gripping, thought-provoking novel about how well it is really possible to know our spouses—and, ultimately, ourselves.]]> 396 Liane Moriarty 0399159347 Melinda 3 fiction 3.93 2013 The Husband's Secret
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Big Little Lies 33516773 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

From the author of Truly Madly Guilty and The Husband s Secret comes a novel about the dangerous little lies we tell ourselves just to survive.

A murder...A tragic accident...Or just parents behaving badly? What’s indisputable is that someone is dead.

Madeline is a force to be reckoned with. She’s funny, biting, and passionate; she remembers everything and forgives no one. Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare but she is paying a price for the illusion of perfection. New to town, single mom Jane is so young that another mother mistakes her for a nanny. She comes with a mysterious past and a sadness beyond her years. These three women are at different crossroads, but they will all wind up in the same shocking place.

Big Little Lies is a brilliant take on ex-husbands and second wives, mothers and daughters, schoolyard scandal, and the little lies that can turn lethal.]]> 460 Liane Moriarty 0399587195 Melinda 4 fiction 4.40 2014 Big Little Lies
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz]]> 126918752 The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps.

When József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, his life expectancy was forty-five minutes. This was how long it took for the half-dead prisoners to be sorted into groups, stripped, and sent to the gas chambers. He beat the odds and survived the “selection,� which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”—the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution. But as Soviet and Allied troops closed in on the camps, local Nazi commanders—anxious about the possible consequences of outright murder—decided to leave the remaining prisoners to die.

Debreczeni survived the liberation of Auschwitz and immediately recorded his experiences in Cold Crematorium, one of the harshest, most merciless indictments of Nazism ever written. This haunting memoir, rendered in the precise and unsentimental prose of an accomplished journalist, is an eyewitness account of incomparable literary quality. It was published in the Hungarian language in 1950, but it was never translated, due to Cold War hostilities and rising antisemitism. More than 70 years later, this masterpiece that was nearly lost to time is now being published in more than 15 different languages for the first time, and will finally take its rightful place among the greatest works of Holocaust literature.]]> 248 József Debreczeni 1250290546 Melinda 5 memoir 4.54 1950 Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
author: József Debreczeni
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.54
book published: 1950
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: memoir
review:

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

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

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

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Melinda 5 fiction 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Hypnotist's Love Story 23751850
Braced for the worst, Ellen is pleasantly surprised. It turns out that Patrick's ex-girlfriend is stalking him. Ellen thinks, "Actually, that's kind of interesting." She's dating someone worth stalking. She's intrigued by the woman's motives. In fact, she'd even love to meet her.

Ellen doesn't know it, but she already has.]]> 446 Liane Moriarty 0425260933 Melinda 0 fiction 3.66 2011 The Hypnotist's Love Story
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Last Anniversary 1282954 Sophie Honeywell always wondered if Thomas Gordon was the one she let get away. He was the perfect boyfriend, but on the day he was to propose, she broke his heart. A year later he married his travel agent, while Sophie has been mortifyingly single ever since. Now Thomas is back in her life because Sophie has unexpectedly inherited his aunt Connie's house on Scribbly Gum Island -- home of the famously unsolved Munro Baby mystery.

Sophie moves onto the island and begins a new life as part of an unconventional family where it seems everyone has a secret. Grace, a beautiful young mother, is feverishly planning a shocking escape from her perfect life. Margie, a frumpy housewife, has made a pact with a stranger, while dreamy Aunt Rose wonders if maybe it's about time she started making her own decisions.

As Sophie's life becomes increasingly complicated, she discovers that sometimes you have to stop waiting around -- and come up with your own fairy-tale ending.

As she so adroitly did in her smashing debut novel, Three Wishes, the incomparable Liane Moriarty once again combines sharp wit, lovable and eccentric characters, and a page-turning story for an unforgettable Last Anniversary.

]]> 388 Liane Moriarty 0060890681 Melinda 4 fiction 3.69 2006 The Last Anniversary
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> What Alice Forgot 6469165
Alice is twenty-nine. She adores sleep, chocolate, and her ramshackle new house. She’s newly engaged to the wonderful Nick and is pregnant with her first baby.

There’s just one problem.
All that was ten years ago �

Alice has slipped in a step aerobics class, hit her head and lost a decade. Now she’s a grown-up, bossy mother of three in the middle of a nasty divorce and her beloved sister Elisabeth isn’t speaking to her. This is her life but not as she knows it.

Clearly Alice has made some terrible mistakes.
Just how much can happen in a decade?

Can she ever get back to the woman she used to be?]]> 487 Liane Moriarty 0141043768 Melinda 4 fiction 4.06 2010 What Alice Forgot
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Nine Perfect Strangers 39280445 Could ten days at a health resort really change you forever?

These nine perfect strangers are about to find out...

Nine people gather at a remote health resort. Some are here to lose weight, some are here to get a reboot on life, some are here for reasons they can’t even admit to themselves. Amidst all of the luxury and pampering, the mindfulness and meditation, they know these ten days might involve some real work. But none of them could imagine just how challenging the next ten days are going to be.

Frances Welty, the formerly best-selling romantic novelist, arrives at Tranquillum House nursing a bad back, a broken heart, and an exquisitely painful paper cut. She’s immediately intrigued by her fellow guests. Most of them don’t look to be in need of a health resort at all. But the person that intrigues her most is the strange and charismatic owner/director of Tranquillum House. Could this person really have the answers Frances didn’t even know she was seeking? Should Frances put aside her doubts and immerse herself in everything Tranquillum House has to offer—or should she run while she still can?

It’s not long before every guest at Tranquillum House is asking exactly the same question.

Combining all of the hallmarks that have made Liane Moriarty's writing a go-to for anyone looking for wickedly smart, page-turning fiction that will make you laugh and gasp, Nine Perfect Strangers once again shows why she is a master of her craft.]]> 453 Liane Moriarty 1250069823 Melinda 4 fiction 3.53 2018 Nine Perfect Strangers
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Veil 58518382
This becomes all too clear when she accidentally travels through time and space to a liminal world where the ghosts of the living history museum haunt its grounds. There, she meets and falls hard for Victorian-era pretty boy Nathaniel. Their heady, romantic encounters douse Sally in the sad reality that her marriage is anything but and leave her tempted to join Nathaniel permanently in his realm.

Is Sally’s marriage literally a fate worse than death, or is there another way altogether?

Length: 47 minutes]]> Rachel Harrison Melinda 2 fiction 3.00 The Veil
author: Rachel Harrison
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Secretary 40139163 Disclaimer with this shivery tale of psychological suspense, featuring a character as disturbing and compelling as Mrs. Danvers in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.

From her first day as Personal Assistant to the celebrated Mina Appleton, Christine Butcher understands what is expected of her. Absolute loyalty. Absolute discretion. For twenty years, Christine has been a most devoted servant, a silent witness to everything in Mina’s life. So quiet, you would hardly know she is there.

Day after day, year after year, Christine has been there, invisible—watching, listening, absorbing all the secrets floating around her. Keeping them safe.

Christine is trusted. But those years of loyalty and discretion come with a high price. And eventually Christina will pay.

Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate such a steadfast woman. Because as everyone is about to discover, there’s a dangerous line between obedience and obsession.]]> 304 Renée Knight 0062362356 Melinda 4 fiction 3.43 2019 The Secretary
author: Renée Knight
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Perfect Marriage (Perfect, #1)]]> 53450790 Would you defend your husband if he was accused of killing his mistress?

Sarah Morgan is a successful and powerful defense attorney in Washington D.C. At 33 years old, she is a named partner at her firm and life is going exactly how she planned.

The same cannot be said for her husband, Adam. He is a struggling writer who has had little success in his career. He begins to tire of his and Sarah’s relationship as she is constantly working.

Out in the secluded woods, at Adam and Sarah’s second home, Adam engages in a passionate affair with Kelly Summers.

Then, one morning everything changes. Adam is arrested for Kelly’s murder. She had been found stabbed to death in Adam and Sarah’s second home.

Sarah soon finds herself playing the defender for her own husband, a man accused of murdering his mistress.

But is Adam guilty or is he innocent?]]> 337 Jeneva Rose 1913419657 Melinda 1 fiction 3.90 2020 The Perfect Marriage (Perfect, #1)
author: Jeneva Rose
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2020
rating: 1
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Disclaimer 23346719
Finding a mysterious novel at her bedside plunges documentary filmmaker Catherine Ravenscroft into a living nightmare. Though ostensibly fiction, The Perfect Stranger recreates in vivid, unmistakable detail the terrible day she became hostage to a dark secret, a secret that only one other person knew—and that person is dead.

Now that the past is catching up with her, Catherine’s world is falling apart. Her only hope is to confront what really happened on that awful day . . . even if the shocking truth might destroy her.]]> 304 Renée Knight 0857522817 Melinda 5 fiction 3.61 2015 Disclaimer
author: Renée Knight
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Apples Never Fall 56143578 #1 New York Times Bestseller
A Peacock Original TV Series–Streaming Soon

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Liane Moriarty comes a novel that looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest

The Delaney family love one another dearly—it’s just that sometimes they want to murder each other . . .

If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father?

This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings.

The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after fifty years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are Stan and Joy so miserable?

The four Delaney children—Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke—were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they’re all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon.

One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted.

Later, when Joy goes missing, and Savannah is nowhere to be found, the police question the one person who remains: Stan. But for someone who claims to be innocent, he, like many spouses, seems to have a lot to hide. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure—but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps their biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light.]]> 467 Liane Moriarty 1250220254 Melinda 4 fiction 3.69 2021 Apples Never Fall
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Here One Moment 208516656 If you knew your future, would you try to fight fate?

Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed.

Because on this ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future—age 103!—and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all.

How do they know this? There were ostensibly more interesting people on the flight (the bride and groom, the jittery, possibly famous woman, the giant Hemsworth-esque guy who looks like an off-duty superhero, the frazzled, gorgeous flight attendant) but none would become as famous as “The Death Lady.�

Not a single passenger or crew member will later recall noticing her board the plane. She wasn’t exceptionally old or young, rude or polite. She wasn’t drunk or nervous or pregnant. Her appearance and demeanor were unremarkable. But what she did on that flight was truly remarkable.

A few months later, one passenger dies exactly as she predicted. Then two more passengers die, again, as she said they would. Soon no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story at a cocktail party.

If you were told you only had a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try to dodge your destiny?

Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment is a brilliantly constructed tale that looks at free will and destiny, grief and love, and the endless struggle to maintain certainty and control in an uncertain world. A modern-day Jane Austen who humorously skewers social mores while spinning a web of mystery, Moriarty asks profound questions in her newest I-can’t-wait-to-find-out-what-happens novel.]]> 512 Liane Moriarty 0593798600 Melinda 5 fiction 3.98 2024 Here One Moment
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/01
date added: 2024/11/01
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Everyone Is Watching 127975602
Five contestants have been chosen to compete for ten million dollars on the game show One Lucky Winner. The catch? None of them knows what (or who) to expect, and it will be live streamed all over the world. Completely secluded in an estate in Northern California, with strict instructions not to leave the property and zero contact with the outside world, the competitors start to feel a little too isolated.

When long-kept secrets begin to rise to the surface, the contestants realize this is no longer just a reality show—someone is out for blood. And the game can’t end until the world knows who the contestants really are…]]> 320 Heather Gudenkauf 0778310795 Melinda 2 fiction 3.61 2024 Everyone Is Watching
author: Heather Gudenkauf
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/29
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Terminal Boredom: Stories 55251789
Women and Women: The fissures in a queer matriarchal utopia are exposed when a boy, a creature usually contained in ghettoised isolation - appears beneath young Yūko's window
You May Dream: An extreme government initiative curbing overpopulation prompts a woman to re-evaluate her friendships
Night Picnic: The last family in a desolate city learns to be human through the awkward appropriation of popular culture
That Old Seaside Club: Passive-aggressive furniture provides unwelcome romantic advice
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Tense interplanetary politics distort Emma's love life
Forgotten: Jane's ex-girlfriend reppears, radically altered and insistent on a catch-up
Terminal Boredom: Tokyo's teenagers, disaffected and numb from excessive screentime, find distraction in violence.

Suzuki's singular slant on science fiction remains fresh and essential. Concerns about society, gender and imperialism dovetail irresistibly with flights of speculative wonder. And with a kitchen sink in the corner of even her wildest stories, Suzuki reminds us that while society may be limitless, relationships remain impossible]]> 218 Izumi Suzuki 1788739884 Melinda 4 asian-studies, fiction 3.58 2021 Terminal Boredom: Stories
author: Izumi Suzuki
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: asian-studies, fiction
review:

]]> The North Line 195367887
Even at the ragged edge of civilization, some lines should not be crossed.

Everyone believes Adam to be something he’s not. Sometimes that’s because he’s told them a story. Sometimes he’s told himself one. But when Adam joins an Alaskan fishing crew that’s promising quick money, the dangerous work and harsh lifestyle strip away all fabrications and force a dark-hearted exploration of who he really is.

On the unforgiving Bering Sea, Adam finds the adventure and authenticity of a fisherman’s life revelatory. The labor required to seize bounty from the ocean invigorates him, and the often crude comradery accompanies a welcome, hard-earned wisdom. But when a strike threatens the entire season and violence stalks the waves, Adam is thrust into a struggle for survival at the edge of the world, where evolutionary and social forces collide for outcomes beyond anyone’s control.

In his riveting debut novel, Matt Riordan pairs personal experiences with a master storyteller’s eye in a piercing examination of the quest for identity in the face of tempests within and without.]]> 313 Matt Riordan 1368100074 Melinda 0 fiction 3.67 2024 The North Line
author: Matt Riordan
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/15
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Push 52476830 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

A tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family–and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for–and everything she feared.

Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had.

But in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter–she doesn’t behave like most children do.

Or is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well.

Then their son Sam is born–and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she’d always imagined with her child. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fall-out forces Blythe to face the truth.

The Push is a tour de force you will read in a sitting, an utterly immersive novel that will challenge everything you think you know about motherhood, about what we owe our children, and what it feels like when women are not believed.]]> 307 Ashley Audrain 1984881663 Melinda 5 fiction 4.03 2021 The Push
author: Ashley Audrain
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Lost Colony 63256895
Jamestown promises to be a history lover’s dream, a reality series featuring fifteen contestants who will spend six months living in seventeenth century conditions, their ability to adapt and overcome daily hardship judged by millions of TV viewers. Supplies will be replenished, and a medical officer will be on hand to ensure everyone’s well-being. Lucrative cash prizes will be awarded at the end.

Except that the colonists find themselves abandoned on an uncharted island on the first morning of the shoot, lacking sufficient provisions or a means of communication with the outside world. Tensions begin to mount—and bodies start to pile up.

Each contestant has reason to fear for their life since everyone on the island hides a dangerous secret, and any one of them might have motive to kill.]]> 450 Irina Shapiro Melinda 4 fiction 4.13 2023 The Lost Colony
author: Irina Shapiro
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Out 25365
The ringleader of this cover-up, Masako Katori, emerges as the emotional heart of Out and as one of the shrewdest, most clear-eyed creations in recent fiction. Masako's own search for a way out of the straitjacket of a dead-end life leads her, too, to take drastic action.

The complex yet riveting narrative seamlessly combines a convincing glimpse into the grimy world of Japan's yakuza with a brilliant portrayal of the psychology of a violent crime and the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse between seasoned detectives and a group of determined but inexperienced criminals. Kirino has mastered a Thelma and Louise kind of graveyard humor that illuminates her stunning evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds and the friendship that bolsters them in the aftermath.]]> 400 Natsuo Kirino 1400078377 Melinda 5 asian-studies, fiction 3.95 1997 Out
author: Natsuo Kirino
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/04
date added: 2024/10/04
shelves: asian-studies, fiction
review:

]]> They Never Learn 124948406 From the author of the “raw, ingenious, and utterly fearless� (Wendy Walker, USA TODAY bestselling author) Temper comes a dynamic psychological thriller about two women who give bad men exactly what they deserve.

Scarlett Clark is an exceptional English professor. But she’s even better at getting away with murder.

Every year, she searches for the worst man at Gorman University and plots his well-deserved demise. Thanks to her meticulous planning, she’s avoided drawing attention to herself—but as she’s preparing for her biggest kill yet, the school starts probing into the growing body count on campus. Determined to keep her enemies close, Scarlett insinuates herself into the investigation and charms the woman in charge, Dr. Mina Pierce. Everything’s going according to her master plan…until she loses control with her latest victim, putting her secret life at risk of exposure.

Meanwhile, Gorman student Carly Schiller is just trying to survive her freshman year. Finally free of her emotionally abusive father, all Carly wants is to focus on her studies and fade into the background. Her new roommate has other ideas. Allison Hadley is cool and confident—everything Carly wishes she could be—and the two girls quickly form an intense friendship. So when Allison is sexually assaulted at a party, Carly becomes obsessed with making the attacker pay...and turning her fantasies about revenge into a reality.

Featuring Layne Fargo’s trademark “propulsive writing style� (Kirkus Reviews) and “sinister, of the moment� (Chicago Review of Books) suspense, They Never Learn is a feminist serial killer story perfect for fans of Killing Eve and Chelsea Cain.]]> 349 Layne Fargo Melinda 4 fiction 3.86 2020 They Never Learn
author: Layne Fargo
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/28
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum]]> 145624993 The Immortal Life ofHenriettaLacks, a page-turning 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last segregated asylums, that New York Times bestselling author Clint Smith describes as “a book that left me breathless.�

On a cold day in March of1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland.Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.

In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.

As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America’s new focus.

In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.
]]> 368 Antonia Hylton 1538723697 Melinda 5 4.25 2024 Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
author: Antonia Hylton
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/25
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: black-lives-matter, epidemics-public-health
review:

]]> <![CDATA[People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up]]> 18877989
Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, covered Lucie's disappearance and followed the massive search for her, the long investigation, and the even longer trial. Over ten years, he earned the trust of her family and friends, won unique access to the Japanese detectives and Japan's convoluted legal system, and delved deep into the mind of the man accused of the crime, Joji Obara, described by the judge as "unprecedented and extremely evil."

The result is a book at once thrilling and revelatory, "In Cold Blood for our times" (Chris Cleave, author of Incendiary and Little Bee).

The People Who Eat Darkness is one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012]]> 465 Richard Lloyd Parry 1466820020 Melinda 4 3.81 2010 People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up
author: Richard Lloyd Parry
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2015/06/26
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 214161672
Yet the cautious Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician. Young, handsome and daring, Jonathan Strange is his very antithesis. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men � which overwhelms that between England and France. And soon their own secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine…]]> 864 Susanna Clarke 1526681552 Melinda 0 to-read 4.20 2004 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai]]> 9367403 In the bestselling tradition of In the Heart of the Sea, The Colony, “an impressively researched� (Rocky Mountain News) account of the history of America’s only leper colony located on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, is “an utterly engrossing look at a heartbreaking chapter� (Booklist) in American history and a moving tale of the extraordinary people who endured it.Beginning in 1866 and continuing for over a century, more than eight thousand people suspected of having leprosy were forcibly exiled to the Hawaiian island of Molokai -- the longest and deadliest instance of medical segregation in American history. Torn from their homes and families, these men, women, and children were loaded into shipboard cattle stalls and abandoned in a lawless place where brutality held sway. Many did not have leprosy, and many who did were not contagious, yet all were ensnared in a shared nightmare. Here, for the first time, John Tayman reveals the complete history of the Molokai settlement and its unforgettable inhabitants. It's an epic of ruthless manhunts, thrilling escapes, bizarre medical experiments, and tragic, irreversible error. Carefully researched and masterfully told, The Colony is a searing tale of individual bravery and extraordinary survival, and stands as a testament to the power of faith, compassion, and the human spirit.]]> 434 John Tayman 1416551921 Melinda 3 4.19 2006 The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai
author: John Tayman
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2010/01/01
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves:
review:

]]> We Used to Live Here 199798006
As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.

As soon as the strangers enter their home, inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?

This unputdownable and spine-tingling novel “is like quicksand: the further you delve into its pages, the more immobilized you become by a spiral of terror. We Used to Live Here will haunt you even after you have finished it� (Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender Is the Flesh).]]> 312 Marcus Kliewer 1982198788 Melinda 4 fiction 3.66 2024 We Used to Live Here
author: Marcus Kliewer
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Devil By Name (Fever House, #2)]]> 202102065 No one expected the apocalypse would be broadcast via phone call. But in this chilling sequel to Fever House, anyone who managed to survive that doomsday call has a harrowing answer to the question, “Where were you when the Message came through?�

Five years after the event that drove most of the global population to madness, the world is overrun with the “fevered”—once-human, zombielike creatures drawn indiscriminately to violence and murder. In a campaign to restabilize the country, the massive corporation known as Terradyne Industries has merged with the U.S. government in a partnership of dubious motives, quarantining major American cities behind towering walls and corralling the afflicted there with the hope, they say, of developing a vaccine.

In Portland, where it all began, guilt-ridden detective John Bonner scours the city’s darkest corners for clues to humanity’s redemption. In New England, Katherine Moriarty mourns the devastating losses of her husband and son while in hiding from Terradyne. And across the ocean in France, a sixteen-year-old girl named Naomi Laurent discovers she has a disturbing and powerful gift—which may just be the key to the world’s salvation.

Equal parts gruesome and beautiful, The Devil by Name is a heart-stopping, breakneck saga of survival. As its characters� paths inevitably collide across the ravaged landscape of a post-apocalyptic America, they are united by the desire to not just escape death but to carve out some way to live anew.

Everything starts and ends in the fever house.

]]> 400 Keith Rosson 0593595785 Melinda 4 fiction 4.21 2024 The Devil By Name (Fever House, #2)
author: Keith Rosson
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/13
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Fever House (Fever House, #1) 66087060 A small-time criminal. A has-been rock star. A shadowy government agency. And a severed hand whose dark powers threaten to destroy them all.

When leg-breaker Hutch Holtz rolls up to a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, to collect overdue drug money, a severed hand is the last thing he expects to find stashed in the client’s refrigerator. Hutch quickly realizes that the hand induces uncontrollable madness: Anyone in its proximity is overcome with a boundless compulsion for violence. Within hours, catastrophic forces are set into motion: Dark-op government agents who have been desperately hunting for the hand are on Hutch’s tail, more of the city’s residents fall under its brutal influence, and suddenly all of Portland stands at the precipice of disaster. . . .

But it’s all the same for Katherine Moriarty, a singer whose sudden fame and precipitous downfall were followed by the mysterious death of her estranged husband—suicide, allegedly. Her trauma has made her agoraphobic, shackled within the confines of her apartment. Her son, Nick, has moved home to care for her, quietly making his living working for Hutch’s boss.

When Hutch calls Nick in distress, looking for someone else to take the hand, Katherine and Nick are plunged into a global struggle that will decimate the walls of the carefully arranged life they’ve built. Mother and son must evade both crazed, bloodthirsty masses and deceitful government agents while exorcising family secrets that have risen from the dead—secrets, they soon discover, that might hold the very key to humanity’s survival.

Can you resist the hand? Find an excerpt from the next Fever House novel at the end of the book.]]> 417 Keith Rosson 0593595750 Melinda 5 fiction 4.02 2023 Fever House (Fever House, #1)
author: Keith Rosson
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/11
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Brief History of the Dead 30072
The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten. But the City is shrinking, and the residents clearing out. Some of the holdouts, like Luka Sims, who produces the City’s only newspaper, are wondering what exactly is going on. Others, like Coleman Kinzler, believe it is the beginning of the end.

Meanwhile, Laura Byrd is trapped in an Antarctic research station, her supplies are running low, her radio finds only static, and the power is failing. With little choice, Laura sets out across the ice to look for help, but time is running out.

Kevin Brockmeier alternates these two storylines to create a lyrical and haunting story about love, loss and the power of memory.]]> 252 Kevin Brockmeier 1400095956 Melinda 5 fiction 3.68 2003 The Brief History of the Dead
author: Kevin Brockmeier
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/07
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Incidents Around the House 199757490 A chilling horror novel about a haunting told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,� from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box

To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’sMommy,Daddo,and Grandma Ruth.But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?”�

When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the same question, over and over . . . Bela understands that unless she says yes, soon her family must pay.

Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe but other incidents show cracks in her parents' marriage. The safety Bela relies on is on the brink of unraveling.

But Other Mommy needs an answer.

Incidents Around the House is a chilling, wholly unique tale of true horror told by the child Bela. A story about a family as haunted as their home.]]> 367 Josh Malerman 0593723120 Melinda 4 fiction 3.60 2024 Incidents Around the House
author: Josh Malerman
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/29
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Man in the Black Suit: 4 Dark Tales]]> 10587 THE MAN IN THE BLACK SUIT

FOUR UNABRIDGED DARK TALES FROM STEPHEN KING

The Man in the Black Suit read by John Cullum

"...the face of the man in the black suit grows ever clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said. I don't want to think of him, but I can't help it, and sometimes at night my old heart beats so hard and so fast I think it will tear itself right clear of my chest."

A haunting recollection of a mysterious boyhood event, The Man in Black Suit read by John Cullum leads off this masterful collection from Stephen King.

Other dark tales include: All That You Love Will Be Carried Away read by Peter Gerety, in which a man checks into a Lincoln, Nebraska Motel 6 to find the meaning in his life; That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French read by Becky Ann Baker presents the ultimate case of déjà vu; and The Death of Jack Hamilton read by Arliss Howard -- a blistering tale of Depression-era outlaws on the run.
Whether writing about encounters with the dead, the near dead, or about the mundane dreads of life, Stephen King's The Man In The Black Suit: Four Dark Tales is intense, eerie and instantly compelling.]]> Stephen King 074352585X Melinda 3 fiction, stephen-king 3.70 1994 The Man in the Black Suit: 4 Dark Tales
author: Stephen King
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves: fiction, stephen-king
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pimsleur Korean Level 1 Lessons 11-15: Learn to Speak and Understand Korean with Pimsleur Language Programs]]> 28688547 The Easiest and Fastest Way to Learn Korean
With Pimsleur you’ll become conversational in Korean � to understand and be understood � quickly and effectively. You’ll learn vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation together through conversation. And our scientifically proven program will help you remember what you’ve learned, so you can put it into action.

Why Pimsleur?
� Quick + Easy � Only 30 minutes a day.
� Portable + Flexible � Core lessons can be done anytime, anywhere, and easily fit into your busy life.
� Proven Method � Works when other methods fail.
� Self-Paced � Go fast or go slow � it’s up to you.
� Based in Science � Developed using proven research on memory and learning.
� Cost-effective � Less expensive than classes or immersion, and features all native speakers.
� Genius � Triggers your brain’s natural aptitude to learn.
� Works for everyone � Recommended for ages 13 and above.

What’s Included?
� 5, 30-minute audio lessons,
� In total, 2.5 hours of audio, all featuring native speakers

What You’ll Learn
This course includes Lessons 11-15 from the Korean Level 1 program featuring 2.5 hours of language instruction. Each lesson provides 30 minutes of spoken language practice, with an introductory conversation, and new vocabulary and structures. Detailed instructions enable you to understand and participate in the conversation. Practice for vocabulary introduced in previous lessons is included in each lesson. The emphasis is on pronunciation and comprehension, and on learning to speak Korean.

Whether you want to travel, communicate with friends or colleagues, reconnect with family, or just understand more of what’s going on in the world around you, Pimsleur will help you learn Korean and expand your horizons and enrich your life.]]> Paul Pimsleur 150821798X Melinda 0 asian-studies, to-read 4.60 Pimsleur Korean Level 1 Lessons 11-15: Learn to Speak and Understand Korean with Pimsleur Language Programs
author: Paul Pimsleur
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.60
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves: asian-studies, to-read
review:

]]> The Marriage Act 62967873 What if marriage was the law? Dare you disobey?

Britain. The near-future. A right-wing government believes it has the answer to society’s ills � the Sanctity of Marriage Act, which actively encourages marriage as the norm, punishing those who choose to remain single.

But four couples are about to discover just how impossible relationships can be when the government is monitoring every aspect of our personal lives � monitoring every word, every minor disagreement � and will use every tool in its arsenal to ensure everyone will love, honor and obey.]]> 432 John Marrs 1335005935 Melinda 3 fiction 3.73 2023 The Marriage Act
author: John Marrs
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs]]> 201319612 The bestselling author of Lost Connections and Stolen Focus offers a revelatory look at the drugs upending weight loss as we knew it—from his personal experience on Ozempic to what these drugs mean for our society’s deeply dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and our bodiesIn January 2023, bestselling author Johann Hari started to inject himself once a week with Ozempic, the diabetes drug that produces significant weight loss. Hewasn’t alone—credible predictions suggest that in two years, a quarter of the U.S. population will be taking this class of drug. Proponents say that this is a biological solution to a biological problem. While 95 percent of diets fail, the average person taking one of the new drugs will lose a quarter of their body weight in six months, and keep it off for as long as they take it. Here is a moment of liberation from an illness that massively increases your chances of diabetes, dementia, and cancer, and causes 10 percent of all deaths.Still, Hari was wildly conflicted. The massive rise in obesity rates around the world in the last half century didn’t happen because something went wrong with human biology. It happened because something went disastrously wrong with our We began to eat food designed to be maximally addictive. We built cities that are impossible to walk or bike around. We became much more stressed, making us seek out more comfort snacks. From this perspective, the new weight loss drugs arrive at a moment of madness. We built a food system that poisons us, then decided en masse to inject ourselves with a different potential poison that puts us off all food.A personal journey through weight loss combined with scientific evidence from experts, Magic Pill explores, as only Hari can, questions How did we get to this point? What does it reveal about our society that we couldn’t solve this problem socially, and instead turned to potentially risky pharmaceutical solutions? And will this free us from social pressure to conform to an ideal body type—or make that pressure even more dangerously intense?]]> 320 Johann Hari 0593728637 Melinda 0 epidemics-public-health 4.26 2024 Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs
author: Johann Hari
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: epidemics-public-health
review:

]]> The Family Experiment 197108968 From the acclaimed author of The One and The Marriage Act, The Family Experiment is a dark and brilliant speculative thriller about families: real and virtual.

Some families are virtually perfect�

The world's population is soaring, creating overcrowded cities and an economic crisis. And in the UK, the breaking point has arrived. A growing number of people can no longer afford to start families, let alone raise them.

But for those desperate to experience parenthood, there is an alternative. For a monthly subscription fee, clients can create a virtual child from scratch who they can access via the metaverse and a VR headset. To launch this new initiative, the company behind Virtual Children has created a reality TV show called The Substitute. It will follow ten couples as they raise a Virtual Child from birth to the age of eighteen but in a condensed nine-month time period. The prize: the right to keep their virtual child, or risk it all for the chance of a real baby�

Set in the same universe as John Marrs's bestselling novel The One and The Marriage Act, The Family Experiment is a dark and twisted thriller about the ultimate Tamagotchi—a virtual baby.]]> 384 John Marrs 1335000364 Melinda 3 fiction 4.00 2024 The Family Experiment
author: John Marrs
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> A Visit from the Goon Squad 7331435
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.]]> 274 Jennifer Egan 0307592839 Melinda 3 fiction 3.70 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/02
date added: 2024/08/02
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis]]> 27161156 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062300546.

Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story...

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.]]> 264 J.D. Vance Melinda 4 memoir 3.81 2016 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
author: J.D. Vance
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/01/14
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves: memoir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Office of Historical Corrections]]> 51777605 The award-winning author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self brings her signature voice and insight to the subjects of race, grief, apology, and American history.

Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and x-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters' lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief—all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history—about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.

In "Boys Go to Jupiter," a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral. In "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend's unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a black scholar from Washington, DC, is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.]]> 269 Danielle Evans 1594487332 Melinda 5 black-lives-matter, fiction 4.15 2020 The Office of Historical Corrections
author: Danielle Evans
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/07/30
shelves: black-lives-matter, fiction
review:

]]> Hidden Pictures 58724923 A wildly inventive spin on the supernatural thriller, about a woman working as a nanny for a young boy with strange and disturbing secrets.

Mallory Quinn is fresh out of rehab when she takes a job as a babysitter for Ted and Caroline Maxwell. She is to look after their five-year-old son, Teddy.

Mallory immediately loves it. She has her own living space, goes out for nightly runs, and has the stability she craves. And she sincerely bonds with Teddy, a sweet, shy boy who is never without his sketchbook and pencil. His drawings are the usual fare: trees, rabbits, balloons. But one day, he draws something different: a man in a forest, dragging a woman’s lifeless body.

Then, Teddy’s artwork becomes increasingly sinister, and his stick figures quickly evolve into lifelike sketches well beyond the ability of any five-year-old. Mallory begins to wonder if these are glimpses of a long-unsolved murder, perhaps relayed by a supernatural force.

Knowing just how crazy it all sounds, Mallory nevertheless sets out to decipher the images and save Teddy before it’s too late.]]> 372 Jason Rekulak 1250819342 Melinda 3 fiction 4.12 2022 Hidden Pictures
author: Jason Rekulak
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/07/20
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Discomfort of Evening 49374086 I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough ... and I asked God if he please couldn't take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. 'Amen.'

Jas lives with her devout farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter's day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip; resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a darkness that threatens to derail them all.

A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands by a prize-winning young poet, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's debut novel lays everything bare. It is a world of language unlike any other, which Michele Hutchison's striking translation captures in all its wild, violent beauty. Studded with unforgettable images - visceral, raw, surreal - The Discomfort of the Evening is a radical reading experience that will leave you changed forever.]]> 282 Lucas Rijneveld 0571349366 Melinda 3 fiction 3.37 2018 The Discomfort of Evening
author: Lucas Rijneveld
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/03
date added: 2024/07/03
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The LEGO Story: How a Little Toy Sparked the World's Imagination]]> 60254223 The extraordinary inside story of LEGO, based on unprecedented access to the company's archives and rare interviews with the founding family that still owns the company

This book tells the story of how my family built the LEGO brand. --Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, former President/CEO of the LEGO Group and 3rd generation owner

It's estimated that each year between eighty and ninety million children around the globe are given a box of LEGO, while up to ten million adults buy sets for themselves. Yet LEGO is much more than a dizzying number of plastic bricks that can be put together and combined in countless ways. LEGO is also a vision of the significance of what play can mean for humanity.

This book tells the extraordinary story of a global company and a Danish family who for ninety years have defended children's right to play--and who believe grown-ups, too, should make the time to nurture their inner child. The LEGO Story is built on Jens Andersen's unique access to LEGO's own archives, as well as on Andersen's extensive conversations with Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, former president and CEO of the LEGO group and grandson of its founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen.

A riveting cultural history of changing generations' views of childhood and the importance of play, The LEGO Story also a fascinating case study of how innovation and creativity helped leaders transform LEGO from a small carpentry business into the world's largest producer of play materials and one of the most beloved brands in the world. Richly illustrated with never-before-seen photos from the family's private archive, this is the ultimate book for fans of LEGO, revealing everything you ever wanted to know about the brand.]]> 432 Jens Andersen 0063258021 Melinda 0 to-read 3.76 2021 The LEGO Story: How a Little Toy Sparked the World's Imagination
author: Jens Andersen
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Man in the High Castle 216363
This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.]]> 259 Philip K. Dick 0679740678 Melinda 4 fiction 3.64 1962 The Man in the High Castle
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/29
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Expiration Dates 176443178
From the New York Times bestselling author of In Five Years and One Italian Summer comes the romance that will define a generation.

Daphne Bell believes the universe has a plan for her. Every time she meets a new man, she receives a slip of paper with his name and a number on it—the exact amount of time they will be together. The papers told her she’d spend three days with Martin in Paris; five weeks with Noah in San Francisco; and three months with Hugo, her ex-boyfriend turned best friend. Daphne has been receiving the numbered papers for over twenty years, always wondering when there might be one without an expiration. Finally, the night of a blind date at her favorite Los Angeles restaurant, there’s only a name: Jake.

But as Jake and Daphne’s story unfolds, Daphne finds herself doubting the paper’s prediction, and wrestling with what it means to be both committed and truthful. Because Daphne knows things Jake doesn’t, information that—if he found out—would break his heart.

Told with her signature warmth and insight into matters of the heart, Rebecca Serle has finally set her sights on romantic love. The result is a gripping, emotional, passionate, and (yes) heartbreaking novel about what it means to be single, what it means to find love, and ultimately how we define each of them for ourselves. Expiration Dates is the one fans have been waiting for.]]> 272 Rebecca Serle 1982166827 Melinda 3 fiction 3.58 2024 Expiration Dates
author: Rebecca Serle
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2024/06/17
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Exhalation 41160292
In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom," the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

Including stories being published for the first time as well as some of his rare and classic uncollected work, Exhalation is Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic—revelatory.]]> 368 Ted Chiang Melinda 4 fiction 4.27 2019 Exhalation
author: Ted Chiang
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/14
date added: 2024/06/14
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> You Like It Darker 201242757 From legendary storyteller and master of short fiction Stephen King comes an extraordinary new collection of twelve short stories, many never-before-published, and some of his best EVER.

“You like it darker? Fine, so do I,� writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,� and in You Like It Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.

“Two Talented Bastids� explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,� a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,� a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,� a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man� asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.

King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.]]> 502 Stephen King 1668037718 Melinda 5 fiction, stephen-king 4.16 2024 You Like It Darker
author: Stephen King
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/27
date added: 2024/05/27
shelves: fiction, stephen-king
review:

]]> CyberStorm 21722366
From the mind of Matthew Mather, author of the sci-fi/techno-thriller Atopia Chronicles, and one of the world’s leading cybersecurity experts. CyberStorm is a disaster adventure of a different kind, a non-stop rollercoaster into the future that explores both the heights—and the depths—of the human spirit, a compelling portrait of a future that is all too terrifyingly real.]]> 0 Matthew Mather 0991677188 Melinda 4 fiction 3.63 CyberStorm
author: Matthew Mather
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.63
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2016/05/06
date added: 2024/05/21
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Book of Doors 156480764
In New York City, bookseller Cassie Andrews is living an unassuming life when she is given a gift by a favourite customer. It's a book - an unusual book, full of strange writing and mysterious drawings. And at the very front there is a handwritten message to Cassie, telling her that this is the Book of Doors, and that any door is every door .

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

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

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

Because some doors should never be opened.]]> 408 Gareth Brown 1787637247 Melinda 3 fiction 4.03 2024 The Book of Doors
author: Gareth Brown
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/12
date added: 2024/05/12
shelves: fiction
review:

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

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

As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actuallyliving?]]> 352 Holly Gramazio 0385550618 Melinda 4 fiction 3.50 2024 The Husbands
author: Holly Gramazio
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/07
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Annie Bot 156023123
She’s learning, too.

Doug says he loves that Annie’s artificial intelligence makes her seem more like a real woman, but the more human Annie becomes, the less perfectly she behaves. As Annie's relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder whether Doug truly desires what he says he does. In such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?]]> 231 Sierra Greer 0063312697 Melinda 5 fiction 3.81 2024 Annie Bot
author: Sierra Greer
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/06
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Homegoing 27071490 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.]]> 305 Yaa Gyasi Melinda 5 black-lives-matter, fiction 4.48 2016 Homegoing
author: Yaa Gyasi
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/24
date added: 2024/04/24
shelves: black-lives-matter, fiction
review:

]]> Table for Two 195474144 From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles. The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter six stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of compromise which operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novel, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September, 1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood� describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age. Throughout the stories, two characters often find themselves sitting across a table for two where the direction of their futures may hinge upon what they say to each other next. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting historical fiction.]]> 451 Amor Towles 0593296370 Melinda 4 fiction 4.15 2024 Table for Two
author: Amor Towles
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/17
date added: 2024/04/17
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Melinda 5 black-lives-matter, fiction 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/08
date added: 2024/04/08
shelves: black-lives-matter, fiction
review:

]]> Erasure 355862 We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

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

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk -- or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh -- is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.]]> 280 Percival Everett 0786888156 Melinda 5 black-lives-matter, fiction 4.17 2001 Erasure
author: Percival Everett
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/03
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves: black-lives-matter, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology]]> 60321447
You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything� from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market � runs on chips. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower. Now, America's edge isslipping, undermined by competitors in Taiwan, Korea,Europe, and, above all, China. Today, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more money each year importing chips than it spends importing oil,is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US. At stake is America's military superiority and economic prosperity.

Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the U.S. become dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems. America's victory in the Cold War and its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power. But here, too, China is catching up, with its chip-building ambitions and military modernization going hand in hand.America has let key components of the chip-building process slip out of its grasp, contributing not only to a worldwide chip shortage but also a new Cold War with a superpower adversary that is desperate to bridge the gap.

Illuminating, timely, and fascinating, Chip War shows that, to make sense of the current state of politics, economics, and technology, we must first understand the vital role played by chips.]]> 464 Chris Miller 1982172002 Melinda 0 currently-reading 4.38 2022 Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
author: Chris Miller
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Elon Musk 122765395 From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,� he said.

It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?]]> 688 Walter Isaacson 1982181281 Melinda 5 4.28 2023 Elon Musk
author: Walter Isaacson
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/10
date added: 2024/03/10
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]]> Ordinary Human Failings 62601701
FINALIST FOR THE FALLON BOOK CLUB SELECTION

When we look beyond the headlines, everyone has a story to tell

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" - ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and 'bad apples': the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.]]> 218 Megan Nolan 1787332500 Melinda 4 fiction 3.73 2023 Ordinary Human Failings
author: Megan Nolan
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/03
date added: 2024/03/03
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Salt Houses 30971664
Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus;Alia’s brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world hecan’t escape;andAlia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam HusseininvadesKuwait in1990, Alia and her familyonce againlose their home, their land, and their story as they know it,scattering toBeirut,Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia’s children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings)of assimilation in foreign cities.
Lyrical and heartbreaking,Salt Housesis a remarkabledebut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflictwemightthink we understand—one that asks us toconfrontthat most devastating of all truths: you can’t go home again.
]]> 312 Hala Alyan 0544912586 Melinda 4 fiction 4.00 2017 Salt Houses
author: Hala Alyan
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/10
date added: 2024/02/10
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York]]> 1111 The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today.

In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.]]> 1246 Robert A. Caro 0394720245 Melinda 5 4.51 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/26
date added: 2024/01/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Love Lockdown: Dating, Sex, and Marriage in America's Prisons]]> 55710561 Love Lockdown, she pulls back the curtain on the lives of the husbands and wives supporting some of the 2.3 million people in prisons around the United States. Love Lockdown infiltrates spaces many of us have only heard whispers of—from conjugal visits to prison weddings to relationships between the incarcerated themselves.]]> 272 Elizabeth Greenwood 1501158414 Melinda 4 3.95 2021 Love Lockdown: Dating, Sex, and Marriage in America's Prisons
author: Elizabeth Greenwood
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/04
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Roma: The History of the Romani People and the Controversial Persecutions of Them across Europe]]> 48505342 56 Charles River Editors Melinda 4 3.80 2019 The Roma: The History of the Romani People and the Controversial Persecutions of Them across Europe
author: Charles River Editors
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves:
review:

]]> In the Tall Grass 15825932 Mile 81 meets N. in this e-book collaboration between Stephen King and Joe Hill.

In the Tall Grass begins with a sister and brother who pull off to the side of the road after hearing a young boy crying for help from beyond the tall grass. Within minutes they are disoriented, in deeper than seems possible, and they’ve lost one another. The boy’s cries are more and more desperate. What follows is a terrifying, entertaining, and masterfully told tale, as only Stephen King and Joe Hill can deliver.

In the Tall Grass was originally published in two parts in the June/July and August 2012 issues of Esquire magazine. This is their second collaboration since the novella Throttle, published in 2009.]]> 2 Stephen King 1442359889 Melinda 4 fiction, stephen-king 3.64 2012 In the Tall Grass
author: Stephen King
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves: fiction, stephen-king
review:

]]> Song Yet Sung 2051755 New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Awardfor Fiction.

In the days before the Civil War, a runaway slave named Liz Spocott breaks free from her captors and escapes into the labyrinthine swamps of Maryland’s eastern shore, setting loose a drama of violence and hope among slave catchers, plantation owners, watermen, runaway slaves, and free blacks. Liz is near death, wracked by disturbing visions of the future, and armed with “the Code,� a fiercely guarded cryptic means of communication for slaves on the run. Liz’s flight and her dreams of tomorrow will thrust all those near her toward a mysterious, redemptive fate.

Filled with rich, true details—much of the story is drawn from historical events—and told in McBride’s signature lyrical style, Song Yet Sung is a story of tragic triumph, violent decisions, and unexpected kindness.
]]> 368 James McBride 1594489726 Melinda 4 black-lives-matter, fiction 3.98 2008 Song Yet Sung
author: James McBride
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/20
date added: 2023/12/20
shelves: black-lives-matter, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West]]> 76401 The New York Times called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down."

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold almost four million copies and has been translated into seventeen languages. For this elegant thirtieth-anniversary edition—published in both hardcover and paperback—Brown has contributed an incisive new preface.

Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was really won.]]> 509 Dee Brown 0805066691 Melinda 0 currently-reading 4.24 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
author: Dee Brown
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/20
date added: 2023/12/20
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea]]> 35404398
Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen years old, and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. His father, himself a Korean national, was lured to the new Communist country by promises of abundant work, education for his children, and a higher station in society. But the reality of their new life was far from utopian.

In this memoir translated from the original Japanese, Ishikawa candidly recounts his tumultuous upbringing and the brutal thirty-six years he spent living under a crushing totalitarian regime, as well as the challenges he faced repatriating to Japan after barely escaping North Korea with his life. A River in Darkness is not only a shocking portrait of life inside the country but a testament to the dignity—and indomitable nature—of the human spirit]]> 174 Masaji Ishikawa 1542097193 Melinda 4 asian-studies, memoir 4.34 2000 A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea
author: Masaji Ishikawa
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/16
date added: 2023/12/16
shelves: asian-studies, memoir
review:

]]> Concerning My Daughter 59703696
But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. Having centred her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. Her daughter’s involvement in a case of unfair dismissal involving gay colleagues from the university where she works is similarly strange to her.

And yet when the care home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for an elderly dementia patient who has no family, who travelled the world as a successful diplomat, who chose not to have children, Green’s mother cannot accept it. Why should not having chosen a traditional life mean that your life is worth nothing at all?]]> 176 Hye-Jin Kim 1529057671 Melinda 4 asian-studies, fiction 3.65 2017 Concerning My Daughter
author: Hye-Jin Kim
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/14
date added: 2023/12/14
shelves: asian-studies, fiction
review:

]]> You Should Have Left 32855689 From the internationally best-selling author of Measuring the World and F, an eerie and supernatural tale of a writer's emotional collapse

"It is fitting that I'm beginning a new notebook up here. New surroundings and new ideas, a new beginning. Fresh air."

These are the opening lines of the journal kept by the narrator of Daniel Kehlmann's spellbinding new novel: the record of the seven days that he, his wife, and his four-year-old daughter spend in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany—a house that thwarts the expectations of his recollection and seems to defy the very laws of physics. The narrator is eager to finish a screenplay, entitled Marriage, for a sequel to the movie that launched his career, but something he cannot explain is undermining his convictions and confidence, a process he is recording in this account of the uncanny events that unfold as he tries to understand what, exactly, is happening around him—and in himself.]]> 113 Daniel Kehlmann 1101871989 Melinda 3 fiction 3.40 2016 You Should Have Left
author: Daniel Kehlmann
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/12
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> 1922 22844166 The chilling novella featured in Stephen King’s bestselling collection Full Dark, No Stars, 1922 � about a man who succumbs to the violence within � is now available as a stand-alone publication.

I believe there is a man inside every man, a stranger

So writes Wilfred James in his confession. It’s 1922. Wilfred owns eighty acres of farmland in Nebraska that have been in the family for generations. His wife, Arlette, owns an adjoining one hundred acres.

But if Arlette carries out her threat to sell her land to a pig butcher, Wilfred will be forced to sell too. Worse, he’ll have to move to the city. But he has a daring plan. It may work if he can persuade his son.

A powerful tale of betrayal, murder, madness and rats, 1922 is a breathtaking exploration into the dark side of human nature from the great American storyteller Stephen King. It was adapted into a film from Netflix.]]> 132 Stephen King Melinda 3 fiction, stephen-king 3.87 2010 1922
author: Stephen King
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/10
shelves: fiction, stephen-king
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom]]> 61272711 New York Times Bestseller | New York Times 10 Best Books of 2023

The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his� slave.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.

With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.]]> 416 Ilyon Woo 1501191055 Melinda 4 black-lives-matter 3.95 2023 Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
author: Ilyon Woo
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/08
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves: black-lives-matter
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

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

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

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Melinda 4 4.14 2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
author: David Grann
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/06
date added: 2023/12/06
shelves:
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]]> You Shouldn't Have Come Here 61458888
Despite her uneasiness and misgivings from Calvin's friends and family, the two grow close and start to fall for one another. However, as her departure date nears, things between them start to change for the worse. Grace grows wary of Calvin as his infatuation for her seems to turn into obsession. Calvin fears that Grace is hiding something from him.

Told from dual points of view, You Shouldn't Have Come Here is a thrill ride and a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when you open up your house and your heart to a total stranger.]]> 292 Jeneva Rose Melinda 0 fiction 3.31 2023 You Shouldn't Have Come Here
author: Jeneva Rose
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/04
date added: 2023/12/04
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Pram 195945795
Willy and Marianne’s farmhouse in Maine has acres of meadow and fresh air, and a lonesome bridle path in the forest along which Willy daydreams and ambles. When he’s loaned a decrepit old baby stroller to cart his groceries home, the rickety squeak of the wheels comforts him. So do the sweet coos of a baby Willy knows can’t be real. Can it? In this twisted thicket, wishes come true—with a price.

Joe Hill’s The Pram is part of Creature Feature, a collection of devilishly creepy stories that tingle the spine and twist the mind. They can be read or listened to in one petrifying sitting.]]> 58 Joe Hill 1662516894 Melinda 4 fiction 3.74 2023 The Pram
author: Joe Hill
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/02
date added: 2023/12/02
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion]]> 57933312 In this lively journey through human psychology, bestselling author and creator of the You Are Not So Smart podcast David McRaney investigates how minds change--and how to change minds.

What made a prominent conspiracy-theorist YouTuber finally see that 9/11 was not a hoax? How do voter opinions shift from neutral to resolute? Can widespread social change take place only when a generation dies out? From one of our greatest thinkers on reasoning, How Minds Change is a book about the science, and the experience, of transformation.

When self-delusion expert and psychology nerd David McRaney began a book about how to change someone's mind in one conversation, he never expected to change his own. But then a diehard 9/11 Truther's conversion blew up his theories--inspiring him to ask not just how to persuade, but why we believe, from the eye of the beholder. Delving into the latest research of psychologists and neuroscientists, How Minds Change explores the limits of reasoning, the power of group-think, and the effects of deep canvassing. Told with McRaney's trademark sense of humor, compassion, and scientific curiosity, it's an eye-opening journey among cult members, conspiracy theorists, and political activists, from Westboro Baptist Church picketers to LGBTQ campaigners in California--that ultimately challenges us to question our own motives and beliefs. In an age of dangerous conspiratorial thinking, can we rise to the occasion with empathy?]]> 352 David McRaney 0593190297 Melinda 0 to-read 4.14 2022 How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion
author: David McRaney
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gwendy's Final Task (The Button Box, #3)]]> 59366265
When Gwendy Peterson was twelve, a mysterious stranger named Richard Farris gave her a mysterious box for safekeeping. It offered treats and vintage coins, but it was dangerous. Pushing any of its seven colored buttons promised death and destruction. Years later, the button box entered Gwendy’s life again. A successful novelist and a rising political star, she was once again forced to deal with the temptation that box represented. Now, evil forces seek to possess the button box and it is up to Senator Gwendy Peterson to keep it from them at all costs. But where can you hide something from such powerful entities?

In Gwendy’s Final Task , “horror giants� (Publishers Weekly) Stephen King and Richard Chizmar take us on a journey from Castle Rock to another famous cursed Maine city to the MF-1 space station, where Gwendy must execute a secret mission to save the world. And, maybe, all worlds.]]> 288 Stephen King 1982191554 Melinda 4 fiction, stephen-king 3.91 2022 Gwendy's Final Task (The Button Box, #3)
author: Stephen King
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/02
date added: 2023/12/02
shelves: fiction, stephen-king
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gwendy's Magic Feather (The Button Box, #2)]]> 45428419
In Washington D.C., thirty-seven-year-old Gwendy Peterson couldn't be more different from the self-conscious teenaged girl who once spent a summer running up Castle Rock's Suicide Stairs. That same summer, she was entrusted or some might say cursed with the extraordinary button box by Richard Farris, the mysterious stranger in the black suit. The seductive and powerful box offered Gwendy small gifts in exchange for its care and feeding until Farris eventually returned, promising Gwendy she'd never see the box again.

One day, though, the button box shows up without warning and without Richard Farris to explain why, or what she's supposed to do with it. The mysterious reappearance of the box, along with the troubling disappearances in Castle Rock, leads Gwendy home again...where she just might be able to help rescue the missing girls and stop a madman before he does something ghastly.

From New York Times bestseller Richard Chizmar comes Gwendy's Magic Feather, a breathtaking novel that asks whether our lives are controlled by fate or the choices we make and what price we might have to pay for those choices when we reach for the things we most desire. Prepare to return again to Stephen King's Castle Rock, the sleepy little town built on a bedrock of deep, dark secrets, which is about to awaken from its quiet slumber once more.]]> 333 Richard Chizmar 1587677318 Melinda 4 fiction 3.68 2019 Gwendy's Magic Feather (The Button Box, #2)
author: Richard Chizmar
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/02
date added: 2023/12/02
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gwendy's Button Box (The Button Box, #1)]]> 34430839
There are three ways up to Castle View from the town of Castle Rock: Route 117, Pleasant Road, and the Suicide Stairs. Every day in the summer of 1974 twelve-year-old Gwendy Peterson has taken the stairs, which are held by strong (if time-rusted) iron bolts and zig-zag up the cliffside.

At the top of the stairs, Gwendy catches her breath and listens to the shouts of the kids on the playground. From a bit farther away comes the chink of an aluminum bat hitting a baseball as the Senior League kids practice for the Labor Day charity game.

One day, a stranger calls to Gwendy: "Hey, girl. Come on over here for a bit. We ought to palaver, you and me."

On a bench in the shade sits a man in black jeans, a black coat like for a suit, and a white shirt unbuttoned at the top. On his head is a small neat black hat. The time will come when Gwendy has nightmares about that hat...

Journey back to Castle Rock again in this chilling new novella by Stephen King, bestselling author of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, and Richard Chizmar, award-winning author of A Long December.]]> 171 Stephen King 1587676109 Melinda 4 fiction, stephen-king 3.86 2017 Gwendy's Button Box (The Button Box, #1)
author: Stephen King
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2023/11/30
shelves: fiction, stephen-king
review:

]]> Guns 17284577 25 Stephen King Melinda 3 stephen-king 4.11 2013 Guns
author: Stephen King
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2023/11/30
shelves: stephen-king
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics]]> 53496557 A bold call for the American Left to extend their politics to the issues of Israel-Palestine, from a New York Times bestselling author and an expert on U.S. policy in the region

In this major work of daring criticism and analysis, scholar and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill and Israel-Palestine expert Mitchell Plitnick spotlight how holding fast to one-sided and unwaveringly pro-Israel policies reflects the truth-bending grip of authoritarianism on both Israel and the United States. Except for Palestine deftly argues that progressives and liberals who oppose regressive policies on immigration, racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and other issues must extend these core principles to the oppression of Palestinians. In doing so, the authors take seriously the political concerns and well-being of both Israelis and Palestinians, demonstrating the extent to which U.S. policy has made peace harder to attain. They also unravel the conflation of advocacy for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel.

Hill and Plitnick provide a timely and essential intervention by examining multiple dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conversation, including Israel's growing disdain for democracy, the effects of occupation on Palestine, the siege of Gaza, diminishing American funding for Palestinian relief, and the campaign to stigmatize any critique of Israeli occupation. Except for Palestine is a searing polemic and a cri de coeur for elected officials, activists, and everyday citizens alike to align their beliefs and politics with their values.]]> 227 Marc Lamont Hill 1620975920 Melinda 5 4.21 2021 Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
author: Marc Lamont Hill
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2023/11/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Bright Young Women 101124639
The survivors, including key witness Pamela Schumacher, will be forever changed by this night. They have all become victims. But they tell their perspectives here, they remain masters of their stories. And they hunt the perpetrator on their own - against resistance from the justice system and the police; against public opinion, which idolizes the serial killer.]]> 384 Jessica Knoll 1501153226 Melinda 4 fiction 3.99 2023 Bright Young Women
author: Jessica Knoll
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/28
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World]]> 25744928 One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.

In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.]]> 296 Cal Newport 1455586692 Melinda 0 to-read 4.16 2016 Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
author: Cal Newport
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Melinda 4 memoir 4.21 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
author: Naomi Klein
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/26
date added: 2023/11/26
shelves: memoir
review:

]]> Y/N 58523626 Y/Na novel about a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a K-pop idol sends her to Seoul on a journey of literary self-destruction.

It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boyband, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic—in which you, the reader, insert [Your/Name] and play out an intimate relationship with the unattainable star.

Then Moon suddenly retires, vanishing from the public eye. As Y/N flies from Berlin to Seoul to be with Moon, our narrator, too, journeys to Korea in search of the object of her love. An escalating series of mistranslations and misidentifications lands her at the headquarters of the Kafkaesque entertainment company that manages the boyband until, at a secret location, together with Moon at last, art and real life approach their final convergence.

Surreal, hilarious, and shrewdly poignant, Y/N is a provocative literary debut about the universal longing for transcendence and the tragic struggle to assert one’s singular story amidst the amnesiac effects of globalization. Esther Yi’s prose unsettles the boundary between high and mass art, exploding our expectations of a novel about “identity� and offering in its place a sui generis picture of the loneliness that afflicts modern life.]]> 204 Esther Yi 1662601549 Melinda 3 asian-studies, fiction 2.92 2023 Y/N
author: Esther Yi
name: Melinda
average rating: 2.92
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/24
date added: 2023/11/24
shelves: asian-studies, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero]]> 25897805 384 Timothy Egan 0544272889 Melinda 5 4.25 2016 The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero
author: Timothy Egan
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/22
date added: 2023/11/22
shelves:
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]]> Later 54798175
Later is Stephen King at his finest, a terrifying and touching story of innocence lost and the trials that test our sense of right and wrong. With echoes of King's classic novel It, Later is a powerful, haunting, unforgettable exploration of what it takes to stand up to evil in all the faces it wears.]]> 248 Stephen King Melinda 4 fiction, stephen-king 3.99 2021 Later
author: Stephen King
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/20
date added: 2023/11/20
shelves: fiction, stephen-king
review:

]]> I Who Have Never Known Men 11996 "As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker."

A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered... if indeed there were crimes.

The youngest of forty—a child with no name and no past—she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden—in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights—she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.

Then everything changes... and nothing changes.

A young woman who has never known men—a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints—must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.]]> 208 Jacqueline Harpman 0380731819 Melinda 5 fiction 4.22 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/17
date added: 2023/11/17
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness]]> 43306206
The Courage to Be Disliked shows you how to unlock the power within yourself to become your best and truest self, change your future and find lasting happiness. Using the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of 19th-century psychology alongside Freud and Jung, the authors explain how we are all free to determine our own future free of the shackles of past experiences, doubts and the expectations of others. It’s a philosophy that’s profoundly liberating, allowing us to develop the courage to change, and to ignore the limitations that we and those around us can place on ourselves.

The result is a book that is both highly accessible and profound in its importance. Millions have already read and benefited from its wisdom. Now that The Courage to Be Disliked has been published for the first time in English, so can you.]]> 288 Ichiro Kishimi Melinda 4 3.89 2013 The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness
author: Ichiro Kishimi
name: Melinda
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/16
date added: 2023/11/16
shelves:
review:

]]> The Free People's Village 66094388
English teacher by day, Maddie Ryan spends her nights and weekends as the rhythm guitarist of Bunny Bloodlust, a queer punk band living in a warehouse-turned-venue called “The Lab� in Houston’s Eighth Ward. When Maddie learns that the Eighth Ward is to be sacrificed for a new electromagnetic hyperway out to the wealthy, white suburbs, she joins “Save the Eighth,� a Black-led organizing movement fighting for the neighborhood. At first, she’s only focused on keeping her band together and getting closer to Red, their reckless and enigmatic lead guitarist. But working with Save the Eighth forces Maddie to reckon with the harm she has already done to the neighborhood—both as a resident of the gentrifying Lab and as a white teacher in a predominantly Black school.

When police respond to Save the Eighth protests with violence, the Lab becomes the epicenter of “The Free People’s Village”—an occupation that promises to be the birthplace of an anti-capitalist revolution. As the movement spreads across the U.S., Maddie dreams of a queer, liberated future with Red. But the Village is beset on all sides—by infighting, police brutality, corporate-owned media, and rising ecofascism. Maddie’s found family is increasingly at risk from state violence, and she must decide if she’s willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of justice.
]]> 400 Sim Kern 1646142667 Melinda 4 fiction 4.08 2023 The Free People's Village
author: Sim Kern
name: Melinda
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/10
date added: 2023/11/10
shelves: fiction
review:

]]>