Tay's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 08 Apr 2025 16:14:19 -0700 60 Tay's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World]]> 50067614 NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2020 BY NPR, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, AND GQThe hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- backed by the United States. In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.]]> 426 Vincent Bevins Tay 0 currently-reading 4.64 2020 The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
author: Vincent Bevins
name: Tay
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
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<![CDATA[Death's Other Kingdom: Horror Tales of World War I]]> 210697969 IN THE AIR, THE EARTH, AND THE SEA, THE WORLD BURNED.

Erupting in a land pregnant with conflict, The War to End All Wars blazed from 1914 to 1918, spreading until no continent escaped the touch of its flame. By the day of armistice, no civilization in history had witnessed more death, destruction, and carnage in such a short time.

TRAVEL THE GHOST ROAD. PART THE VEIL.


Curated by historian Coy Hall, Death's Other Kingdom collects nine frightening tales from this baptismal storm of steel. Within these pages, horrors of the supernatural bleed into the terrors of war. In this ritual of violence, humans have never been more vulnerable.]]>
254 Coy Hall Tay 4 4.50 Death's Other Kingdom: Horror Tales of World War I
author: Coy Hall
name: Tay
average rating: 4.50
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rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
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A few duds, but mostly great stories. Standouts for me were "Death in the Ruins" by Brian G. Berry and "Jeanne and the Imp" by M.E. Proctor.
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<![CDATA[Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History]]> 219838823 240 Chris C. Whipple 0063386216 Tay 0 to-read 3.39 Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History
author: Chris C. Whipple
name: Tay
average rating: 3.39
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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<![CDATA[Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants]]> 17465709 Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.]]> 408 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1571313354 Tay 0 to-read 4.52 2013 Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Tay
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2013
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<![CDATA[The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World]]> 208840291 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”]]>
112 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1668072246 Tay 0 to-read 4.39 2024 The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Tay
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2024
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<![CDATA[What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures]]> 144421737 What if we act as if we love the future?

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do while facing an existential crisis is imagine life on the other side. This provocative and joyous book maps an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures.

Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data, poetry, and art, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financers, architects and advocates help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take—from all of us, with whatever we have to offer—to create.

If you haven’t yet been able to picture a transformed and replenished world—or see yourself, your loved ones, and your community in it� this book is for you. If you haven’t yet found your role in shaping this new world, or you’re not sure how we can actually get there, this book is for you.

With grace, humor, and humanity, Ayana invites readers to ask and answer this ultimate question, What if we get it right?

On imagination, possibility, and transformation with

Paola Antonelli
Xiye Bastida & Ayisha Siddiqa
Jade Begay
Régine Clément
Abigail Dillen
Brian Donahue
Kelly Sims Gallagher
Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Corley Kenna
Bryan C. Lee Jr. & Kate Orff
Franklin Leonard & Adam McKay
Bill McKibben
Kate Marvel
Samantha Montano
Leah Penniman
Colette Pichon Battle
Kendra Pierre-Louis
Judith D. Schwartz
Jigar Shah
Bren Smith
Oana Stanescu
Mustafa Suleyman]]>
496 Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Tay 0 to-read 4.48 2024 What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures
author: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
name: Tay
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2024
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The Message 211050274
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]>
237 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230396 Tay 0 currently-reading 4.62 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Tay
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Gate of the Feral Gods (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #4)]]> 220772908 New Achievement! Total, Utter Failure.

You failed a quest less than five minutes after you received it. Now that’s talent.

A floating fortress occupied by warrior gnomes. A castle made of sand. A derelict submarine guarded by malfunctioning machines. A haunted crypt surrounded by lethal traps.

It was supposed to be easy. One bubble. Four castles. Fifteen days. Capture each one, and the stairwell is unlocked.

Here's the thing. It's never easy. Carl and his team can't go it alone. Not this time. They must rely on the help of the low-level, I-can't-believe-these-idiots-are-still-alive crawlers trapped in the bubble with them. But can they be trusted?

Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the fifth floor of the dungeon.]]>
608 Matt Dinniman 0593955978 Tay 0 currently-reading 4.54 2021 The Gate of the Feral Gods (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #4)
author: Matt Dinniman
name: Tay
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Queer as Folklore: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters]]> 204190332 Queer as Folklore takes readers across centuries and continents which reveals the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new.

Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward will take you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the ‘queerly departed� along the way. Queer communities have often sought refuge in the shadows, found kinship in the in-between and created safe spaces in underworlds; but these forgotten narratives tell stories of remarkable resilience that deserve to be heard.

Join any Pride march and you are likely to see a glorious display of papier-mâché unicorn heads trailing sequins, drag queens wearing mermaid tails and more fairy wings than you can shake a trident at. But these are not just accessories: they are queer symbols with historic roots.

To truly understand who queer people are today, we must confront the twisted tales of the past and Queer as Folklore is a celebration of queer history like you've never seen it before.]]>
352 Sacha Coward 1800183364 Tay 0 to-read 4.08 2024 Queer as Folklore: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters
author: Sacha Coward
name: Tay
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
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<![CDATA[Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America]]> 216520753 New York Times best-selling author brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to offer a brilliant takedown of ten incredibly bad pieces of legislation that are causing way too much misery to millions.

“If it were up to me, I’d treat every law passed before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as presumptively unconstitutional. The government of this country was illegitimate when it ruled over people who had no ability to choose the rules.�

—from the introduction to Bad Law

In Bad Law, the New York Times best-selling author of Allow Me to A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to a brilliant takedown of ten of what he considers the most egregiously awful laws on the books today. These are pieces of legislation that are making life worse rather than better for Americans, and that, he argues with trenchant wit and biting humor, should be repealed completely.

On topics ranging from abortion and immigration to voting rights and religious freedom, we have chosen rules to live by that do not reflect the will of most of the people. With respect to our decision to make a law that effectively grants immunity to gun manufacturers, for example, Mystal writes, “We live in the most violent, wealthy country on earth not in spite of the law; we live in a first-person-shooter video game because of the law.�

But, as the man Samantha Bee calls “irrepressible and righteously indignant� and Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion calls “the funniest lawyer in America,� points out, these laws do not come to us from on high; we write them, and we can and should unwrite them. In a marvelous and original takedown spanning all the hot-button topics in the country today, one of our most brilliant legal thinkers points the way to a saner tomorrow.]]>
256 Elie Mystal 162097858X Tay 0 to-read 4.52 Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America
author: Elie Mystal
name: Tay
average rating: 4.52
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<![CDATA[Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism]]> 223436601 An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.�

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]>
400 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Tay 0 to-read 4.34 2025 Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Tay
average rating: 4.34
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<![CDATA[End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration]]> 62926960
From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames

Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.

Back in 2010, when Nature magazine asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his models to predict that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order circa 2020. The years since have proved his prediction more and more accurate, and End Times reveals why.

The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it's very hard to exit.

In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. That is only one possible end time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.]]>
368 Peter Turchin 0593490509 Tay 0 to-read 4.02 End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration
author: Peter Turchin
name: Tay
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<![CDATA[The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (Dungeon Crawler Carl #3)]]> 57605411 Welcome to the Gun Show!

The top ten list is populated. The sponsorship program is open. The difficulty is ramping up. The first three floors were nothing compared to what Carl and Donut now face.

The Iron Tangle. An impossibly-complicated subway system built out of the world's subterranean railway systems, all combined and then tied together into a knot. Up is down. Down is up. Close is far. The cars are filled with monsters, the railway stations are less than safe, and the exit is always just a few stops away.

But there is hope. For the first time, the crawlers are all working together. The loot is better than ever. And the secret to unraveling it all may be hidden in the pages of a seemingly-useless book. Welcome, crawlers. Welcome to the fourth floor of the dungeon.]]>
548 Matt Dinniman Tay 3 4.04 2021 The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (Dungeon Crawler Carl #3)
author: Matt Dinniman
name: Tay
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/09
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Markedly less good than the first two. The whole train system of this level was, frankly, awful. Some fun and exciting moments, of course, but my god, when the author himself basically starts the book by saying, "Hey, this is gonna be really confusing for you as the reader!" you know it's not a good sign. Glad to have gotten past this one.
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Shroud 210384823 An utterly gripping story of alien encounter and survival from Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Children of Time.

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

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

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

If they escape Shroud, they’ll face a crew only interested in profiteering from this extraordinary world. They’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all.]]>
436 Adrian Tchaikovsky 1035013797 Tay 0 to-read 4.16 2025 Shroud
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Tay
average rating: 4.16
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<![CDATA[A Radical History of the World]]> 39105662
This is the history of the struggle and revolution of human society: of hominids, hunters and herders; of emperors and slaves; of patriarchs and women; of rich and poor; of dictators and revolutionaries. From the ancient empires of Persia and Rome to the Russian Revolution, the Vietnam War, and the 2008 Crash, this is a history of greed and violence, but also of solidarity and resistance.

Many times in the past, a different society became an absolute necessity. Humans have always struggled to create a better life. This history proves that we, the many, have the power to change the world.]]>
512 Neil Faulkner 0745338054 Tay 0 to-read 4.09 2018 A Radical History of the World
author: Neil Faulkner
name: Tay
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/23
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<![CDATA[Carl's Doomsday Scenario (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #2)]]> 212393364
The ratings and views are off the chart. The fans just can't get enough. The dungeon gets more dangerous each day. But in a grinder designed to chew up and spit out crawlers by the millions, Carl and Princess Donut need to work harder than ever just to survive.

They call it the Over City. A sprawling, once-thriving metropolis devastated by a mysterious calamity. But these streets are far from abandoned. An undead circus trawls the ruins. Murdered prostitutes rain from the sky. An ancient spell is finally ready to reveal its dark purpose.

Carl still has no pants.

They call it Dungeon Crawler World. For Carl and Donut, it's anything but a game.]]>
384 Matt Dinniman 0593820266 Tay 5 4.47 2021 Carl's Doomsday Scenario (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #2)
author: Matt Dinniman
name: Tay
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/07
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The story continues to have me absolutely hooked. So enjoyable! And the stakes continue to be raised. Mongo is a cutie
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A Hero of Our Time 226378 A Hero of Our Time looks backward to the tales of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, so beloved by Russian society in the 1820s and '30s. In the character of its protagonist, Pechorin, the archetypal Russian antihero, Lermontov's novel looks forward to the subsequent glories and passion of Russian literature that it helped, in great measure, to make possible.]]> 185 Mikhail Lermontov 014044176X Tay 0 to-read 4.12 1839 A Hero of Our Time
author: Mikhail Lermontov
name: Tay
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1839
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Short Stories 23790
"Backgrounds" includes a rich selection of Chekhov's letters, in new translations by Professor Matlaw, and Gorky's celebrated essay on Chekhov, translated by Ivy Litvinov. The critical essays offer general views of Chekhov's art and achievement and detailed analyses of particular stories. The critics are D. S. Mirsky, A. B. Derman (whose essay has been translated from the Russian especially for this edition), Renato Poggioli, Gleb Struve, Donald Rayfield, Karl Kramer, Virginia Llewellyn Smith, and Nils Ake Nilsson.

A Selected Bibliography directs readers to resources for further study.


Chameleon (1884) --
Oysters (1884) --
A living chronology (1885) --
The huntsman (1885) --
Misery (1886) --
The requiem (1886) --
Anyuta (1886) --
Agatha (1886) --
Grisha (1886) --
A gentleman friend (1886) --
The chorus girl (1886)--
Dreams (1886) --
Vanka (1886)--
At home (1887) --
The siren's song (1887) --
Sleepy (1888) --
The grasshopper (1892) --
In exile --
Rothschild's fiddle (1894) --
The student (1894) --
The teacher of literature (1889-94) --
Whitebrow (1895) --
Anna on the neck (1895) --
The house with the mansard (1896) --
The pecheneg (1898)--
A journey by cart (1897) --
The man in a case (1898) --
Gooseberries (1898) --
About love (1898) --
A doctor's visit (1902) --
The darling (1899) --
The lady with the dog (1899) --
The bishop (1902) --
The betrothed (1903).]]>
384 Anton Chekhov 0393090027 Tay 0 to-read 4.36 1932 Short Stories
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Tay
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1932
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The Leopard 625094 The Sicilian prince Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (1896-1957) died just after writing The Leopard, his only novel. Visconti's film adaptation, starring Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1963.

In Sicily, in 1860, a family from the high aristocracy suffered the consequences of the change of regime in favor of the Republicans. While Prince Salina lets himself be overcome by nostalgia, his nephew Tancred embodies the new force that is shaking his country. He asks for the hand of Angélique, daughter of an upstart, while this union marks the defeat of the family coat of arms.]]>
319 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 0679731210 Tay 0 to-read 4.01 1958 The Leopard
author: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
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average rating: 4.01
book published: 1958
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The Complete Stories 284996 ISBN: 0374515360 (ISBN13: 9780374515362

Winner of the National Book Award

The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime - Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day" - sent to her publisher shortly before her death - is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.

Contents:
The geranium --
The barber --
Wildcat --
The crop --
The turkey --
The train --
The peeler --
The heart of the park --
A stoke of good fortune --
Enoch and the gorilla --
A good man is hard to find --
A late encounter with the enemy --
The life you save may be your own --
The river --
A circle in the fire --
The displaced person --
A temple of the Holy Ghost --
The artificial nigger --
Good country people --
You can't be any poorer than dead --
Greenleaf --
A view of the woods --
The enduring chill --
The comforts of home --
Everything that rises must converge --
The partridge festival --
The lame shall enter first --
Why do the heathen rage? --
Revelation --
Parker's back --
Judgement Day.]]>
555 Flannery O'Connor Tay 0 to-read 4.41 1971 The Complete Stories
author: Flannery O'Connor
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average rating: 4.41
book published: 1971
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<![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume I]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]>
160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 Tay 0 to-read 3.91 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I
author: Solvej Balle
name: Tay
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2020
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<![CDATA[In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)]]> 216730678 James C. Scott reframes rivers as alive and dynamic, revealing the consequences of treating them as resources for our profit

Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered.

It is the annual flood pulse—the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain—that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing the flood pulse with dams, irrigation, siltation, dikes, and levees. In demonstrating these threats to the riverine world, award-winning author James C. Scott examines the life history of a particular river, the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) of Burma, the heartland and superhighway of Burman culture.

Scott opens our understanding of rivers to encompass their entirety—tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, backwaters, eddies, periodic marshlands, and the assemblage of life forms dependent on rivers for their existence and well-being. For anyone interested in the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration, rivers offer a striking example of the consequences of human intervention in trying to control and domesticate a natural process, the complexity and variability of which we barely understand.]]>
220 James C. Scott 0300278497 Tay 0 to-read 3.60 2025 In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)
author: James C. Scott
name: Tay
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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Stoner 166997
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.]]>
292 John Williams 1590171993 Tay 0 to-read 4.35 1965 Stoner
author: John Williams
name: Tay
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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Solenoid 60582780
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and history� the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript―Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.]]>
639 Mircea Cărtărescu 1646052021 Tay 0 to-read 4.31 2015 Solenoid
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: Tay
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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Artificial Wisdom 197491143
A whistleblower pulls Tully into a murder investigation at the centre of an election battle for a global dictator, with a mandate to prevent a climate apocalypse. A former US President campaigns against the first AI politician for the position, but someone is trying to sway the outcome.

Tully must convince the world to face the truth and make hard choices about the future of the species. But will humanity ultimately choose salvation over freedom, whatever the cost?

An enthralling murder mystery with a vividly realised future world, forcing readers to grapple with hard hitting questions about the climate crisis, our relationship with Artificial Intelligence and the price we'd be willing to pay, as a species, to be saved. Perfect for fans of Blake Crouch, Harlan Coben, Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson and RR Haywood.]]>
433 Thomas R. Weaver 1739434307 Tay 0 to-read 3.97 2023 Artificial Wisdom
author: Thomas R. Weaver
name: Tay
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist]]> 214151728 With unprecedented access and unsparing analysis, this is the definitive investigation into Spotify, weaving interviews with incisive cultural criticism, and illuminating how streaming has reshaped music for listeners and artists alike.

Flush with testimony from over a hundred industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us into the inner workings of the highly consolidated modern music business and how it has become personalized, playlisted, autoplayed, and algorithmic.

With an expert’s eye, music journalist Liz Pelly reveals how Spotify’s two-sided marketplace—the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all—has changed music media forever. She also explores how musicians and listeners are coming together to fight this era of musical individualism and advocate for artists� futures.

Amazon Unbound and Weapons of Math Destruction for the music industry, Mood Machine is a timely and unputdownable exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music.]]>
288 Liz Pelly 1668083507 Tay 0 to-read 3.97 2025 Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
author: Liz Pelly
name: Tay
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
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The Mourner’s Bestiary 210436767 A critically acclaimed literary memoir braiding together environmental research and the personal journey of generational healing, grief, and chronic illness.

Author Eiren Caffall is the inheritor of a family legacy of 200 years of genetic kidney disease and the mother of a child who may inherit that legacy.

A literary memoir on loss, chronic illness, and generational healing, Caffall’s The Mourner’s Bestiary is also a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems—the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound—and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores.

The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf.]]>
320 Eiren Caffall 1955905584 Tay 0 to-read 4.39 2024 The Mourner’s Bestiary
author: Eiren Caffall
name: Tay
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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A Short Stay in Hell 13456414
In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.]]>
110 Steven L. Peck 098374842X Tay 0 to-read 4.17 2011 A Short Stay in Hell
author: Steven L. Peck
name: Tay
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America]]> 45000 polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Drawing on this remarkable archive, Russell Shorto has created a gripping narrative–a story of global sweep centered on a wilderness called Manhattan–that transforms our understanding of early America.

The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original� thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.]]>
384 Russell Shorto 1400078679 Tay 0 to-read 4.15 2004 The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
author: Russell Shorto
name: Tay
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead]]> 51648276
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

Duration: 11 hours 39 minutes.]]>
274 Olga Tokarczuk Tay 0 to-read 3.93 2009 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Tay
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses]]> 87040 Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. Robin Wall Kimmerer's book is not an identification guide, nor is it a scientific treatise. Rather, it is a series of linked personal essays that will lead general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings, from salmon and hummingbirds to redwoods and rednecks. Kimmerer clearly and artfully explains the biology of mosses, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us.

Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

Gathering Moss will appeal to a wide range of readers, from bryologists to those interested in natural history and the environment, Native Americans, and contemporary nature and science writing.

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168 Robin Wall Kimmerer 0870714996 Tay 0 to-read 4.39 2003 Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Tay
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Welcome to Dorley Hall (The Sisters of Dorley, #1)]]> 61098513
What is happening to these boys? Who are the handful of women on campus who bear a striking resemblance to some of those who went missing? And what is the connection to the mysterious Dorley Hall?

Stefan works hard to get into the Royal College for one reason and one reason only: to find out exactly what happened to the women who live at Dorley Hall, and to get it to happen to him, too.

A closeted trans girl attempts to infiltrate a secret underground forced feminisation programme.

Content note: this story engages with some reasonably dark topics, including but not limited to torture, manipulation, dysphoria, nonconsensual surgery, and kidnapping. While it isn't intended to be a dark or dystopian story, the perspective characters are carrying a lot of baggage, and the exploration of the premise might be triggering for trans readers.]]>
511 Alyson Greaves Tay 0 to-read 4.40 2022 Welcome to Dorley Hall (The Sisters of Dorley, #1)
author: Alyson Greaves
name: Tay
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2022
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<![CDATA[Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)]]> 256008 Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.]]>
960 Larry McMurtry 067168390X Tay 0 to-read 4.53 1985 Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Tay
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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Dungeon Crawler Carl - Tome 1 216874432
You know what’s worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what’s worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That’s what.

Join Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, as they try to survive the end of the world—or just get to the next level—in a video game–like, trap-filled fantasy dungeon. A dungeon that’s actually the set of a reality television show with countless viewers across the galaxy. Exploding goblins. Magical potions. Deadly, drug-dealing llamas. This ain’t your ordinary game show.

Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the Dungeon. Survival is optional. Keeping the viewers entertained is not.

Includes part one of the exclusive bonus story “Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret.�
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512 Matt Dinniman 2487700033 Tay 5 4.50 2020 Dungeon Crawler Carl - Tome 1
author: Matt Dinniman
name: Tay
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
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What a fun read to start the new year! The writing isn't winning any awards, and the book is 95% plot-driven, so know that going in. But in one word, the book is just FUN. Exactly what I was looking for.
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<![CDATA[The Dog Who Followed the Moon: An Inspirational Story with Meditations on Life, Experience the Power of Love and Sacrifice]]> 210051588
From the international bestselling author and illustrator of Big Panda and Tiny Dragon and The Cat Who Taught Zen comes a beautifully illustrated adult fable of a lost young puppy, the old wolf who rescues her, and their journey to follow the moon—with meditations on friendship, connection, and sacrifice.

Deep in the mountain forests, a young pup named Amaya wanders lost and alone, until an aging wolf rescues her from a terrifying encounter with his vicious pack. To try and reunite Amaya with her parents, the unlikely pair embark on a journey to follow the moon.

Eerie woods, forgotten cities, and other obstacles await Amaya and the Wolf on their adventure. As they make their way through the wilderness, the two learn profound lessons about love, sacrifice, and the importance of embracing change.

Featuring stunning artwork from bestselling author and illustrator James Norbury, The Dog Who Followed the Moon is a moving, poignant reflection on love and loss, grief and growth.]]>
176 James Norbury 0063420716 Tay 0 to-read 3.91 2024 The Dog Who Followed the Moon: An Inspirational Story with Meditations on Life, Experience the Power of Love and Sacrifice
author: James Norbury
name: Tay
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Silverblood Promise (The Last Legacy, #1)]]> 212004901 When Lukan discovers that his estranged father has been murdered in strange circumstances, he finds fresh purpose. Deprived of his chance to make amends for his mistakes, he vows to unravel the mystery behind his father's death.
His search for answers leads him to Saphrona, fabled city of merchant princes, where anything can be bought if one has the coin. Lukan only seeks the truth, but instead he finds danger and secrets in every shadow.
For in Saphrona, everything has a price - and the price of truth is the deadliest of all.]]>
608 James Logan 1529432820 Tay 4 4.02 2024 The Silverblood Promise (The Last Legacy, #1)
author: James Logan
name: Tay
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2024/12/23
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3.5 rounded up. This took me quite a bit longer than I expected. A fun, adventurous heist novel. I think the book suffered a bit from "fantasy author throws 500 different names and places at you very early" syndrome, but I was fine after a while. Lukan, the main character, was one of my least favorites, but Flea and Ashra were great. I admit, most of the way through, I really felt like this'd be a one and done for me, but the last 5-10% has me intrigued enough to want to see what happens next.
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<![CDATA[The Blackfire Blade (The Last Legacy, #2)]]> 215124421
But when Lukan’s past catches up with him, his key to the vault ends up in the hands of a mysterious thief known only as the Rook. As Lukan and his companions race to recover the key, they soon find themselves trapped in a web of murder and deceit. In desperation, Lukan requests the help of Lady Marni Volkova, scion to Korslakov’s most powerful family.

Yet Lady Marni has secrets of her own. Worse, she has plans for Lukan and his friends. Plans that involve a journey into Korslakov’s dark past, in search of a long-lost alchemical formula that could prove to be the city’s greatest discovery . . . or its destruction.]]>
James Logan Tay 0 to-read 5.00 2025 The Blackfire Blade (The Last Legacy, #2)
author: James Logan
name: Tay
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
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<![CDATA[Creep: Accusations and Confessions]]> 101161160 A ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection that tackles the pervasive, creeping oppression and toxicity that has wormed its way into society—in our books, schools, and homes, as well as the systems that perpetuate them—from the acclaimed author of Mean, and one of our fiercest, foremost explorers of intersectional Latinx identity.

A creep can be a singular figure, a villain who makes things go bump in the night. Yet creep is also what the fog does—it lurks into place to do its dirty work, muffling screams, obscuring the truth, and providing cover for those prowling within it.

Creep is Myriam Gurba’s informal sociology of creeps, a deep dive into the dark recesses of the toxic traditions that plague the United States and create the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes. Through cultural criticism disguised as personal essay, Gurba studies the ways in which oppression is collectively enacted, sustaining ecosystems that unfairly distribute suffering and premature death to our most vulnerable. Yet identifying individual creeps, creepy social groups, and creepy cultures is only half of this book’s project—the other half is examining how we as individuals, communities, and institutions can challenge creeps and rid ourselves of the fog that seeks to blind us.

With her ruthless mind, wry humor, and adventurous style, Gurba implicates everyone from Joan Didion to her former abuser, everything from Mexican stereotypes to the carceral state. Braiding her own history and identity throughout, she argues for a new way of conceptualizing oppression, and she does it with her signature blend of bravado and humility.]]>
331 Myriam Gurba 198218647X Tay 0 to-read 4.32 2023 Creep: Accusations and Confessions
author: Myriam Gurba
name: Tay
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2023
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<![CDATA[There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension]]> 181346634
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it's basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.]]>
334 Hanif Abdurraqib 0593448790 Tay 0 to-read 4.33 2024 There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Tay
average rating: 4.33
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<![CDATA[All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess]]> 127282281 A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as mindfulness, decluttering, David Cronenberg, and consent.

In her debut essay collection, “brilliant and stylish� (The Washington Post) critic Becca Rothfeld takes on one of the most sacred cows of our time: the demand that we apply the virtues of equality and democracy to culture and aesthetics. The result is a culture that is flattened and sanitized, purged of ugliness, excess, and provocation.

Our embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished. We see it in our homes, where we bring in Marie Kondo to rid them of their idiosyncrasies and darknesses. We take up mindfulness to do the same thing to our heads, emptying them of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are. In the bedroom, a new wave of puritanism has drained sex of its unpredictability and therefore true eroticism. In our fictions, the quest for balance has given us protagonists who aspire only to excise their appetites. We have flipped our values, Rothfeld argues: while the gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, we strive to compensate with egalitarianism in art, erotics, and taste, where it does not belong and where it quashes wild experiments and exuberance.

Lush, provocative, and bitingly funny, All Things Are Too Small is a subversive soul cry to restore imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment to all domains of our lives.]]>
304 Becca Rothfeld 1250849918 Tay 0 to-read 3.60 2024 All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
author: Becca Rothfeld
name: Tay
average rating: 3.60
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<![CDATA[Something in the Woods Loves You]]> 204593663 An inspiring blend of nature writing and memoir that explores nature’s crucial role in our emotional and mental health. Bats can hear shapes, plants can eat light, and bees can dance maps.When his life took him to a painfully dark place, the poet behind The Cryptonaturalist, Jarod K. Anderson, found comfort and redemption in these facts and the shift in perspective that comes from paying a new kind of attention to nature.Something in the Woods Loves Youtells the story of the darkest stretch of a young person’s life, and how deliberate and meditative encounters with plants and animals helped him see the light at every turn. Ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of a single mushroom, Anderson has written a lyrical love letter to the natural world and given us the tools to see it all anew.]]> 368 Jarod K. Anderson 1643262297 Tay 0 to-read 4.34 2024 Something in the Woods Loves You
author: Jarod K. Anderson
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average rating: 4.34
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<![CDATA[Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures]]> 52668915
Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.

In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence�, and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web�, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.

Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.]]>
352 Merlin Sheldrake 0525510311 Tay 0 to-read 4.34 2020 Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
author: Merlin Sheldrake
name: Tay
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2020
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Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]>
272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Tay 0 to-read 3.89 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Tay
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth]]> 141310682 ‘The best case I've read for putting an upper limit on the accumulation of wealth� Richard WilkinsonNo-one deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you. We all notice when the poor get when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately.In this astonishing, eye-opening intervention, world-leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control. In moral, political, economic, social, environmental and psychological terms, she shows, extreme wealth is not only unjustifiable but harmful to us all - the rich included.In place of our current system, Robeyns offers a breathtakingly clear limitarianism. The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism - and the opportunity for a vastly better world - lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. Because nobody deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you.]]> 336 Ingrid Robeyns 0241578191 Tay 0 to-read 4.03 2023 Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
author: Ingrid Robeyns
name: Tay
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
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The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

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

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]>
490 Liz Moore Tay 0 to-read 4.16 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Tay
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
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Life and Fate 88432 Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war.

Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece.

Librarian's Note: This is an alternative cover edition of ISBN13: 9780099506164]]>
864 Vasily Grossman Tay 0 to-read 4.42 1960 Life and Fate
author: Vasily Grossman
name: Tay
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1960
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Mercy of Gods (The Captive’s War #1)]]> 201930181
Caught up in academic intrigue and affairs of the heart, Dafyd Alkhor is pleased just to be an assistant to a brilliant scientist and his celebrated research team. Then the Carryx ships descend, decimating the human population and taking the best and brightest of Anjiin society away to serve on the Carryx homeworld, and Dafyd is swept along with them. They are dropped in the middle of a struggle they barely understand, set in a competition against the other captive species with extinction as the price of failure.

Only Dafyd and a handful of his companions see past the Darwinian contest to the deeper game that they must play to learning to understand � and manipulate � the Carryx themselves. With a noble but suicidal human rebellion on one hand and strange and murderous enemies on the other, the team pays a terrible price to become the trusted servants of their new rulers. Dafyd Alkhor is a simple man swept up in events that are beyond his control and more vast than his imagination. He will become the champion of humanity and its betrayer, the most hated man in history and the guardian of his people. This is where his story begins.]]>
422 James S.A. Corey 031652557X Tay 0 to-read 4.11 2024 The Mercy of Gods (The Captive’s War #1)
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average rating: 4.11
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<![CDATA[A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity]]> 150276510
This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.

After setting the scene in the Middle East of late antiquity, the book depicts the rise of Islam as one of the great black swan events of history. It continues with the spectacular rise of the Caliphate, an empire that by the time it broke up had nurtured the formation of a new civilization. The book then goes on to cover the diverse histories of all the major regions of the Muslim world, providing a wide-ranging account of the major military, political, and cultural developments that accompanied the eastward and westward spread of Islam from the Middle East to the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

At the same time, A History of the Muslim World deploys numerous quotations deriving from primary sources that expose the reader to a variety of acutely insightful voices from the Muslim past.]]>
960 Michael A. Cook 0691236577 Tay 0 to-read 3.96 A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity
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<![CDATA[The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium]]> 62366632 1160 Anthony Kaldellis 0197549322 Tay 0 to-read 4.55 2023 The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium
author: Anthony Kaldellis
name: Tay
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2023
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<![CDATA[The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore]]> 201751300 An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations

Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In The Bookshop, we see those stakes: what has been, and what might be lost.

Evan Friss’s history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including The Strand, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who appeared to sign books at Marshall Field’s in 1944.

The Bookshop is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life—and why we still need them.]]>
416 Evan Friss 0593299922 Tay 0 to-read 3.93 2024 The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
author: Evan Friss
name: Tay
average rating: 3.93
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<![CDATA[The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement]]> 203956674 America’s favorite government teacher offers thrilling, heartfelt stories of ordinary American heroes.Most pundits and historians sell a dangerously naïve version of the American story—either praising its most consequential figures uncritically or criticizing them unfairly.Sharon McMahon believes the truth is more human. In her debut book The Small and the Mighty, she tells the inpiring stories of twelve Americans--regular people with human foibles--whose extraordinary heroism in the face of mounting trials created the character of our country.With the same clarity and candor that's earned her millions of fans, McMahon follows the daughter of formerly enslaved parents who sparked a reformation in Black education, a Japanese immigrant who nearly died in combat and became a consequential Senator, and even the electrician who saved her husband’s life. Her unforgettable prose and meticulous research tell the story of America from the perspective of the unsung heroes whose devotion to their country will restore your faith in the American dream.The portraits of our nation’s most improbable champions, innovators, and rebels in this book celebrate the United States and reveal our common humanity. The Small and the Mighty is the encouragement we all need in an age of doomscrolling and division.]]> 320 Sharon McMahon 0593541677 Tay 0 to-read 4.45 2024 The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement
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Martyr! 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]>
331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Tay 0 to-read 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
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Surviving Autocracy 50695164 A bestselling, National Book Award-winning journalist's essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Masha Gessen stood out from other journalists for the ability to convey the ominous significance of Donald Trump's speech and behavior, unprecedented in a national candidate. Within forty-eight hours of his victory, the essay "Autocracy: Rules for Survival" had gone viral, and Gessen's coverage of his norm-smashing presidency became essential reading for a citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Gessen has a sixth sense for signs of autocracy--and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate its emergence to Americans. This incisive book provides an indispensable overview of the calamitous trajectory of the past few years. Gessen not only highlights the corrosion of the media, the judiciary, and the cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years have changed us, from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages but also a beacon to recovery--or to enduring, and resisting, an ongoing assault.]]>
288 Masha Gessen 0593188934 Tay 0 to-read 4.15 2020 Surviving Autocracy
author: Masha Gessen
name: Tay
average rating: 4.15
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<![CDATA[How Europe Underdeveloped Africa]]> 40630 The decisiveness of the short period of colonialism and its negative consequences for Africa spring mainly from the fact that Africa lost power. Power is the ultimate determinant in human society, being basic to the relations within any group and between groups. It implies the ability to defend one's interests and if necessary to impose one’s will by any means available. In relations between peoples, the question of power determines maneuverability in bargaining, the extent to which a people survive as a physical and cultural entity. When one society finds itself forced to relinquish power entirely to another society, that in itself is a form of underdevelopment.
Before a bomb ended his life in the summer of 1980, Walter Rodney had created a powerful legacy. This pivotal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, had already brought a new perspective to the question of underdevelopment in Africa. his Marxist analysis went far beyond the heretofore accepted approach in the study of Third World underdevelopment. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an excellent introductory study for the student who wishes to better understand the dynamics of Africa’s contemporary relations with the West.]]>
312 Walter Rodney 0882580965 Tay 0 to-read 4.43 1971 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
author: Walter Rodney
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average rating: 4.43
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<![CDATA[A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance]]> 49247757 A stirring meditation on Black performance in America from the New York Times bestselling author of Go Ahead in the Rain

At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was fifty-seven years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,� she told the crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds in “Gimme Shelter� in which Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,� a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance.

Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain, infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians he loves. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space—from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.]]>
301 Hanif Abdurraqib 1984801198 Tay 0 to-read 4.60 2021 A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
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<![CDATA[They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us]]> 33947154
In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of black Americans, Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car.

In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—along with original, previously unreleased essays—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.]]>
291 Hanif Abdurraqib Tay 0 currently-reading 4.57 2017 They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
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average rating: 4.57
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The Reformatory 128747206 A gloriously creepy Deep South horror story based on the infamous Dozier School for boys, perfect for fans of The Only Good Indians and Nothing But Blackened Teeth.

Jim Crow Florida, 1950. Twelve-year-old Robert Stephens Jr., who for a trivial scuffle with a white boy is sent to The Gracetown School for Boys. But the segregated reformatory is a chamber of horrors, haunted by the boys that have died there. In order to survive the school governor and his Funhouse, Robert must enlistthe help of the school's ghosts � only they have their own motivations...]]>
601 Tananarive Due 1803366532 Tay 5 4.54 2023 The Reformatory
author: Tananarive Due
name: Tay
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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Damn, this was HEAVY. What a brutal yet phenomenal read. Ghosts aren't the horrors of this book, people are. The way Tananarive Due describes the terror of the Jim Crow South for Black people is so vivid and awful, you will be sickened. While the book itself is fiction, the system of oppression definitely was not. This book is begging to be made into a movie or T.V. series, and I will eagerly watch it when it is. Fantastic, fantastic novel.
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<![CDATA[How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America]]> 52048467
To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy.

Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.
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272 Heather Cox Richardson 0190900903 Tay 0 to-read 4.25 2020 How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America
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<![CDATA[Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877]]> 132913 New Republic) made history when it was originally published in 1988. It redefined how Reconstruction was viewed by historians and people everywhere in its chronicling of how Americans -- black and white -- responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) has since gone on to become the classic work on the wrenching post-Civil War period -- an era whose legacy reverberates still today in the United States.]]> 690 Eric Foner 0060937165 Tay 0 to-read 4.18 1988 Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877
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<![CDATA[The Strange Career of Jim Crow]]> 97484 C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most eminent Southern historian, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Mary Chestnut's Civil War and a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. Now, to honor his long and truly distinguished career, Oxford is pleased to publish this special commemorative edition of Woodward's most influential work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region.

Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a landmark in the history of American race relations."

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245 C. Vann Woodward 0195146905 Tay 0 to-read 4.12 1955 The Strange Career of Jim Crow
author: C. Vann Woodward
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<![CDATA[Of Blood and Fire (The Bound and the Broken, #1)]]> 56750401 Born in fire. Tempered in blood.

Epheria is a land divided by war and mistrust. The High Lords of the south squabble and fight, only kept in check by the Dragonguard, traitors of a time long past, who serve the empire of the North.

In the remote villages of southern Epheria, still reeling from the tragic loss of his brother, Calen Bryer prepares for The Proving—a test of courage and skill that not all survive.

But when three strangers arrive in the village of Milltown, with a secret they are willing to die for, Calen’s world is ripped from under him and he is thrust headfirst into a war that has been raging for centuries.

There is no prophecy. His coming was not foretold.

He bleeds like any man, and bleed he will.
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541 Ryan Cahill Tay 0 to-read 4.09 2021 Of Blood and Fire (The Bound and the Broken, #1)
author: Ryan Cahill
name: Tay
average rating: 4.09
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<![CDATA[The Fall (The Bound and the Broken, #0.5)]]> 136017402
The City of Ilnaen is on fire.
Dragons fill the skies.
Traitors fill the streets.

The Fall is a prequel novella that takes place four hundred years before the events in Of Blood and Fire � book one in The Bound and The Broken series.]]>
95 Ryan Cahill Tay 0 to-read 4.13 2020 The Fall (The Bound and the Broken, #0.5)
author: Ryan Cahill
name: Tay
average rating: 4.13
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Howling Dark (Sun Eater, #2) 41564599
Hadrian Marlowe is lost.

For half a century, he has searched the farther suns for the lost planet of Vorgossos, hoping to find a way to contact the elusive alien Cielcin. He has not succeeded, and for years has wandered among the barbarian Normans as captain of a band of mercenaries.

Determined to make peace and bring an end to nearly four hundred years of war, Hadrian must venture beyond the security of the Sollan Empire and among the Extrasolarians who dwell between the stars. There, he will face not only the aliens he has come to offer peace, but contend with creatures that once were human, with traitors in his midst, and with a meeting that will bring him face to face with no less than the oldest enemy of mankind.

If he succeeds, he will usher in a peace unlike any in recorded history. If he fails...the galaxy will burn.]]>
688 Christopher Ruocchio Tay 0 to-read 4.35 2019 Howling Dark (Sun Eater, #2)
author: Christopher Ruocchio
name: Tay
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2019
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<![CDATA[Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin]]> 6572270
Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.

From Booklist
If there is an explanation for the political killing perpetrated in eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, historian Snyder roots it in agriculture. Stalin wanted to collectivize farmers; Hitler wanted to eliminate them so Germans could colonize the land. The dictators wielded frightening power to advance such fantasies toward reality, and the despots toted up about 14 million corpses between them, so stupefying a figure that Snyder sets himself three goals here: to break down the number into the various actions of murder that comprise it, from liquidation of the kulaks to the final solution; to restore humanity to the victims via surviving testimony to their fates; and to deny Hitler and Stalin any historical justification for their policies, which at the time had legions of supporters and have some even today. Such scope may render Snyder’s project too imposing to casual readers, but it would engage those exposed to the period’s chronology and major interpretive issues, such as the extent to which the Nazi and Soviet systems may be compared. Solid and judicious scholarship for large WWII collections.]]>
524 Timothy Snyder 0465002390 Tay 0 to-read 4.37 2010 Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
author: Timothy Snyder
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average rating: 4.37
book published: 2010
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<![CDATA[The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz]]> 51187948
On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold the country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally-and willing to fight to the end.

In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless." It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it's also an intimate domestic drama set against the backdrop of Churchill's prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London.

Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports-some released only recently-Larson provides a new lens on London's darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents' wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela's illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the cadre of close advisers who comprised Churchill's "Secret Circle," including his lovestruck private secretary, John Colville; newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook; and the Rasputin-like Frederick Lindemann.

The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today's political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when-in the face of unrelenting horror-Churchill's eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together."--]]>
546 Erik Larson 038534872X Tay 0 to-read 4.30 2020 The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
author: Erik Larson
name: Tay
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2020
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The Sword of Kaigen 202943439 A son struggling to grasp his violent future,
A father blind to the danger that threatens them all.

When the winds of war reach their peninsula, will the Matsuda family have the strength to defend their empire? Or will they tear each other apart before the true enemies even reach their shores?

High on a mountainside at the edge of the Kaigenese Empire live the most powerful warriors in the world, superhumans capable of raising the sea and wielding blades of ice. For hundreds of years, the fighters of the Kusanagi Peninsula have held the Empire’s enemies at bay, earning their frozen spit of land the name ‘The Sword of Kaigen.�

Born into Kusanagi’s legendary Matsuda family, fourteen-year-old Mamoru has always known his purpose: to master his family’s fighting techniques and defend his homeland. But when an outsider arrives and pulls back the curtain on Kaigen’s alleged age of peace, Mamoru realizes that he might not have much time to become the fighter he was bred to be. Worse, the empire he was bred to defend may stand on a foundation of lies.

Misaki told herself that she left the passions of her youth behind when she married into the Matsuda house. Determined to be a good housewife and mother, she hid away her sword, along with everything from her days as a fighter in a faraway country. But with her growing son asking questions about the outside world, the threat of an impending invasion looming across the sea, and her frigid husband grating on her nerves, Misaki finds the fighter in her clawing its way back to the surface.]]>
720 M.L. Wang 1739478711 Tay 4 4.63 2019 The Sword of Kaigen
author: M.L. Wang
name: Tay
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/23
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I enjoyed this book, but I enjoyed Blood Over Bright Haven much, much more. I do applaud M.L. Wang for making some pretty bold (and shocking) narrative choices here, but many of the overarching plot points were left unresolved (I guess there were going to be more books in this world, but she decided against it). I wasn't quite as enamored with this as most people seem to be, but it was still a good read, and I look forward to reading pretty much anything M.L. Wang comes out with next.
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<![CDATA[The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief]]> 23992445
The Wild Edge of Sorrowexplains that grief has always been communal and illustrates how we need the healing touch of others, an atmosphere of compassion, and the comfort of ritual in order to fully metabolize our grief. Weller describes how we often hide our pain from the world, wrapping it in a secret mantle of shame. This causes sorrow to linger unexpressed in our bodies, weighing us down and pulling us into the territory of depression and death. We have come to fear grief and feel too alone to face an encounter with the powerful energies of sorrow.

Those who work with people in grief, who have experienced the loss of a loved one, who mourn the ongoing destruction of our planet, or who suffer the accumulated traumas of a lifetime will appreciate the discussion of obstacles to successful grief work such as privatized pain, lack of communal rituals, a pervasive feeling of fear, and a culturally restrictive range of emotion. Weller highlights the intimate bond between grief and gratitude, sorrow and intimacy. In addition to showing us that the greatest gifts are often hidden in the things we avoid, he offers powerful tools and rituals and a list of resources to help us transform grief into a force that allows us to live and love more fully.


From the Trade Paperback edition.]]>
224 Francis Weller 1583949755 Tay 0 to-read 4.37 2015 The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
author: Francis Weller
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average rating: 4.37
book published: 2015
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Carmilla 48037
But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day� Pre-dating Dracula by twenty-six years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in sexual tension and gothic romance.]]>
108 J. Sheridan Le Fanu 0809510839 Tay 0 to-read 3.88 1872 Carmilla
author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu
name: Tay
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1872
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<![CDATA[Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI]]> 204927599 From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite allour discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.]]>
528 Yuval Noah Harari 059373422X Tay 0 to-read 4.14 2024 Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: Tay
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/13
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Playground 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

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

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]>
381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Tay 0 to-read 4.16 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: Tay
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Nine Princes in Amber (The Chronicles of Amber, #1)]]> 92121 175 Roger Zelazny 0380014300 Tay 0 to-read 4.07 1970 Nine Princes in Amber (The Chronicles of Amber, #1)
author: Roger Zelazny
name: Tay
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/09
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The Demon Princes 40885 Vols 1 & 2 : 'The Star King' , 'The Killing Machine' , 'The Palace of Love' , 'The Face ' , 'The Book of Dreams']]> 965 Jack Vance 0739451030 Tay 0 to-read 4.30 1986 The Demon Princes
author: Jack Vance
name: Tay
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/09
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<![CDATA[Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?]]> 29164016 From the bestselling author of What's the Matter With Kansas, a scathing look at the standard-bearers of liberal politics -- a book that asks: what's the matter with Democrats?

It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course.

But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.

With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America.

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324 Thomas Frank 1627795405 Tay 0 to-read 4.25 2016 Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
author: Thomas Frank
name: Tay
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/29
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The Geek Feminist Revolution 26792189
The Geek Feminist Revolution is a collection of essays by double Hugo Award-winning essayist and science fiction and fantasy novelist Kameron Hurley.

The book collects dozens of Hurley’s essays on feminism, geek culture, and her experiences and insights as a genre writer, including “We Have Always Fought,� which won the 2014 Hugo for Best Related Work. The Geek Feminist Revolution will also feature several entirely new essays written specifically for this volume.

Unapologetically outspoken, Hurley has contributed essays to The Atlantic, Locus, Tor.com, and elsewhere on the rise of women in genre, her passion for SF/F, and the diversification of publishing.]]>
285 Kameron Hurley 0765386259 Tay 0 did-not-finish 3.97 2016 The Geek Feminist Revolution
author: Kameron Hurley
name: Tay
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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Billy Summers 56883591
How about everything.

This spectacular can’t-put-it-down novel is part war story, part love letter to small town America and the people who live there, and it features one of the most compelling and surprising duos in King fiction, who set out to avenge the crimes of an extraordinarily evil man. It’s about love, luck, fate, and a complex hero with one last shot at redemption.

You won’t put this story down, and you won’t forget Billy.]]>
528 Stephen King 1982173637 Tay 5 4.47 2021 Billy Summers
author: Stephen King
name: Tay
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/06
date added: 2024/09/27
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4.5, rounded up. This book was excellent! Stephen King's still got it, baby! 500+ pages that absolutely flew by. Stephen King still does characterization so insanely well. I preferred The Institute, but Billy Summers is a fast-paced, energetic rollercoaster of a book. Definitely recommended.
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Bury Your Gays 200780517 From the USA Today bestselling author of Camp Damascus, comes a new heart-pounding story about what it takes to succeed in a world that wants you dead.

Misha is a jaded scriptwriter working in Hollywood, and he's seen it all. All the toxic personalities and coverups, the structural obstructions to reform, even dead actors brought back to screen by CGI � and finally, maybe, the hint of change.

But having just been nominated for his first Oscar, Misha is pressured by his producers to kill off a gay character in the upcoming season finale�"for the algorithm"—on the same day he witnesses to gruesome death-by-piano of treasured animator (and notorious creep) Raymond Nelson.

Success, it seems, isn't the answer to everything.

With the help of his best friend and paranoid database queen, Tara, and his boyfriend, Zeke, Misha has face down his traumatic childhood and past mistakes. But in a paranoid industry that thinks nothing of killing off talent, it's not so simple to find a way to do what's right.]]>
351 Chuck Tingle 1803365196 Tay 2 4.12 2024 Bury Your Gays
author: Chuck Tingle
name: Tay
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/26
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I really wanted to like this. I really, really did. Some good, scary moments, but my god, the prose was just awful. At least it was a quick, easy read. This was not for me.
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<![CDATA[Lords of Uncreation (The Final Architecture #3)]]> 62909156 The Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author of Children of Time brings us the third and finalnovel in an extraordinary space opera trilogy about humanity on the brink of extinction, and how one man's discovery will save or destroy us all.


Copy tk


The Final Architecture
Shards of Earth
Eyes of the Void
Lords of Uncreation
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592 Adrian Tchaikovsky 0316705950 Tay 5 4.50 2023 Lords of Uncreation (The Final Architecture #3)
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Tay
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/19
date added: 2024/09/21
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4.5 easily rounded up! Such a satisfying conclusion to a fantastic series. There was a plot line throughout the first third of the book which felt a little underwhelming, and could've been shorter, but once that wrapped up, we got back to what makes this series so wonderful: over-the-top, epic-in-scope, ass-kicking space opera goodness. I really am having a hard time deciding on who exactly was my favorite character, but I think it's a three-way tossup between Mundy, Olli, and Kit. The characters in these books are so uniquely human, even if they're aliens, or sentient AI cockroaches. I would love, love, love to see more stories set in this universe.
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<![CDATA[Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution]]> 58228943 MSNBC legal commentator Elie Mystal thinks that Republicans are wrong about the law almost all of the time. Now, instead of talking about this on cable news, Mystal explains why in his first book.

"After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don't understand--quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer . . ." --Michael Harriot, The Root

Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.

Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.

You don't need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don't need to accept the "whites only" theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn't have to be.]]>
276 Elie Mystal 1620976900 Tay 0 to-read 4.68 2022 Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution
author: Elie Mystal
name: Tay
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/20
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These Violent Delights 49203397 The Secret History meets Call Me by Your Name in Micah Nemerever's compulsively enjoyable debut novel - a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence.

When Paul and Julian meet as university freshmen in early 1970s Pittsburgh, they are immediately drawn to one another. A talented artist, Paul is sensitive and agonizingly insecure, incomprehensible to his working-class family, and desolate with grief over his father's recent death. Paul sees his wealthy, effortlessly charming Julian as his sole intellectual equal - an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. He idolizes his friend for his magnetic confidence. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian also is volatile and capriciously cruel. An admiration isn't the same as trust.

As their friendship spirals into an all-consuming intimacy, Paul is desperate to protect their precarious bond, even as it becomes clear that pressures from the outside world are nothing compared with the brutality they are capable of inflicting on one another. Separation is out of the question. But as their orbit compresses and their grip on one another tightens, they are drawn to an act of irrevocable violence that will force the young men to confront a shattering truth at the core of their relationship.

Exquisitely plotted, unfolding with propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is a novel of escalating dread and an excavation of the unsettling depths of human desire.]]>
460 Micah Nemerever 0062963635 Tay 0 to-read 3.96 2020 These Violent Delights
author: Micah Nemerever
name: Tay
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Thousand Names (The Shadow Campaigns, #1)]]> 15810910
Captain Marcus d’Ivoire, commander of one of the Vordanai empire’s colonial garrisons, was resigned to serving out his days in a sleepy, remote outpost. But that was before a rebellion upended his life. And once the powder smoke settled, he was left in charge of a demoralized force clinging tenuously to a small fortress at the edge of the desert.

To flee from her past, Winter Ihernglass masqueraded as a man and enlisted as a ranker in the Vordanai Colonials, hoping only to avoid notice. But when chance sees her promoted to command, she must win the hearts of her men and lead them into battle against impossible odds.

The fates of both these soldiers and all the men they lead depend on the newly arrived Colonel Janus bet Vhalnich, who has been sent by the ailing king to restore order. His military genius seems to know no bounds, and under his command, Marcus and Winter can feel the tide turning. But their allegiance will be tested as they begin to suspect that the enigmatic Janus’s ambitions extend beyond the battlefield and into the realm of the supernatural—a realm with the power to ignite a meteoric rise, reshape the known world, and change the lives of everyone in its path.]]>
513 Django Wexler 0451465105 Tay 0 to-read 4.03 2013 The Thousand Names (The Shadow Campaigns, #1)
author: Django Wexler
name: Tay
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[We'll Prescribe You a Cat (We'll Prescribe You a Cat, #1)]]> 209891170 A cat a day keeps the doctor away�.

Discover this utterly charming, vibrant celebration of the healing power of cats in the award-winning, bestselling Japanese novel that has become an international sensation.

Tucked away on the fifth floor of an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Nakagyō Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can be found only by people who are struggling in their lives and who genuinely need help. The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way there: it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take� their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, and occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.

Throughout these pages, the power of the human-animal bond is revealed as a disheartened businessman finds unexpected joy in physical labor, a middle-aged man struggles to stay relevant at work and home, a young girl navigates the complexities of elementary school cliques, a hardened handbag designer seeks emotional balance, and a geisha learns to move on from the memory of her lost cat. As the clinic’s patients grapple with their inner turmoil and seek resolution, their feline companions lead them toward healing, self-discovery, and newfound hope.]]>
297 Syou Ishida 0593818741 Tay 0 to-read 3.78 2023 We'll Prescribe You a Cat (We'll Prescribe You a Cat, #1)
author: Syou Ishida
name: Tay
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Yumi and the Nightmare Painter]]> 60531416 #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson brings us a gripping story set in the Cosmere universe told by Hoid, where two people from incredibly different worlds must compromise and work together to save their worlds from ruin.

Yumi comes from a land of gardens, meditation, and spirits, while Painter lives in a world of darkness, technology, and nightmares. When their lives suddenly become intertwined in strange ways, can they put aside their differences and work together to uncover the mysteries of their situation and save each other’s communities from certain disaster?]]>
480 Brandon Sanderson 1938570375 Tay 0 to-read 4.46 2023 Yumi and the Nightmare Painter
author: Brandon Sanderson
name: Tay
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Designing Regenerative Cultures]]> 28863170 288 Daniel Christian Wahl 1909470775 Tay 0 to-read 4.21 Designing Regenerative Cultures
author: Daniel Christian Wahl
name: Tay
average rating: 4.21
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date added: 2024/09/11
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<![CDATA[A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America]]> 197877738
Red America and Blue America are so divided they could be two different countries, with wildly diverging views of why government exists and who counts as American. Their ideologies are grounded in different versions of American history, endorsing irreconcilable visions of patriotism and national identity.

A Great Disorder is a bold, urgent work that helps us make sense of today’s culture wars through a brilliant reconsideration of America’s foundational myths and their use in contemporary politics. Famous for his trilogy on the Myth of the Frontier, Richard Slotkin identifies five myths, born of different eras, that have shaped our conception of what it means to be the myths of the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War (which he breaks into two opposing camps, Emancipation and the Lost Cause), and the Good War, embodied by the multiethnic platoon fighting for freedom. His argument is that while Trump and his MAGA followers have played up a frontier-inspired hostility to the federal government and rallied around Confederate symbols to champion a racially exclusive definition of American nationality, Blue America, taking its cue from the protest movements of the 1960s, envisions a limitlessly pluralistic country in which the federal government is the ultimate enforcer of rights and opportunities. American history―and the foundations of our democracy―have become a battleground. It is not clear at this time which vision will prevail.]]>
528 Richard Slotkin 0674292383 Tay 0 to-read 4.14 2024 A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America
author: Richard Slotkin
name: Tay
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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Revival 34466886 People) in this electrifying #1 New York Times bestseller!

The new minister came to Harlow, Maine, when Jamie Morton was a boy doing battle with his toy army men on the front lawn. The young Reverend Charles Jacobs and his beautiful wife brought new life to the local church and captivated their congregation. But with Jamie, he shares a secret obsession—a draw so powerful, it would have profound consequences five decades after the shattering tragedy that turned the preacher against God, and long after his final, scathing sermon. Now Jamie, a nomadic rock guitarist hooked on heroin, meets Charles Jacobs again. And when their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil’s devising, Jamie discovers that the word revival has many meanings�.]]>
466 Stephen King 1501168908 Tay 4 3.85 2014 Revival
author: Stephen King
name: Tay
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
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3.5 rounded up. This was pretty good, but not King's best. Not even close. Much of this novel felt like it should've been left on the cutting room floor, and it wasn't long at all by King's standards. The first 80% of this novel is a 3-star, and the last 20% is a 5-star. I wish we could've explored more of the, you know, actually interesting spooky stuff, for longer than we got to.
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<![CDATA[Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures]]> 12479311 79 Garth Nix Tay 5 4.12 2011 Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures
author: Garth Nix
name: Tay
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/09/08
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Absolutely loved this novella. It has that typical Garth Nix style I had grown to love after reading The Old Kingdom trilogy, but this novella is written in a slightly more Victorian fashion. Great story, unique characters, and a captivating (albeit short) plot. Mr. Nix, turn this into a full-length work!
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<![CDATA[Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh]]> 23281022 Aberration in the Heartland, Painting explores Cold War popular culture, all-American apocalyptic fervor, organized racism, contentious politics, militarism, warfare, conspiracy theories, bioethical controversies, mind control, the media's construction of villains and demons, and institutional secrecy and cover-ups. All these stories are examined, compared, and tested in Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, making this book a much closer examination into the personality and life of Timothy McVeigh than has been provided by any other biographical work about him.]]> 720 Wendy S. Painting 1634240030 Tay 0 to-read 4.56 2015 Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh
author: Wendy S. Painting
name: Tay
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/07
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<![CDATA[Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery]]> 56179372 Set in Colonial New England, Slewfoot is a tale of magic and mystery, of triumph and terror as only dark fantasist Brom can tell it.

A spirited young Englishwoman, Abitha, arrives at a Puritan colony betrothed to a stranger � only to become quickly widowed when her husband dies under mysterious circumstances. All alone in this pious and patriarchal society, Abitha fights for what little freedom she can grasp onto, while trying to stay true to herself and her past.

Enter Slewfoot, a powerful spirit of antiquity newly woken ... and trying to find his own role in the world. Healer or destroyer? Protector or predator? But as the shadows walk and villagers start dying, a new rumor is whispered: Witch.

Both Abitha and Slewfoot must swiftly decide who they are, and what they must do to survive in a world intent on hanging any who meddle in the dark arts.

Complete with 8 pages of Brom’s mesmerizing full-color artwork and chapter illustrations throughout, his latest book is sure to delight.]]>
305 Brom 125062200X Tay 0 to-read 4.23 2021 Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery
author: Brom
name: Tay
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/02
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<![CDATA[Evening in the Palace of Reason]]> 275879 Evening in the Palace of Reason captures the tumult of the eighteenth century, the legacy of the Reformation, and the birth of the Enlightenment in this extraordinary tale of two men.]]> 336 James R. Gaines 0007156618 Tay 0 to-read 4.08 2005 Evening in the Palace of Reason
author: James R. Gaines
name: Tay
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/28
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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.]]>
512 Stephen King 1668037718 Tay 0 to-read 4.16 2024 You Like It Darker
author: Stephen King
name: Tay
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/26
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The Day after Oblivion 35157285 AND SO IT BEGINS�
In the United States, the Department of Defense and the NSA computer networks have been hacked. A nuclear-armed CIA drone has lost all flight control. North Korea . . . Iran . . . Russia . . . and soon the gates of Hell will open.

DEFCON 1—FULL SCALE NUCLEAR WAR
Humanity’s most terrifying nightmare has become reality. Bombs are detonated, missiles are launched, counterstrikes are ordered, and within minutes, untold thousands of megatons have left countless millions dead or dying. Devastation of biblical proportions has fallen over the land . . . and the USA has been hit the hardest.

NOW THE SURVIVORS ARE ON THEIR OWN�
The death toll is incalculable. Following the devastation, there is no law, no power, no communication. But there are survivors. And now the real battle begins, on the ground, hand to hand, person to person. Can those who remain survive long enough to rebuild a world . . . or will it just take a little longer for them to die?

“Leaves you breathless.�—Marc Cameron, bestselling author of National Security and Day Zero

“Like a nuclear reactor, this story heats up fast!�—Anderson Harp, author of Retribution and Born of War (on Powerless)]]>
561 Tim Washburn 0786042516 Tay 0 to-read 4.20 2018 The Day after Oblivion
author: Tim Washburn
name: Tay
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us]]> 209527753 228 Anna Bogutskaya 0571385788 Tay 0 to-read 3.99 2024 Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us
author: Anna Bogutskaya
name: Tay
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/24
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<![CDATA[A Brief History of Neoliberalism]]> 183033 247 David Harvey 0199283273 Tay 0 to-read 4.14 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism
author: David Harvey
name: Tay
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/19
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Stephen King's N. 7006562 112 Marc Guggenheim 0785134530 Tay 0 to-read 4.26 2008 Stephen King's N.
author: Marc Guggenheim
name: Tay
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[Last Argument Of Kings (The First Law #3)]]> 19302986 740 Joe Abercrombie Tay 3 /review/show...

The third book is easily my least favorite. Specifically, somehow all of the characters seemed to become the worst versions of themselves possible. As a reader, this sort of anti-payoff just did not feel satisfying at all. Abercrombie's writing is great, and I'm still interested in this world, and while the book itself had plenty of enjoyable moments, it was overall a relatively disappointing end to this series. Just OK.]]>
4.27 2008 Last Argument Of Kings (The First Law #3)
author: Joe Abercrombie
name: Tay
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves:
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I agree with much of Ethan's review here: /review/show...

The third book is easily my least favorite. Specifically, somehow all of the characters seemed to become the worst versions of themselves possible. As a reader, this sort of anti-payoff just did not feel satisfying at all. Abercrombie's writing is great, and I'm still interested in this world, and while the book itself had plenty of enjoyable moments, it was overall a relatively disappointing end to this series. Just OK.
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Blindsight (Firefall, #1) 48484 Two months since the stars fell...

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

Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.

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

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

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

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

But you’d give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them…]]>
384 Peter Watts 0765312182 Tay 0 to-read 4.01 2006 Blindsight (Firefall, #1)
author: Peter Watts
name: Tay
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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The Inverted World 142181 239 Christopher Priest 0060134216 Tay 0 to-read 3.94 1974 The Inverted World
author: Christopher Priest
name: Tay
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1974
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<![CDATA[The Metamorphosis and Other Stories]]> 7723 The Metamorphosis,� a story that is both harrowing and amusing, and a landmark of modern literature.

Bringing together some of Kafka’s finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the author’s artistry. �The Judgment,� which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and �The Stoker,� which became the first chapter of his novel Amerika, are here included. These two, along with �The Metamorphosis,� form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as “The Sons,� and they collectively present a devastating portrait of the modern family.

Also included are �In the Penal Colony,� a story of a torture machine and its operators and victims, and �A Hunger Artist,� about the absurdity of an artist trying to communicate with a misunderstanding public. Kafka’s lucid, succinct writing chronicles the labyrinthine complexities, the futility-laden horror, and the stifling oppressiveness that permeate his vision of modern life.]]>
224 Franz Kafka 1593080298 Tay 4 4.08 1915 The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
author: Franz Kafka
name: Tay
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1915
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction]]> 429983 250 Ursula K. Le Guin 0060168358 Tay 0 to-read 4.25 1979 The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
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average rating: 4.25
book published: 1979
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Middlemarch 19089 "People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are"

George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".]]>
912 George Eliot 0451529170 Tay 0 to-read 4.00 1872 Middlemarch
author: George Eliot
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average rating: 4.00
book published: 1872
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date added: 2024/08/01
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