en-US Tue, 13 May 2025 20:26:42 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 15839976 "I live for the dream that my children will be born free," she says. "That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them."

"I live for you," I say sadly.

Eo kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations.

Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.

But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.]]> 382 Pierce Brown 0345539788 Claire 2 Edit: after all these years, went back and finished this book. It was fine but I probably won’t finish the series. ]]> 4.26 2014
author: Pierce Brown
name: Claire
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/05/13
shelves:
review:
Stopped reading at 31% (Part III) because my loan expires tomorrow and I'm not interested enough at the moment to keep reading. I've heard enough good things about this series that I'll probably pick it up again sometime in the future.
Edit: after all these years, went back and finished this book. It was fine but I probably won’t finish the series.
]]> 208819132
When Azetla’s battalion is sent into the desert to catch a Sahr devil—one of the famously brutal inhabitants of the region—his tenuous position is threatened. He discovers that there is far more to this mission than catching a fiend. For the Emperor of Maurow, it is a way to prove that he fears nothing, not even devils. For the Emperor’s brother, it is a stepping-stone to rebellion. For Azetla it could be deadly either way, as he is cornered into choosing a side in the coming coup.

But the devil that Azetla finds in the desert is not what anyone expects or wants. As the conspiracy against the Emperor becomes entangled with the simmering ambitions of the desert tribes, Azetla must decide if he’s willing to strike a bargain with a devil in order to survive.

Naturally, she is not to be trusted. But then again, neither is he.]]> 374 J.L. Odom Claire 0 to-read 4.46
author: J.L. Odom
name: Claire
average rating: 4.46
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/11
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]]> 50666983
It’s 1942 and Willowjean “Will�� Parker is a scrappy circus runaway whose knife-throwing skills have just saved the life of New York’s best, and most unorthodox, private investigator, Lillian Pentecost. When the dapper detective summons Will a few days later, she doesn’t expect to be offered a life-changing proposition: Lillian’s multiple sclerosis means she can’t keep up with her old case load alone, so she wants to hire Will to be her right-hand woman. In return, Will is to receive a salary, room and board, and training in Lillian’s very particular art of investigation.

Three years later, Will and Lillian are on the Collins case: Abigail Collins was found bludgeoned to death with a crystal ball following a big, boozy Halloween party at her home—her body slumped in the same chair where her steel magnate husband shot himself the year before. With rumors flying that Abigail was bumped off by the vengeful spirit of her husband (who else could have gotten inside the locked room?), the family has tasked the detectives with finding answers where the police have failed.

But that’s easier said than done in a case that involves messages from the dead, a seductive spiritualist, and Becca Collins—the beautiful daughter of the deceased, who Will quickly starts falling for. When Will and Becca’s relationship dances beyond the professional, Will finds herself in dangerous territory, and discovers she may have become the murderer’s next target.]]> 321 Stephen Spotswood 0385546556 Claire 0 to-read 3.96 2020
author: Stephen Spotswood
name: Claire
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/08
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]]> 44778982 A lady never reveals the true extent of her decay...

Hannah Miles lives a quiet existence, helping her parents conduct research into a most terrible affliction - until a gruesome murder during her best friend's engagement party pulls her from the shadows. With her specialist's knowledge and demure disposition, Hannah is requested to aid the investigation.

Except Hannah discovers her role is to apologise in the wake of the rude and disgraced man tasked with finding the murderer. The obnoxious Viscount Wycliff thinks to employ Hannah purely as a front to satisfy Whitehall, but she'll have none of that.

The two must work together to find the murderer before the season is ruined. But the viscount is about to meet his greatest challenge, and it's not a member of the ton with a hankering for brains.]]> 320 Tilly Wallace Claire 0 currently-reading 3.97 2019
author: Tilly Wallace
name: Claire
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/08
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 216971220 What could accidentally moving into a house with thirty feral cats teach you about going viral, surviving capitalism, and the importance of community? Kind of a lot, actually.

When Courtney Gustafson moved into a rental house in the Poets Square neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, she didn’t know that the property came with thirty feral cats. Focused only on her own survival—in a new relationship, during a pandemic, with poor mental health and a job that didn’t pay enough—Courtney was reluctant to spend any of her own time or money caring for the wayward animals.��

But the cats—their pleading eyes, their ribs showing, the new kittens born in the driveway—didn’t give her a choice.��

She had no idea about the grief and hardship of animal rescue, the staggering size of the problem in neighborhoods across the country. And she couldn't have imagined how that struggle—towards an ethics of care, of individuals trying their best amidst spectacularly failing systems—would help pierce a personal darkness she'd wrestled for with much of her life. She also didn’t expect that the TikTok and Instagram accounts she created to share the quirky personalities of the wild, but lovable cats, like Mushroom Risotto, Bubbles, Goldie, and Sad Boy, would end up saving her home.

Courtney writes toward a vision of community—from the dark alleys where she feeds feral cats, from inside the tragically neglected homes where she climbs over piles of trash and occasionally animals, from her own driveway with the cats she loves and must sometimes let go. Compelling and tender, Poets Square is as much about cats as it is about the urgency of care,��community, and a little bit of dumb hope, in a world that can feel insurmountably broken.]]> 256 Courtney Gustafson 0593727614 Claire 0 to-read 4.73 2025
author: Courtney Gustafson
name: Claire
average rating: 4.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/06
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]]> 8303977 Neohelix albolabris —a common woodland snail.

While an illness keeps her bedridden, Bailey watches a wild snail that has taken up residence on her nightstand. As a result, she discovers the solace and sense of wonder that this mysterious creature brings and comes to a greater understanding of her own confined place in the world.

Intrigued by the snail’s molluscan anatomy, cryptic defenses, clear decision making, hydraulic locomotion, and mysterious courtship activities, Bailey becomes an astute and amused observer, providing a candid and engaging look into the curious life of this underappreciated small animal.��

Told with wit and grace, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a remarkable journey of survival and resilience, showing us how a small part of the natural world illuminates our own human existence and provides an appreciation of what it means to be fully alive.]]> 208 Elisabeth Tova Bailey 1565126068 Claire 0 to-read 4.15 2010
author: Elisabeth Tova Bailey
name: Claire
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60194743 An inspiring vision of how we can build a more just world--one small change at a time

Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.

Vividly recounting her personal experiences and those of her family, Benjamin shows how seemingly minor decisions and habits could spread virally and have exponentially positive effects. She recounts her father's premature death, illuminating the devastating impact of the chronic stress of racism, but she also introduces us to community organizers who are fostering mutual aid and collective healing. Through her brother's experience with the criminal justice system, we see the trauma caused by policing practices and mass imprisonment, but we also witness family members finding strength as they come together to demand justice for their loved ones. And while her own challenges as a young mother reveal the vast inequities of our healthcare system, Benjamin also describes how the support of doulas and midwives can keep Black mothers and babies alive and well.

Born of a stubborn hopefulness, Viral Justice offers a passionate, inspiring, and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities, and helping us build a more just and joyful world.]]> 392 Ruha Benjamin 0691222886 Claire 0 to-read 4.45 2022
author: Ruha Benjamin
name: Claire
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/06
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]]> 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 Claire 0 to-read 4.43 1971
author: Walter Rodney
name: Claire
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/06
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]]> 211003717
In 2023, author and activist Mike Tidwell decided to keep a record for a full year of the growing impacts of climate change on his one urban block right on the border with Washington, DC. A love letter to the magnificent oaks and other trees dying from record heat waves and bizarre rain, Tidwell's story depicts the neighborhood's battle to save the trees and combat climate change: The midwife who builds a geothermal energy system on the block, the Congressman who battles cancer and climate change at the same time, and the Chinese-American climate scientist who wants to bury billions of the world's dying trees to store their carbon and help stabilize the atmosphere.


The story goes beyond ailing trees as Tidwell chronicles people on his block sick with Lyme disease, a church struggling with floods, and young people anguishing over whether to have kids, all in the same neighborhood and all against the global backdrop of 2023’s record heat domes and raging wildfires and hurricanes. Then there’s Tidwell himself who explores the ethical and scientific questions surrounding the idea of “geoengineering�� as a last-ditch way to save the world’s trees �� and human communities everywhere �� by reflecting sunlight away from the planet. No book has told the story of climate change this hyper local, full of surprises, full of true stories of life and death in one neighborhood. The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue is a harrowing and hopeful proxy for every street in America and every place on Earth.]]> 288 Mike Tidwell 1250362261 Claire 0 to-read 4.30
author: Mike Tidwell
name: Claire
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/06
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]]> 213870084 From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.�� This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.��

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.��

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.�� It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order,�� a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.��

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 Claire 0 currently-reading 4.68 2025
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Claire
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 60141696 From award-winning, New York Times bestselling historian Adam Hochschild, a fast-paced, revelatory new account of a pivotal but neglected period in American history: World War I and its stormy aftermath, when bloodshed and repression on the home front nearly doomed American democracy.

The nation was on the brink. Angry mobs burned Black churches to the ground and chased down pacifists and immigrants. Well over a thousand men and women were jailed solely for what they had written or said, even in private. An astonishing 250,000 people joined a nationwide vigilante group—sponsored by the Department of Justice.

This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by torture, censorship, and killings. Adam Hochschild brings to life this troubled period, which stretched from 1917 to 1921, through the interwoven tales of a colorful cast of characters: some well-known, among them the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson and the ambitious young bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover; others less familiar, such as the fiery antiwar advocate Kate Richards O’Hare and the outspoken Leo Wendell, a labor radical who was frequently arrested and wholly trusted by his comrades—but who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent.

A groundbreaking work of narrative history, American Midnight recalls these horrifying yet inspiring four years, when some brave Americans strove to keep their fractured country democratic, while ruthless others stimulated toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law—poisons that feel ominously familiar today.]]> 422 Adam Hochschild 0358455464 Claire 0 to-read 4.16 2022
author: Adam Hochschild
name: Claire
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 206120253 Liberal civilisation is in crisis—now is a time of monstersThe rise of the new far-right has left the world grappling with a profound misunderstanding. While the spotlight often shines on the actions of charismatic leaders like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Rodrigo Duterte, the true peril lies elsewhere. They are but the political manifestations of a potent force - disaster nationalism. This mass cultural phenomenon, propelled through the vast networks of social media and fueled by far-right influencers, emerges from a reservoir of societal despair, fear, and isolation.At its core, disaster nationalism fixates on images of catastrophe - the 'Great Replacement,' Satanic 'cabals' - as explanations for its discontent. It yearns for an 'end of days,' a reckoning, a 'storm' as the QAnon faithful call it, to bring an end to its suffering. This yearning is only heightened by the relentless onslaught of real-world disasters, from economic recessions to global pandemics and ecological collapse.Within this seething cauldron, we witness not only the surge of far-right political movements but also the sparks of individual and collective violence against perceived enemies, from 'lone wolf' killers to terrifying pogroms. Should a new fascism emerge, it will coalesce from these very elements. This is disaster nationalism.In Disaster Nationalism, Richard Seymour delves deep into this alarming phenomenon, dissecting its roots, its influencers, and the threats it poses. With meticulous analysis and compelling storytelling, this book offers a stark warning and a call to action. The battle against disaster nationalism is not just political; it is a struggle for our collective soul and the future of civilization itself.]]> 288 Richard Seymour 180429425X Claire 0 currently-reading 4.12
author: Richard Seymour
name: Claire
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 1237300 The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.]]> 558 Naomi Klein 0805079831 Claire 5 4.28 2007
author: Naomi Klein
name: Claire
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/04
date added: 2025/05/04
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]]> 198563691 Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize�� Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.

By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.]]> 400 Eve L. Ewing 0593243706 Claire 0 to-read 4.58 2025
author: Eve L. Ewing
name: Claire
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Claire 0 to-read 4.25 2025
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Claire
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

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

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Claire 4 audiobook, nonfiction 4.21 2023
author: Naomi Klein
name: Claire
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: audiobook, nonfiction
review:

]]> 60656015 The interwoven destinies of the people of Meridian will finally be determined in this stunning conclusion to New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky trilogy.

Even the sea cannot stay calm before the storm. —Teek saying

Serapio, avatar of the Crow God Reborn and the newly crowned Carrion King, rules Tova. But his enemies gather both on distant shores and within his own city as the matrons of the clans scheme to destroy him. And deep in the alleys of the Maw, a new prophecy is whispered, this one from the Coyote God. It promises Serapio certain doom if its terrible dictates are not fulfilled.

Meanwhile, Xiala is thrust back amongst her people as war comes first to the island of Teek. With their way of life and their magic under threat, she is their last best hope. But the sea won’t talk to her the way it used to, and doubts riddle her mind. She will have to sacrifice the things that matter most to unleash her powers and become the queen they were promised.

And in the far northern wastelands, Naranpa, avatar of the Sun God, seeks a way to save Tova from the visions of fire that engulf her dreams. But another presence has begun stalking her nightmares, and the Jaguar God is on the hunt.]]> 597 Rebecca Roanhorse 1534437703 Claire 5 4.20 2024
author: Rebecca Roanhorse
name: Claire
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
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]]> 57339626 There are no tides more treacherous than those of the heart. —Teek saying

The great city of Tova is shattered. The sun is held within the smothering grip of the Crow God’s eclipse, but a comet that marks the death of a ruler and heralds the rise of a new order is imminent.

The Meridian: a land where magic has been codified and the worship of gods suppressed. How do you live when legends come to life, and the faith you had is rewarded?

As sea captain Xiala is swept up in the chaos and currents of change, she finds an unexpected ally in the former Priest of Knives. For the Clan Matriarchs of Tova, tense alliances form as far-flung enemies gather and the war in the heavens is reflected upon the earth.

And for Serapio and Naranpa, both now living avatars, the struggle for free will and personhood in the face of destiny rages. How will Serapio stay human when he is steeped in prophecy and surrounded by those who desire only his power? Is there a future for Naranpa in a transformed Tova without her total destruction?]]> 384 Rebecca Roanhorse Claire 4 4.09 2022
author: Rebecca Roanhorse
name: Claire
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/21
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]]> 50892360 The first book in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy, inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and woven into a tale of celestial prophecies, political intrigue, and forbidden magic.

A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.

Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.]]> 454 Rebecca Roanhorse 1534437673 Claire 5 4.17 2020
author: Rebecca Roanhorse
name: Claire
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
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]]> 153008
Phèdre nó Delaunay is a young woman who was born with a scarlet mote in her left eye. Sold into indentured servitude as a child, her bond is purchased by Anafiel Delaunay, a nobleman with very a special mission... and the first one to recognize who and what she is: one pricked by Kushiel's Dart, chosen to forever experience pain and pleasure as one.

Phèdre is trained equally in the courtly arts and the talents of the bedchamber, but, above all, the ability to observe, remember, and analyze. Almost as talented a spy as she is courtesan, Phèdre stumbles upon a plot that threatens the very foundations of her homeland. Treachery sets her on her path; love and honor goad her further. And in the doing, it will take her to the edge of despair... and beyond. Hateful friend, loving enemy, beloved assassin; they can all wear the same glittering mask in this world, and Phèdre will get but one chance to save all that she holds dear.

Set in a world of cunning poets, deadly courtiers, heroic traitors, and a truly Machiavellian villainess, this is a novel of grandeur, luxuriance, sacrifice, betrayal, and deeply laid conspiracies. Not since Dune has there been an epic on the scale of Kushiel's Dart-a massive tale about the violent death of an old age, and the birth of a new.]]> 1040 Jacqueline Carey 0330493744 Claire 0 to-read 4.01 2001
author: Jacqueline Carey
name: Claire
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Claire 4 books-i-own 4.04 2022
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Claire
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: books-i-own
review:

]]> 53487791 194 Waka Hirako 1975318609 Claire 4 4.03 2020
author: Waka Hirako
name: Claire
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 216025168 What happens to loving each other forever when your soulmate decides living forever is more important?

Yuki and Sam are soulmates.
They are destined to spend the rest of their lives together.
They are supposed to love one another, forever.

But when a miracle drug is created which can extend a human's life, indefinitely, Sam decides to live forever, rather than love Yuki forever.

What comes next is a time-bending, decades-long, world-building epic set across the globe and narrated by an intersecting cast of characters. Who Wants to Live Forever is the greatest romance you will ever read without the happily ever after.]]> 320 Hanna Thomas Uose 1840918489 Claire 0 to-read 4.09 2025
author: Hanna Thomas Uose
name: Claire
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 208430658 Magic has made the city of Tiran an industrial utopia, but magic has a cost—and the collectors have come calling.

An orphan since the age of four, Sciona has always had more to prove than her fellow students. For twenty years, she has devoted every waking moment to the study of magic, fueled by a mad desire to achieve the impossible: to be the first woman ever admitted to the High Magistry. When she finally claws her way up the ranks to become a highmage, however, she finds that her challenges have just begun. Her new colleagues will stop at nothing to let her know she is unwelcome, beginning with giving her a janitor instead of a qualified lab assistant.

What neither Sciona nor her peers realize is that her taciturn assistant was once more than a janitor; before he mopped floors for the mages, Thomil was a nomadic hunter from beyond Tiran’s magical barrier. Ten years have passed since he survived the perilous crossing that killed his family. But working for a highmage, he sees the opportunity to finally understand the forces that decimated his tribe, drove him from his homeland, and keep the Tiranish in power.

Through their fractious relationship, mage and outsider uncover an ancient secret that could change the course of magic forever—if it doesn’t get them killed first. Sciona has defined her life by the pursuit of truth, but how much is one truth worth with the fate of civilization in the balance?

A standalone dark academia brimming with mystery, tragedy, and the damning echoes of the past. For fans of Leigh Bardugo, V. E. Schwab, and Fullmetal Alchemist.

(Content warnings for gore, sexual assault, and suicidal ideation)]]> 430 M.L. Wang 0593873351 Claire 4 4.39 2023
author: M.L. Wang
name: Claire
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
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review:

]]> 25507388
But Sam has never held much interest in playing damsel-in-distress, and so she rescues herself from a lifetime of boredom and matrimonial drudgery. Disguised as a boy, Sam leaves home behind to fight demons-—the most dangerous monsters in Thule��-alongside the kingdom’s elite warriors. Pity that Tristan Lyons, the Paladin assigned to train her, is none other than the hero of her childhood. He hasn’t recognized her–yet–but if he does, he’ll take away her sword and send her packing.

Sam is not the only trainee hiding secrets: Braeden is a half-demon with a dark past that might be unforgivable. Whether he can be trusted is anyone’s guess, including his.

As demons wreak havoc across the land, rebellion stirs in the West, led by a rival faction of warriors.

A war between men is coming, and Sam must pick a side. Will saving the kingdom cost her life–or just her heart?]]> 341 Sally Slater 0989463311 Claire 3 4.02 2015
author: Sally Slater
name: Claire
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves:
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]]> 41886271 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.]]> 651 M.L. Wang Claire 0 to-read 4.46 2019
author: M.L. Wang
name: Claire
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195034827 292 James Alistair Henry 1916678017 Claire 0 to-read 3.84 2025
author: James Alistair Henry
name: Claire
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209439446
Now Violet must journey beyond the failing Aretian wards to seek allies from unfamiliar lands to stand with Navarre. The trip will test every bit of her wit, luck, and strength, but she will do anything to save what she loves—her dragons, her family, her home, and him.

Even if it means keeping a secret so big, it could destroy everything. They need an army. They need power. They need magic. And they need the one thing only Violet can find—the truth. But a storm is coming...and not everyone can survive its wrath.]]> 527 Rebecca Yarros 1649374186 Claire 3 4.17 2025
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Claire
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves:
review:
2.5 stars. I cannot stand the central romance but there’s enough actual plot to keep me reading despite my annoyances.
]]> 7961571 Hellboy. But when Mignola needs a short break from the Hellboy universe, he turns to diversions such as The Amazing Screw-On Head, winner of the Eisner Award for Best Humor Publication!

When Emperor Zombie threatens the safety of all life on earth, President Lincoln enlists the aid of a mechanical head. With the help of associates Mr. Groin (a faithful manservant) and Mr. Dog (a dog), Screw-On Head must brave ancient tombs, a Victorian flying apparatus, and demons from a dimension inside a turnip. This new collection of oddball Mignola creations also includes The Magician and the Snake from Dark Horse Maverick: Happy Endings, and nearly fifty pages of brand new material, all as weird and hilarious as the beloved Screw-On Head.]]> 104 Mike Mignola 1595825010 Claire 3 4.01 2002
author: Mike Mignola
name: Claire
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/21
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]]> 41812831
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.�� Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.]]> 336 Rashid Khalidi 1627798552 Claire 0 to-read 4.50 2020
author: Rashid Khalidi
name: Claire
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 215149209 From Axie Oh, the New York Times-bestselling author of The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, Final Fantasy meets Shadow and Bone in this romantic fantasy reimagining the Korean legend of Celestial Maidens.

Sunho lives in the Under World, a land of perpetual darkness. An ex-soldier, he can remember little of his life from before two years ago, when he woke up alone with only his name and his sword. Now he does odd-jobs to scrape by, until he comes across the score of a lifetime—a chest of coins for any mercenary who can hunt down a girl who wields silver light.

Meanwhile, far to the east, Ren is a cheerful and spirited acrobat traveling with her adoptive family and performing at villages. But everything changes during one of their festival performances when the village is attacked by a horrific humanlike demon. In a moment of fear and rage, Ren releases a blast of silver light—a power she has kept hidden since childhood—and kills the monster. But her efforts are not in time to prevent her adoptive family from suffering a devastating loss, or to save her beloved uncle from being grievously wounded.

Determined to save him from succumbing to the poisoned wound, Ren sets off over the mountains, where the creature came from—and from where Ren herself fled ten years ago. Her path sets her on a collision course with Sunho, but he doesn't realize she's the girl that he—and a hundred other swords-for-hire—is looking for. As the two grow closer through their travels, they come to realize that their pasts—and destinies—are far more entwined than either of them could have imagined...]]> 368 Axie Oh 1250853087 Claire 0 to-read 4.10 2025
author: Axie Oh
name: Claire
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> 219551344 Who works for the government and what do they do? A timely and absorbing civics lessons from an all-star team of writers and storytellers.

The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.

��������Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers to find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.

��������Whether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these workers are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. The vivid profiles in On Duty blow up the stereotype of the irrelevant bureaucrat. They show how the essential business of government makes our lives possible, and how much it matters.]]> 272 Michael Lewis Claire 0 to-read 4.19 2025
author: Michael Lewis
name: Claire
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

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

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

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Claire 0 to-read 4.49 2025
author: John Green
name: Claire
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 211003894
Now, Noon is stuck navigating the submerged town with her mom, who believes their dead family has reincarnated as sea creatures. Alone with the pain of what happened that night at the cove, Noon buries the truth: she is not the right shape.

When Mercy’s predatory leader demands Noon and her mom capture the creature drowning residents, she reluctantly finds an ally in his deadly hunter of a daughter and friends old and new. As the next storm approaches, Noon must confront the past and decide if it’s time to answer the monster itching at her skin.]]> 272 Trang Thanh Tran 1547611111 Claire 0 to-read 3.57 2025
author: Trang Thanh Tran
name: Claire
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 218559595 Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.

Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years--or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.

When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.

One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.

Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication

Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.

But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.

And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.]]> 432 Emily Henry Claire 0 to-read 4.09 2025
author: Emily Henry
name: Claire
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 217896248 From the nationally bestselling author of The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence, a transfixing, intensely atmospheric fever dream of medieval horror.

Aymar Castle has been under siege for six months. Food is running low and there has been no sign of rescue. But just as the survivors consider deliberately thinning their number, the castle stores are replenished. The sick are healed. And the divine figures of the Constant Lady and her Saints have arrived, despite the barricaded gates, offering succor in return for adoration.

Soon, the entire castle is under the sway of their saviors, partaking in intoxicating feasts of terrible origin. The war hero Ser Voyne gives her allegiance to the Constant Lady. Phosyne, a disorganized, paranoid nun-turned-sorceress, races to unravel the mystery of these new visitors and exonerate her experiments as their source. And in the bowels of the castle, a serving girl, Treila, is torn between her thirst for a secret vengeance against Voyne and the desperate need to escape from the horrors that are unfolding within Aymar’s walls.

As the castle descends into bacchanalian madness—forgetting the massed army beyond its walls in favor of hedonistic ecstasy—these three women are the only ones to still see their situation for what it is. But they are not immune from the temptations of the castle’s new masters�� or each other; and their shifting alliances and entangled pasts bring violence to the surface. To save the castle, and themselves, will take a reimagining of who they are, and a reorganization of the very world itself.]]> 352 Caitlin Starling 0063418819 Claire 0 to-read 4.00 2025
author: Caitlin Starling
name: Claire
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> 214151601 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]> 192 Agustina Bazterrica 1668051885 Claire 0 to-read 3.63 2023
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Claire
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220259184 Heartwood takes you on a journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.]]> 320 Amity Gaige 1668063603 Claire 0 to-read 3.91 2025
author: Amity Gaige
name: Claire
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 214151316
Bree Matthews is alone. She exiled herself from the Legendborn Order, cut her ancestral connections, and turned away from the friends who can’t understand the impossible cost of her powers. This is the only way to keep herself—and those she loves—safe.

But Bree’s decision has come with a terrible price: an unbreakable bargain with the Shadow King himself, a shapeshifter who can move between humanity, the demon underworld, and the Legendborn secret society. In exchange for training to wield her unprecedented abilities, Bree has put her future in the Shadow King’s hands—and unwittingly bound herself to do his bidding as his new protégé.

Meanwhile, the other Scions must face war with their Round Table fractured, leaderless, and missing its Kingsmage, as Selwyn has also disappeared. When Nick is detained by the Order’s Merlins, he invokes an ancient law that requires the High Council of Regents to convene at the Northern Keep and grant him an audience. No one knows what he will demand of them...or what secrets he has kept hidden from the Table.

As a string of mysterious kidnappings escalates and Merlins are found dead, it becomes clear that no matter how hard Bree runs from who she is, the past will always find her.]]> 656 Tracy Deonn 1665951907 Claire 3 4.36 2025
author: Tracy Deonn
name: Claire
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 33920723 242 Mahmoud Darwish 1566560004 Claire 0 to-read 4.43
author: Mahmoud Darwish
name: Claire
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56036 312 Jennifer Sturman 0373250797 Claire 3 books-i-own 3.58
author: Jennifer Sturman
name: Claire
average rating: 3.58
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2015/09/27
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: books-i-own
review:
I bought this book 10 years ago and finally, finally got around to reading it. An easy read, perfect for the poolside.
]]> 63946988 370 Amie McNee 0645190535 Claire 3 3.89 2022
author: Amie McNee
name: Claire
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 182095845 272 Amy Lin 195850632X Claire 0 to-read 4.24 2024
author: Amy Lin
name: Claire
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61250159 An imprisoned prince. A vengeful queen. And a battle that will determine the future of Elfhame.
��
Prince Oak is paying for his betrayal. Imprisoned in the icy north and bound to the will of a monstrous new queen, he must rely on charm and calculation to survive. With High King Cardan and High Queen Jude willing to use any means necessary to retrieve their stolen heir, Oak will have to decide whether to attempt regaining the trust of the girl he’s always loved or to remain loyal to Elfhame and hand over the means to end her reign—even if it means ending Wren, too.
��
��
With a new war looming on the horizon and treachery lurking in every corner, neither Oak’s guile nor his wit will be enough to keep everyone he loves alive. It’s just a question of whom he will doom.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Holly Black comes the stunning blood-soaked conclusion to the Stolen Heir duology.
��]]> 359 Holly Black 0316592730 Claire 2 3.88 2024
author: Holly Black
name: Claire
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
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]]> 214151420 From eldest daughter Shari Franke, the shocking true story behind the viral 8 Passengers family vlog and the hidden abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother, and how, in the face of unimaginable pain, she found freedom and healing.

Shari Franke’s childhood was a constant battle for survival. Her mother, Ruby Franke, enforced a severe moral code while maintaining a façade of a picture-perfect family for their wildly popular YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which documented the day-to-day life of raising six children for a staggering 2.5 million subscribers. But a darker truth lurked beneath the surface—Ruby’s wholesome online persona masked a more tyrannical parenting style than anyone could have imagined.

As the family’s YouTube notoriety grew, so too did Ruby’s delusions of righteousness. Fueled by the sadistic influence of relationship coach Jodi Hildebrandt, together they implemented an inhumane and merciless disciplinary regime.

Ruby and Jodi were arrested in Utah in 2023 on multiple charges of aggravated child abuse. On that fateful day, Shari shared a photo online of a police car outside their home. Her caption had one word: “Finally.��

For the first time, Shari will reveal the disturbing truth behind 8 Passengers and her family’s devastating involvement with Jodi Hildebrandt’s cultish life coaching program, “ConneXions.�� No stone is left unturned as Shari exposes the perils of influencer culture and shares for the first time her battle for truth and survival in the face of her mother’s cruelty.]]> 320 Shari Franke 1668065398 Claire 4 4.41 2025
author: Shari Franke
name: Claire
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves:
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]]> 218462026 Set in a universe where time is key to power and privilege, this dazzlingly inventive, genre-defying fantasy romance is the first in a duology by best-selling author Caroline O’Donoghue.

Margo is a troubled schoolgirl. After the death of her father, she’s on her way to a new boarding school in a new city.

Moon is a salesman. He makes his living traveling through a series of interconnected worlds on a network of barely used train lines.

They never should have met. But when Margo suddenly appears one day on Moon’s train, their fates become inextricably linked. If Margo wants to survive, she has to pass as a traveling salesman, too—except it’s not that easy.

Move north on the train line and time speeds up, a day passing in mere hours. Move south and time slows down—a day can last several weeks. Slow worlds are the richest you live longer, your youth lasting decades. Fast worlds are sharp, cruel, and don’t have time for pleasantries. Death is frequent. Salesmen die young of skipshock. That is, if they’re not shot down by the Southern Guard first.

As Margo moves between worlds and her attachment to Moon intensifies, she feels her youth start to slip between her fingers. But is Moon everything he seems? Is Margo?

Told through the eyes of both naive Margo and desperate Moon, the unforgettable realm of Skipshock will shake the way you think about love, time, and the fabric of the universe. The first in a planned duology from the best-selling author of the Gifts series, this utterly original epic is a must-read.]]> 400 Caroline O'Donoghue 1536228818 Claire 0 to-read 4.23 2025
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Claire
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61198133 A runaway queen. A reluctant prince. And a quest that may destroy them both.

Eight years have passed since the Battle of the Serpent. But in the icy north, Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth has reclaimed the Ice Needle Citadel. There, she is using an ancient relic to create monsters of stick and snow who will do her bidding and exact her revenge.

Suren, child queen of the Court of Teeth, and the one person with power over her mother, fled to the human world. There, she lives feral in the woods. Lonely, and still haunted by the merciless torments she endured in the Court of Teeth, she bides her time by releasing mortals from foolish bargains. She believes herself forgotten until the storm hag, Bogdana chases her through the night streets. Suren is saved by none other than Prince Oak, heir to Elfhame, to whom she was once promised in marriage and who she has resented for years.

Now seventeen, Oak is charming, beautiful, and manipulative. He’s on a mission that will lead him into the north, and he wants Suren’s help. But if she agrees, it will mean guarding her heart against the boy she once knew and a prince she cannot trust, as well as confronting all the horrors she thought she left behind.

#1��New York Times��bestselling author Holly Black returns to the opulent world of Elfhame in the first book in a thrilling new duology, following Jude's brother Oak, and the changeling queen, Suren.]]> 356 Holly Black 0316592706 Claire 3 audiobook, fantasy 3.92 2023
author: Holly Black
name: Claire
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: audiobook, fantasy
review:

]]> 24885533
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary�� (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware�� (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves�� (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species�� (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), “All the Flavors�� (Nebula award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King�� (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie�� (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor.]]> 450 Ken Liu 1481442546 Claire 5 4.5 stars 4.36 2016
author: Ken Liu
name: Claire
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2019/04/22
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: audiobook, books-i-own, sci-fi, made-me-cry
review:
4.5 stars
]]> 17571564
Pictures
Words
Stories about things that happened to me
Stories about things that happened to other people because of me
Eight billion dollars*
Stories about dogs
The secret to eternal happiness*

*These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!]]> 371 Allie Brosh 1451666179 Claire 5 Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don't want to. If I lose, I'm one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I'm going to win or lose until the last second.

I'm always surprised when I lose.

Oof, this book was like a brutally honest (yet also validating) reflection at times. Brosh's writing is hilariously self-aware and self-deprecating as she tells anecdotes about her struggles with depression, growing up, and being a functioning adult. Punctuating her reminiscences are simply stylized illustrations that depict Brosh as a pink-dressed somewhat amorphous blob with a yellow triangle ponytail. These comics both add to the hilarity of already funny stories and inject humor to deeper moments.

Also, if you are a dog person you will LOVE this book. I was doubled over in tears gasping for breath during Brosh's descriptions of the Simple Dog and Helper Dog, dysfunctional and infinitely lovable.

]]> 4.16 2013
author: Allie Brosh
name: Claire
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2016/08/28
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: nonfiction, graphic-novels, scribd, made-me-cry
review:
Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don't want to. If I lose, I'm one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I'm going to win or lose until the last second.

I'm always surprised when I lose.

Oof, this book was like a brutally honest (yet also validating) reflection at times. Brosh's writing is hilariously self-aware and self-deprecating as she tells anecdotes about her struggles with depression, growing up, and being a functioning adult. Punctuating her reminiscences are simply stylized illustrations that depict Brosh as a pink-dressed somewhat amorphous blob with a yellow triangle ponytail. These comics both add to the hilarity of already funny stories and inject humor to deeper moments.

Also, if you are a dog person you will LOVE this book. I was doubled over in tears gasping for breath during Brosh's descriptions of the Simple Dog and Helper Dog, dysfunctional and infinitely lovable.


]]> 50093704 Where do you see yourself in five years?

When Type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Kohan is asked this question at the most important interview of her career, she has a meticulously crafted answer at the ready. Later, after nailing her interview and accepting her boyfriend's marriage proposal, Dannie goes to sleep knowing she is right on track to achieve her five-year plan.

But when she wakes up, she’s suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. The television news is on in the background, and she can just make out the scrolling date. It’s the same night—December 15—but 2025, five years in the future.

After a very intense, shocking hour, Dannie wakes again, at the brink of midnight, back in 2020. She can’t shake what has happened. It certainly felt much more than merely a dream, but she isn’t the kind of person who believes in visions. That nonsense is only charming coming from free-spirited types, like her lifelong best friend, Bella. Determined to ignore the odd experience, she files it away in the back of her mind.

That is, until four-and-a-half years later, when by chance Dannie meets the very same man from her long-ago vision.

Brimming with joy and heartbreak, In Five Years is an unforgettable love story that reminds us of the power of loyalty, friendship, and the unpredictable nature of destiny.]]> 272 Rebecca Serle 1982137444 Claire 3 3.5 stars 3.74 2020
author: Rebecca Serle
name: Claire
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2021/02/27
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: magical-realism, fiction, audiobook, made-me-cry
review:
3.5 stars
]]> 54017820 Once upon a time, there was a horrible girl...

Vanja Schmidt knows that no gift is freely given, not even a mother’s love―and she’s on the hook for one hell of a debt. Vanja, the adopted goddaughter of Death and Fortune, was Princess Gisele's dutiful servant up until a year ago. That was when Vanja’s otherworldly mothers demanded a terrible price for their care, and Vanja decided to steal her future back�� by stealing Gisele’s life for herself.

The real Gisele is left a penniless nobody while Vanja uses an enchanted string of pearls to take her place. Now, Vanja leads a lonely but lucrative double life as princess and jewel thief, charming nobility while emptying their coffers to fund her great escape. Then, one heist away from freedom, Vanja crosses the wrong god and is cursed to an untimely end: turning into jewels, stone by stone, for her greed.

Vanja has just two weeks to figure out how to break her curse and make her getaway. And with a feral guardian half-god, Gisele’s sinister fiancé, and an overeager junior detective on Vanja’s tail, she’ll have to pull the biggest grift yet to save her own life.]]> 512 Margaret Owen 1250191904 Claire 5 4.24 2021
author: Margaret Owen
name: Claire
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: audiobook, fantasy, made-me-cry
review:

]]> 18007533 The Office (US version): a story collection that was "workshopped" at comedy clubs and bookstores on both coasts.

B.J. Novak's One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories is an endlessly entertaining, surprisingly sensitive, and startlingly original debut collection that signals the arrival of a welcome new voice in American fiction.

Across a dazzling range of subjects, themes, tones, and narrative voices, Novak's assured prose and expansive imagination introduce readers to people, places, and premises that are hilarious, insightful, provocative, and moving-often at the same time.

In One More Thing, a boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes - only to discover that claiming the winnings may unravel his family. A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins - turning for help to the famed motivator himself. A school principal unveils a bold plan to permanently abolish arithmetic. An acclaimed ambulance driver seeks the courage to follow his heart and throw it all away to be a singer-songwriter. Author John Grisham contemplates a monumental typo. A new arrival in heaven, overwhelmed by infinite options, procrastinates over his long-ago promise to visit his grandmother. We meet a vengeance-minded hare, obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life; and post-college friends who debate how to stage an intervention in the era of Facebook. We learn why wearing a red t-shirt every day is the key to finding love; how February got its name; and why the stock market is sometimes just... down.

Finding inspiration in questions from the nature of perfection to the icing on carrot cake, from the deeply familiar to the intoxicatingly imaginative, One More Thing finds its heart in the most human of phenomena: love, fear, family, ambition, and the inner stirring for the one elusive element that might make a person complete. The stories in this collection are like nothing else, but they have one thing in common: they share the playful humor, deep heart, inquisitive mind, and altogether electrifying spirit of a writer with a fierce devotion to the entertainment of the reader.]]> 288 B.J. Novak 0385351836 Claire 0 to-read 3.67 2014
author: B.J. Novak
name: Claire
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49950349 In this stand-alone fantasy, Durst introduces an imaginative new world in which a pair of strong and determined women risk their lives battling injustice, corruption, and deadly enemies in their quest to become monster-racing champions.

Life, death, and rebirth - in Becar, who you are in this life will determine your next life. Yet there is hope - you can change your destiny with the choices you make. But for the darkest individuals, there is no redemption: you come back as a kehok, a monster, and are doomed to be a kehok for the rest of time.

Unless you can win the Races.

After a celebrated career as an elite kehok rider, Tamra became a professional trainer. Then a tragic accident shattered her confidence, damaged her reputation, and left her nearly broke. Now, she needs the prize money to prevent the local temple from taking her daughter away from her, and that means she must once again find a winning kehok...and a rider willing to trust her.

Raia is desperate to get away from her domineering family and cruel fiancé. As a kehok rider, she could earn enough to buy her freedom. But she needs a first-rate trainer.

Impressed by the inexperienced young woman’s determination, Tamra hires Raia and pairs her with a strange new kehok with the potential to win - if he can be tamed.

But in this sport, if you forget you’re riding on the back of a monster, you die. Tamra and Raia will work harder than they ever thought possible to win the deadly Becaran Races - and in the process, discover what makes this particular kehok so special.]]> 528 Sarah Beth Durst 0062888617 Claire 0 to-read 4.30 2020
author: Sarah Beth Durst
name: Claire
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60531420 From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson―creator of The Stormlight Archive, the Mistborn Saga, and countless bestselling works of science fiction and fantasy―comes this standalone novel showing a rare glimpse of a future Cosmere universe.

Running. Putting distance between himself and the relentless Night Brigade has been Nomad’s strategy for years. Staying one or two steps ahead of his pursuers by skipping through the Cosmere from one world to the next.

But now, his powers too depleted to escape, Nomad finds himself trapped on Canticle, a planet that will kill anyone who doesn’t keep moving. Fleeing the fires of a sunrise that melts the very stones, he is instantly caught up in the struggle between a heartless tyrant and the brave rebels who defy him.

Failure means a quick death, incinerated by the sun�� or a lifetime as a mindless slave. Tormented by the consequences of his past, Nomad must fight not only for his survival―but also for his very soul.]]> 447 Brandon Sanderson 1938570391 Claire 4 4.28 2023
author: Brandon Sanderson
name: Claire
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 53138095 Global phenomenon Sarah J. Maas’s sexy, richly imagined #1 bestselling Court of Thorns and Roses series continues with the journey of Feyre’s fiery sister, Nesta.

Nesta Archeron has always been prickly-proud, swift to anger, and slow to forgive. And ever since being forced into the Cauldron and becoming High Fae against her will, she’s struggled to find a place for herself within the strange, deadly world she inhabits. Worse, she can’t seem to move past the horrors of the war with Hybern and all she lost in it.

The one person who ignites her temper more than any other is Cassian, the battle-scarred warrior whose position in Rhysand and Feyre’s Night Court keeps him constantly in Nesta’s orbit. But her temper isn’t the only thing Cassian ignites. The fire between them is undeniable, and only burns hotter as they are forced into close quarters with each other.

Meanwhile, the treacherous human queens who returned to the Continent during the last war have forged a dangerous new alliance, threatening the fragile peace that has settled over the realms. And the key to halting them might very well rely on Cassian and Nesta facing their haunting pasts.

Against the sweeping backdrop of a world seared by war and plagued with uncertainty, Nesta and Cassian battle monsters from within and without as they search for acceptance—and healing—in each other’s arms.]]> 757 Sarah J. Maas 168119628X Claire 0 ebooks-i-own, did-not-finish 4.44 2021
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Claire
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: ebooks-i-own, did-not-finish
review:

]]> 211482463 *FROM THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF ENTER GHOST*

'Recognising the Stranger combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose.' SALLY ROONEY

'A pitch-perfect example of how the novelist can get to the heart of the matter better than a million argumentative articles. Hammad shows us how the Palestinian struggle is the story of humanity itself, and asks us not to look away but to see ourselves.' MAX PORTER

‘Hammad’s writing burns with fierce intelligence, humane insight and righteous anger. For those at risk of despair, doubtful of the role literature has to play in times of crisis, it is a reminder of the radical potential of reading and the possibility of change.�� OLIVIA SUDJIC

Award-winning author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Lecture at Columbia University nine days before 7 October 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword written in the early weeks of 2024 together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what feels like a turning point in the narrative of human history.

Moving and erudite, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognising the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today.]]> 84 Isabella Hammad 1529940214 Claire 0 to-read 4.69 2024
author: Isabella Hammad
name: Claire
average rating: 4.69
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207567756 An investigation into the rise of the Christian right over the last half-century that lays out the grim vision Evangelicals are enforcing on our democracy.

All across America, a storm is gathering: from book bans in school libraries to anti-trans laws in state legislatures; firebombings of abortion clinics and protests against gay rights. The Christian Right, a cunning political force in America for more than half a century, has never been more powerful than it is right now—it propelled Donald Trump to power, and it won’t stop until it’s refashioned America in its own image.

In Wild Faith, critically acclaimed author Talia Lavin goes deep into what motivates the Christian Right, from its segregationist past to a future riddled with apocalyptic ideology.

Using primary sources and firsthand accounts, Lavin introduces you to “deliverance ministers�� who carry out exorcisms by the hundreds; modern-day, self-proclaimed prophets and apostles; Christian militias, cults, zealots, and showmen; and the people in power who are aiding them to achieve their goals.

Along the way, she explores anti-abortion terrorists, the Christian Patriarchy movement, with its desire to place all women under absolute male control; the twisted theology that leads to rampant child abuse; and the ways conspiracy theorists and extremist Christians influence each other to mutual political benefit.

From school boards to the Supreme Court, Christian theocracy is ascendant in America—and only through exploring its motivations and impacts can we understand the crisis we face. In Wild Faith, Lavin fearlessly confronts whether our democracy can survive an organized, fervent theocratic movement, one that seeks to impose its religious beliefs on American citizens.]]> 304 Talia Lavin 0306829193 Claire 5 audiobook, nonfiction 4.25
author: Talia Lavin
name: Claire
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: audiobook, nonfiction
review:

]]> 61685822 From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, a passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of #MeToo, and of the link between genius and monstrosity.

In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.]]> 257 Claire Dederer 0525655115 Claire 0 to-read 3.75 2023
author: Claire Dederer
name: Claire
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127282778 Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
Named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly.

A riveting story of what it means to be human in a world changed by artificial intelligence, revealing the perils and inequities of our growing reliance on automated decision-making

On the surface, a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, an Indian doctor, and a Chinese activist in exile have nothing in common. But they are in fact linked by a profound common experience—unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence. In Code Dependent, Murgia shows how automated systems are reshaping our lives all over the world, from technology that marks children as future criminals, to an app that is helping to give diagnoses to a remote tribal community.

AI has already infiltrated our day-to-day, through language-generating chatbots like ChatGPT and social media. But it’s also affecting us in more insidious ways. It touches everything from our interpersonal relationships, to our kids�� education, work, finances, public services, and even our human rights.

By highlighting the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from the cozy enclave of Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often-exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Murgia exposes how AI can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency, and shatter our illusion of free will.

The ways in which algorithms and their effects are governed over the coming years will profoundly impact us all. Yet we can’t agree on a common path forward. We cannot decide what preferences and morals we want to encode in these entities—or what controls we may want to impose on them. And thus, we are collectively relinquishing our moral authority to machines.

In Code Dependent, Murgia not only sheds light on this chilling phenomenon, but also charts a path of resistance. AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small, and Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity.]]> 320 Madhumita Murgia 1250867398 Claire 0 to-read 4.08 2024
author: Madhumita Murgia
name: Claire
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58837734 320 Stanley Tucci 0241501008 Claire 0 to-read 4.21 2021
author: Stanley Tucci
name: Claire
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219848315 Oprah’s Book Club Pick �� Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

“Stunning . . . A heartfelt and powerful examination of those living on the fringes of society, and the unique challenges they face to survive and thrive.�� —Oprah Winfrey

“Magnificent . . . In writing this book, Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists.�� —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once��

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing �� formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness �� are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 416 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Claire 0 to-read 4.33 2025
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Claire
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 150247389
When Gracie Gold stepped onto center stage (or ice, rather) as America’s sweetheart at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, she instantly became the face of America’s most beloved winter sport. Beautiful, blonde, Midwestern, and media-trained, she was suddenly being written up everywhere from The New Yorker to Teen Vogue to People and baking cookies with Taylor Swift.

But little did the public know what Gold was facing when the cameras were off. In 2017, she entered treatment for what was publicly announced as an eating disorder and anxiety treatment but was, in reality, suicidal ideation. While Gold’s public star was rising, her private life was falling Cracks within her family were widening, her bulimia was getting worse, and she became a survivor of sexual assault. The pressure of training for years with demanding coaches and growing up in a household that accepted nothing less than gold had finally taken its toll.

Now Gold reveals the exclusive and harrowing story of her struggles in and out of the pressure-packed world of elite figure the battles with her family, her coaches, the powers-that-be at her federation, and her deteriorating mental health.

Told with unflinching honesty and stirring defiance, Outofshapeworthlessloser is not only a forceful reckoning from a world-class athlete but also an intimate account of surviving as a young woman in a society that rewards appearances more than anything and demands perfection at all costs.]]> 352 Gracie Gold 0593444043 Claire 5 memoir, nonfiction 4.05 2024
author: Gracie Gold
name: Claire
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/26
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: memoir, nonfiction
review:

]]> 182761345
Kembral Thorne is spending a few hours away from her newborn, and she's determined to enjoy herself at this party no matter what. But when the guests start dropping dead, Kem has no choice but to get to work. She is a Hound, after all, and she can't help picking up the scent of trouble.��

She’s not the only one. Her professional and personal nemesis, notorious burglar Rika Nonesuch, is on the prowl. They quickly identify what’s causing the a mysterious grandfather clock that sends them down an Echo every time it chimes. In each strange new layer of reality, time resets and a sinister figure appears to perform a blood-soaked ritual.��

As Kem and Rika fall into increasingly macabre versions of their city, they’ll need to rely on their wits—and each other—to unravel the secret of the clock and save their home.��]]> 432 Melissa Caruso 031630347X Claire 4 3.78 2024
author: Melissa Caruso
name: Claire
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves:
review:

]]> 59366223 ��The Great Displacement is closely observed, compassionate, and far-sighted.�� —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Under a White Sky

The untold story of climate migration in the United States—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future.

Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us still think about it in the future tense—we imagine that as global warming gets worse over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world fleeing famine and rising seas. What we often don’t realize is that the consequences of climate change are already visible, right here in the United States. In communities across the country, climate disasters are pushing thousands of people away from their homes.

A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is “a vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view�� (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth). From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last few decades, the federal government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas.

Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest migration in our country’s history. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives—erasing historic towns and villages, pushing people toward new areas, and reshaping the geography of the United States.]]> 368 Jake Bittle 1982178256 Claire 0 to-read 4.27 2023
author: Jake Bittle
name: Claire
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61966364 A stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with a city and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing��relationship between fire and humankind

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

Fire has been a partner in our evolution for millennia,��shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a��riveting journey��through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the��unprecedented devastation that modern forest fires wreak, and into lives forever changed by these disasters.��His urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.]]> 432 John Vaillant 1524732850 Claire 0 to-read 4.31 2023
author: John Vaillant
name: Claire
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53430792 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A NEW YORK TIMES Selection for BEST 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK
A PICK FOR THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S 2018 BEST BOOKS
THE PERFECT HOLIDAY GIFT FOR READERS

“A page turner...An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis. "��The New York Times Book Review

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, he finds his partner is infected, and that he might even have the virus himself. The only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago epidemic, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways the AIDS crisis affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. Yale and Fiona's stories unfold in incredibly moving and sometimes surprising ways, as both struggle to find goodness in the face of disaster.]]> 431 Rebecca Makkai Claire 0 to-read 4.44 2018
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Claire
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57850265
Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible.]]> 293 Sequoia Nagamatsu 0063072645 Claire 0 to-read 3.81 2022
author: Sequoia Nagamatsu
name: Claire
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 Claire 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: Liz Pelly
name: Claire
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50607309 “All magic is beautiful,�� she said, “and terrible. Do you not see the beauty in yours, or the terror in mine? You can stop a heart, and I can stop your breath.��

She is heir to a Sultanate that once ruled the world. He is an unwanted prince with the power to destroy.

She is order and intellect, a woman fit to rule in a man's place. He is chaos and violence and will stop at nothing to protect his people.

His magic answers hers with shadow for light. They need each other, but the cost of balance may be too high a price. Magic is dying and the only way to save it is to enlist mages who wield the forbidden power of death, mages cast out centuries ago in a brutal and bloody war.

Now, a new war is coming. Science and machines to replace magic and old religion.

They must find a way to save their people from annihilation and balance the sacred Wheel—but first, they will have to balance their own forbidden passion. His peace for her tempest, his restlessness for her calm��

Night and day, dusk and dawn, the end, and the beginning. ]]> 420 J.D. Evans 1951607015 Claire 0 to-read 4.17 2020
author: J.D. Evans
name: Claire
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61783783
Drafted is a graphic novel memoir by Rick Parker, a shy, inexperienced, and overly protected teenager who gets drafted into the United States Army at the height of the Vietnam War. The looming threat of deployment informs every aspect of his life, from the most ludicrous experiences to the grimmest tests of endurance. Initially determined to do his patriotic duty, Parker gradually comes to the realization that he is just not cut out for a military career and wants nothing more than to serve his time and return to civilian life to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. In telling this story, he shows how the Vietnam War was the last war in the United States that instituted the draft; how the draft affected those who served; and how we as Americans think of war and our soldiers once they return from service. Parker also describes how being an artist helped him to survive his time in the Army. Drafted is a compelling and unique graphic novel memoir, perfect for fans of Joe Sacco and Derf Backderf, and is sure to appeal to Parker’s dedicated followers and new fans alike—already proven by the response to the award-winning short film Rick Parker, I’m Afraid .]]> 256 Rick Parker 1419761595 Claire 2 3.53
author: Rick Parker
name: Claire
average rating: 3.53
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 40132775
The Asteri have kept their word so far, leaving Bryce and Hunt alone. But with the rebels chipping away at the Asteri’s power, the threat the rulers pose is growing. As Bryce, Hunt, and their friends get pulled into the rebels�� plans, the choice becomes clear: stay silent while others are oppressed, or fight for what’s right. And they’ve never been very good at staying silent.

In this sexy, action-packed sequel to the #1 bestseller House of Earth and Blood, Sarah J. Maas weaves a captivating story of a world about to explode―and the people who will do anything to save it.]]> 805 Sarah J. Maas 1408884429 Claire 1
I have a lot of complaints. Everyone in these books is the hottest, most sexy person the characters have ever seen. Sarah J Maas is only capable of writing ~4 character types: bad ass woman who plays by her own rules, snarky and overly flirtatious alpha male, and sadistic versions of both of these. I feel like SJM did not need to create a world that was so medievally misogynistic, and I find it weird that having done so her only female characters are loner types that spend all of their time with men. Bryce supposedly has close female friends but they maybe get 5 cumulative pages of interactions, and the rest of her time she’s surrounded by men. So many of the whom are, by the way, hundreds of years old but they all speak like they are frat boys. I was able to move past this enough to enjoy the first book, but that was because the characters actually had some motivations driving the plot forward in book 1.
The actions of the main cast in this book made absolutely no sense. Every main character aids and abets the rebellion with truly no motivation behind what they were doing—not a single character had any sort of principles or value alignment with the rebellion and yet all of them actively participate. WHY? One could maybe argue Bryce had some paltry reasoning behind her actions, but Ruhn aided the rebellion the most and had no reasons for doing so whatever. He was very explicitly not blackmailed into helping! Yet he and all the others decide to risk torture and death for a rebellion they do not believe in and have no personal stake in. It was infuriating.
The plot managed to absolutely drag, and the book could have been edited down a few hundred pages. Also, if your plot relies on numerous villain monologues in order to move forward, it’s just not a well thought out story. And now I’ve managed to convince myself that this does indeed deserve only 1 star. Kudos to the voice actors for getting me through this book at all, I ended up listening at 2x speed but I did manage to finish it. Will not be continuing with book 3.]]> 4.41 2022
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Claire
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves:
review:
These books are aggressively heterosexual (derogatory).

I have a lot of complaints. Everyone in these books is the hottest, most sexy person the characters have ever seen. Sarah J Maas is only capable of writing ~4 character types: bad ass woman who plays by her own rules, snarky and overly flirtatious alpha male, and sadistic versions of both of these. I feel like SJM did not need to create a world that was so medievally misogynistic, and I find it weird that having done so her only female characters are loner types that spend all of their time with men. Bryce supposedly has close female friends but they maybe get 5 cumulative pages of interactions, and the rest of her time she’s surrounded by men. So many of the whom are, by the way, hundreds of years old but they all speak like they are frat boys. I was able to move past this enough to enjoy the first book, but that was because the characters actually had some motivations driving the plot forward in book 1.
The actions of the main cast in this book made absolutely no sense. Every main character aids and abets the rebellion with truly no motivation behind what they were doing—not a single character had any sort of principles or value alignment with the rebellion and yet all of them actively participate. WHY? One could maybe argue Bryce had some paltry reasoning behind her actions, but Ruhn aided the rebellion the most and had no reasons for doing so whatever. He was very explicitly not blackmailed into helping! Yet he and all the others decide to risk torture and death for a rebellion they do not believe in and have no personal stake in. It was infuriating.
The plot managed to absolutely drag, and the book could have been edited down a few hundred pages. Also, if your plot relies on numerous villain monologues in order to move forward, it’s just not a well thought out story. And now I’ve managed to convince myself that this does indeed deserve only 1 star. Kudos to the voice actors for getting me through this book at all, I ended up listening at 2x speed but I did manage to finish it. Will not be continuing with book 3.
]]> 60619439
An unfulfilled college student hurtles through four parallel realities to explore the what-might've-been and the what-should-never-be in this Groundhog Day meets The Midnight Library–esque novel from one of Japan’s most popular authors.

Our protagonist, an unnamed junior at a prestigious university in Kyoto, is on the verge of dropping out. After rebelling against the dictatorial jock president of the film club, he and his worst and only friend, the diabolical creep Ozu, are personas non grata on campus. For two years, our protagonist has made all the wrong decisions, and now he's about to make another mistake. He and Ozu are preparing for revenge—a fireworks attack at the film club's welcoming party for new members. Then, a chance encounter with a self-proclaimed god sets the confused and distraught young man on a new course. Destiny will bring him together with Akashi, the blunt but charming sophomore he has a crush on—if he’s brave enough to make a move. Yet our protagonist cannot get beyond his profound disillusionment and the moment is lost. But what if there's a universe where he did join the club of his dreams, ditched Ozu for good, and was confident enough to get the girl? A realm of possibility opens up for our protagonist as time rewinds, and from the four-and-a-half-mat tatami floor of his dorm room, he is plunged into a series of adventures that will take him to four parallel universes. In each universe, he is given the opportunity to start over as a freshman, in search of a rose-colored campus life.

The inspiration behind the much-loved anime series, Tomihiko Morimi's contemporary classic is a fantastic journey through time and space, where a half-eaten castella cake, a photograph from Rome, and a giant cavity in a wisdom tooth hold the keys to self-discovery. A time-traveling romp that speaks to everyone who has wondered what if, The Tatami Galaxy will win readers�� hearts over . . . and over . . . and over again.]]> 344 Tomihiko Morimi 0063158442 Claire 0 currently-reading 3.46 2004
author: Tomihiko Morimi
name: Claire
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 200987323 In this wildly funny and heartwarming office comedy, an admin worker accidentally gains access to her colleagues�� private emails and DMs and decides to use this intel to save her job—a laugh-till-you-cry debut novel you’ll be eager to share with your entire list of contacts, perfect for fans of Anxious People and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

As far as Jolene is concerned, her interactions with her colleagues should start and end with her official duties as an admin for Supershops, Inc. Unfortunately, her irritating, incompetent coworkers don’t seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her secret to survival? She vents her grievances in petty email postscripts, then changes the text colour to white so no one can see. That is, until one of her secret messages is exposed. Her punishment: sensitivity training (led by the suspiciously friendly HR guy, Cliff) and rigorous email restrictions.

When an IT mix-up grants her access to her entire department’s private emails and DMs, Jolene knows she should report it, but who could resist reading what their coworkers are really saying? And when she discovers layoffs are coming, she realizes this might just be the key to saving her job. The plan is simple: gain her boss’s favour, convince HR she’s Supershops material and beat out the competition.

But as Jolene is drawn further into her coworker’s private worlds and secrets, her carefully constructed walls begin to crumble—especially around Cliff, who she definitely cannot have feelings for. Soon she will need to decide if she’s ready to leave the comfort of her cubicle, even if it means coming clean to her colleagues.

Crackling with laugh-out-loud dialogue and relatable observations, I Hope This Finds You Well is a fresh and surprisingly tender comedy about loneliness and love beyond our computer screens. This sparkling debut novel will open your heart to the everyday eccentricities of work culture and the undeniable human connection that comes with it.]]> 338 Natalie Sue 0063320363 Claire 3 3.74 2024
author: Natalie Sue
name: Claire
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

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

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Claire 0 to-read, book-club-option 4.37 2021
author: John Green
name: Claire
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read, book-club-option
review:

]]> 211003695 An exuberant and ribald debut novel about three adolescent girls coming of age in a gritty post-industrial town in Yorkshire, England in the ��90s who are as sweetly vulnerable and funny as they are cunning and tough

“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.�� But it’s also the home of Rach, Kel, and Shaz, bezzies since childhood. From scheming one another’s first kisses, to sneaking vodka (or the occasional Cointreau) into school in water bottles, to accompanying one another to Family Planning for pregnancy tests, the girls come of age together, Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace �� the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as the girls grow up and away from each other, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart. Is their shared past enough to keep them close?

Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh spans decades and continents as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, making one overlooked and forgotten place the very center of the world.]]> 336 Colwill Brown 1250342880 Claire 0 to-read 4.14 2025
author: Colwill Brown
name: Claire
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 37794149
Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her Station from Teixcalaan's unceasing expansion—all while navigating an alien culture that is all too seductive, engaging in intrigues of her own, and hiding a deadly technological secret—one that might spell the end of her Station and her way of life—or rescue it from annihilation.]]> 448 Arkady Martine 1529001587 Claire 4 4.08 2019
author: Arkady Martine
name: Claire
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 58340706
Elspeth Spindle needs more than luck to stay safe in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom of Blunder—she needs a monster. She calls him the Nightmare, an ancient, mercurial spirit trapped in her head. He protects her. He keeps her secrets.

But nothing comes for free, especially magic.

When Elspeth meets a mysterious highwayman on the forest road, her life takes a drastic turn. Thrust into a world of shadow and deception, she joins a dangerous quest to cure Blunder from the dark magic infecting it. And the highwayman? He just so happens to be the King’s nephew, Captain of the most dangerous men in Blunder…and guilty of high treason.

Together they must gather twelve Providence Cards—the keys to the cure. But as the stakes heighten and their undeniable attraction intensifies, Elspeth is forced to face her darkest secret yet: the Nightmare is slowly taking over her mind. And she might not be able to stop him.]]> 399 Rachel Gillig 0316312487 Claire 0 did-not-finish 4.25 2022
author: Rachel Gillig
name: Claire
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> 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 You��tells 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 Claire 0 to-read 4.32 2024
author: Jarod K. Anderson
name: Claire
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 123195206 A sharp-tongued folklorist must pair up with her academic rival to solve their mentor's murder��in this lush and enthralling sapphic fantasy romance from the New York Times bestselling author of A Far Wilder Magic.

Lorelei Kaskel, a folklorist with a quick temper and an even quicker wit, is on an expedition with six eccentric nobles in search of a fabled spring. The magical spring promises untold power, which the king wants to harness to secure his reign of the embattled country of Brunnestaad. Lorelei is determined to use this opportunity to prove herself and make her wildest, most impossible dream come true: to become a naturalist, able to travel freely to lands she’s only ever read about.

The expedition gets off to a harrowing start when its leader—Lorelei’s beloved mentor—is murdered in her quarters aboard their ship. The suspects are her five remaining expedition mates, each with their own motive. The only person Lorelei knows must be innocent is her longtime��academic rival, the insufferably gallant and maddeningly beautiful Sylvia von Wolff. Now in charge of the expedition, Lorelei must find the spring before the murderer strikes again—and a coup begins in earnest.

But there are other dangers lurking in the dark: forests that rearrange themselves at night, rivers with slumbering dragons waiting beneath the water, and shapeshifting beasts out for blood.

As Lorelei and Sylvia grudgingly work together to uncover the truth—and resist their growing feelings for one another—they discover that their professor had secrets of her own. Secrets that make Lorelei question whether justice is worth pursuing, or if this kingdom is worth saving at all.]]> 371 Allison Saft 0593722353 Claire 2 awaited-release
The world building was underwhelming and borderline nonexistent, both in terms of the nations, politics, magic system, and academic function. Emphasis on the latter point—I’ve seen online discussion about this being a ‘sapphic fantasy dark academia�� plot. Academia where?? The journey the characters embark on is ostensibly a research expedition but other than a few mentions of reading scientific instruments early on, there was no attempt at making the characters seem academic. Also, the main character is a folklorist and it is never really shown how this is a field of study other than Lorelei sometimes drawing comparisons from tales to her current situation. It would be one thing if she was studying folklore as an anthropology field or something, but her presence on the expedition implies it’s supposed to be more scientific and this is never fleshed out.

Finally, I have been hyper aware of colonization in the last year, and this book’s handling of colonization was off-putting. The antagonists were pro-revolution, and the protagonists actively supported their conquering nation. I thought this would be subverted at some point, but nope. Bizarre.

Overall I would say this book is aggressively mediocre. I’m sure some readers would really enjoy it, especially those with minimal prior exposure to the genre.]]> 3.69 2024
author: Allison Saft
name: Claire
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: awaited-release
review:
I haven’t left a review in so long and unfortunately I only ever feel inclined to write them for low ratings. This book’s cover is much better than the content within. The book read as a series of tropes and archetypes that never felt earned. The enemies-to-lovers fell flat on both the enemies and lovers front, and any emotional moment from any of the characters felt like the author checking off a box of scenes common in books like these. It was painful getting through the last two hours of the audiobook, when the central relationship progresses. I found them both insufferable.

The world building was underwhelming and borderline nonexistent, both in terms of the nations, politics, magic system, and academic function. Emphasis on the latter point—I’ve seen online discussion about this being a ‘sapphic fantasy dark academia�� plot. Academia where?? The journey the characters embark on is ostensibly a research expedition but other than a few mentions of reading scientific instruments early on, there was no attempt at making the characters seem academic. Also, the main character is a folklorist and it is never really shown how this is a field of study other than Lorelei sometimes drawing comparisons from tales to her current situation. It would be one thing if she was studying folklore as an anthropology field or something, but her presence on the expedition implies it’s supposed to be more scientific and this is never fleshed out.

Finally, I have been hyper aware of colonization in the last year, and this book’s handling of colonization was off-putting. The antagonists were pro-revolution, and the protagonists actively supported their conquering nation. I thought this would be subverted at some point, but nope. Bizarre.

Overall I would say this book is aggressively mediocre. I’m sure some readers would really enjoy it, especially those with minimal prior exposure to the genre.
]]> 63251778 ��
The Heat Will Kill You First�� is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing.��It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90° F to 110°F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event�� one that culls out the most vulnerable people.�� But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.����
��
As an award-winning journalist who has been at the forefront of environmental journalism for decades, Goodell’s new book may be his most provocative yet, explaining how extreme heat will dramatically change the world as we know it.�� Masterfully reported, mixing the latest scientific insight with on-the-ground storytelling, Jeff Goodell tackles the big questions and uncovers how extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.
��]]> 400 Jeff Goodell 0316497576 Claire 0 to-read 4.25 2023
author: Jeff Goodell
name: Claire
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 Claire 0 to-read 4.36 1965
author: John Williams
name: Claire
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62790909 Bestselling journalist Antony Loewenstein uncovers the widespread commercialisation and brutal deployment globally of Israel’s occupation-enforcing technologies.

For more than 50 years, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an ‘enemy�� population, the Palestinians. It’s here that they have perfected the architecture of control, using the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world.

The Palestine Laboratory shows in depth and for the first time how Israel has become a leader in developing spying technology and defence hardware that fuels some of the globe’s most brutal conflicts �� from the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos’s and Jamal Khashoggi’s phones, and the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingyas, to the drones being used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown.

In a global investigation that uncovers secret documents, based on revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting, Antony Loewenstein shows how, as ethno-nationalism grows in the 21st century, Israel has built the ultimate tools for despots and democracies.]]> 320 Antony Loewenstein 1922310409 Claire 0 to-read 4.46 2023
author: Antony Loewenstein
name: Claire
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60784614 The revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award.

An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation―and the moral implications that affect us all.

Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt.

Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated.]]> 288 Siddharth Kara 1250284309 Claire 0 to-read 4.36 2023
author: Siddharth Kara
name: Claire
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 35070437 ��
What has befallen Gaza is a man-made humanitarian disaster.
��
Based on scores of human rights reports, Norman G.��Finkelstein's new book��presents a meticulously researched inquest into Gaza’s martyrdom. He shows that although Israel has justified its assaults in the name of self-defense, in fact these actions constituted flagrant violations of international law.
��
But Finkelstein also documents that the guardians of international law—from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the UN Human Rights Council—ultimately failed Gaza. One of his most disturbing conclusions is that,��after Judge��Richard Goldstone's humiliating retraction of his UN report, human rights organizations succumbed to the Israeli juggernaut.

Finkelstein’s magnum opus is both a monument to Gaza’s martyrs and an act of resistance against the forgetfulness of history.]]> 429 Norman G. Finkelstein 0520295714 Claire 0 to-read 4.69 2018
author: Norman G. Finkelstein
name: Claire
average rating: 4.69
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57256629 A trenchant look at contemporary capitalism’s insatiable appetite—and a rallying cry for everyone who wants to stop it from devouring our world

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy.

What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital—and starve it to death.]]> 209 Nancy Fraser 1839761253 Claire 0 to-read 4.06 2022
author: Nancy Fraser
name: Claire
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 Claire 0 to-read 3.59 2024
author: Becca Rothfeld
name: Claire
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 208185059 For readers of Naomi Klein and Nicole Perlroth, a myth-dissolving exposé of what “artificial intelligence�� really means, and a resounding argument for an equitable future of A.I. Silicon Valley has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions laboring under often appalling conditions to make A.I. possible. This book presents an urgent, riveting investigation of the intricate network that maintains this exploitative system, revealing the untold truth of A.I.Based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of fieldwork over more than a decade, Feeding the Machine describes the lives of the workers deliberately concealed from view, and the power structures that determine their future. It gives voice to the people whom A.I. exploits, from accomplished writers and artists to the armies of data annotators, content moderators and warehouse workers, revealing how their dangerous, low-paid labor is connected to longer histories of gendered, racialized, and colonial exploitation.A.I. is an extraction machine that feeds off humanity's collective effort and intelligence, churning through ever-larger datasets to power its algorithms. This book is a call to arms that details what we need to do to fight for a more just digital future.]]> 288 James Muldoon 1639734961 Claire 0 to-read 4.11 2024
author: James Muldoon
name: Claire
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 17927395
Nor has Feyre forgotten her bargain with Rhysand, High Lord of the feared Night Court. As Feyre navigates its dark web of politics, passion, and dazzling power, a greater evil looms—and she might be key to stopping it. But only if she can harness her harrowing gifts, heal her fractured soul, and decide how she wishes to shape her future—and the future of a world cleaved in two.

With more than a million copies sold of her beloved Throne of Glass series, Sarah J. Maas's masterful storytelling brings this second book in her seductive and action-packed series to new heights.]]> 626 Sarah J. Maas Claire 5
Edit: Keeping my original rating to reflect how I felt during my first read. When I first read this book over 8 years ago, I absolutely loved it and thought it was the perfect sequel to ACOTAR, which I thought only picked up in the second half. Reading this now after having read so many more contemporary fantasy novels, I found this quite lacking. The pacing in parts was slow, and the dialogue just isn’t good. None of the characters are as witty or as biting as the book tells us they are. I also found Feyre to be pretty annoying at parts. I still think this one is the best in the series, unfortunately I disliked the 3rd one when it came out but will still reread it so I can see how the rest of the series plays out. ]]> 4.60 2016
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Claire
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2016/05/03
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: ebooks-i-own, fantasy, made-me-cry
review:
EVERYTHING I WANTED AND MORE. SARAH J MAAS DELIVERED.

Edit: Keeping my original rating to reflect how I felt during my first read. When I first read this book over 8 years ago, I absolutely loved it and thought it was the perfect sequel to ACOTAR, which I thought only picked up in the second half. Reading this now after having read so many more contemporary fantasy novels, I found this quite lacking. The pacing in parts was slow, and the dialogue just isn’t good. None of the characters are as witty or as biting as the book tells us they are. I also found Feyre to be pretty annoying at parts. I still think this one is the best in the series, unfortunately I disliked the 3rd one when it came out but will still reread it so I can see how the rest of the series plays out.
]]> 212078448 The brilliant detective Ana Dolabra may have finally met her match in the gripping sequel to The Tainted Cup—from the bestselling author of The Founders Trilogy.

In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, an impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—abducted from his quarters while the door and windows remained locked from the inside, in a building whose entrances and exits are all under constant guard.

To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial investigator, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant Dinios Kol.

Before long, Ana’s discovered that they’re not investigating a disappearance, but a murder—and that the killing was just the first chess move by an adversary who seems to be able to pass through warded doors like a ghost, and who can predict every one of Ana’s moves as though they can see the future.

Worse still, the killer seems to be targeting the high-security compound known as the Shroud. Here, the Empire's greatest minds dissect fallen Titans to harness the volatile magic found in their blood. Should it fall, the destruction would be terrible indeed—and the Empire itself will grind to a halt, robbed of the magic that allows its wheels of power to turn.

Din has seen Ana solve impossible cases before. But this time, with the stakes higher than ever and Ana seemingly a step behind their adversary at every turn, he fears that his superior has finally met an enemy she can’t defeat.]]> 432 Robert Jackson Bennett 1399725424 Claire 0 to-read 4.59 2025
author: Robert Jackson Bennett
name: Claire
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210943364
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.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Claire 0 4.51 2024
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Claire
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: books-i-own, currently-reading
review:

]]> 61885060 336 Katharine Schellman 1250831849 Claire 0 did-not-finish 3.69 2023
author: Katharine Schellman
name: Claire
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> 197448796 A millennial turned magical girl must combat climate change and credit card debt in this delightful, witty, and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga.

Twenty-nine, depressed, and drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the pandemic, a millennial woman decides to end her troubles by jumping off Seoul’s Mapo Bridge.

But her suicide attempt is interrupted by a girl dressed all in white—her guardian angel. Ah Roa is a clairvoyant magical girl on a mission to find the greatest magical girl of all time. And our protagonist just may be that special someone.

But the young woman’s initial excitement turns to frustration when she learns being a magical girl in real life is much different than how it’s portrayed in stories. It isn’t just destiny—it’s work. Magical girls go to job fairs, join trade unions, attend classes. And for this magical girl there are no special powers and no great perks, and despite being magical, she still battles with low self-esteem. Her magic wand . . . is a credit card—which she must use to defeat a terrifying threat that isn’t a monster or an intergalactic war. It’s global climate change. Because magical girls need to think about sustainability, too.

Park Seolyeon reimagines classic fantasy tropes in a novel that explores real-world challenges that are both deeply personal and universal: the search for meaning and the desire to do good in a world that feels like it’s ending. A fun, fast-paced, and enchanting narrative that sparkles thanks to award-nominated translator Anton Hur, A Magical Girl Retires reminds us that we are all magical girls—that fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight can be anyone's game.

Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur.]]> 160 Park Seolyeon 0063373262 Claire 3 3.57 2022
author: Park Seolyeon
name: Claire
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves:
review:

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

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

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

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.]]> 305 Yaa Gyasi Claire 5 book-club-option, books-i-own 4.48 2016
author: Yaa Gyasi
name: Claire
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: book-club-option, books-i-own
review:

]]> 194896980 A notorious rake meets his match in a doe-eyed girl from the country, changing the course of both of their futures��

A London season is the chance of a lifetime for Catherine Keating. But the ton’s glitter and decadence and casual cruelty threaten to crush her hopes of finding a husband before her season even begins... until she accidentally acquires one of the most scandalous men in England as a secret chaperone.

Famously fiery Lord Dominic Kirke can hold the House of Commons—and any woman he chooses�� in thrall. But when his house goes up in flames in the dead of night, he finds himself at the Grand Palace on the Thames. And there he discovers his cynical armor is no match for another an innocent country girl with a crackling wit and eyes like a summer sky.

He's maddening, elusive, hopelessly charismatic, wrong in every way—perfectly designed to break her heart. But she doesn't know she holds his battered heart in her hands. And though it will destroy him, Dominic knows loving her means setting Catherine free for the life—and man—she deserves.]]> 380 Julie Anne Long 0063281163 Claire 0 to-read 4.26 2024
author: Julie Anne Long
name: Claire
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 2767 Zinn portrays a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a small aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties.
A People's History has been assigned as reading in many high schools and colleges across the United States. It has also resulted in a change in the focus of historical work, which now includes stories that previously were ignored

Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s book “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those…whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”]]> 729 Howard Zinn 0060838655 Claire 0 to-read 4.07 1980
author: Howard Zinn
name: Claire
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

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

In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.]]> 1246 Robert A. Caro 0394720245 Claire 0 to-read 4.51 1974
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Claire
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 123183412
This commitment to authenticity has never been more on display than in Down the Drain . With writing that is both eloquent and accessible, Fox recounts her turbulent path to cultural her parents�� volatile relationship that divided her childhood between Italy and New York City and left her largely raising herself; a possessive and abusive drug-dealing boyfriend whose torment continued even from within Rikers Island; her own trips to jail as well as to a psychiatric hospital; her work as a dominatrix that led to a complicated entanglement with a sugar daddy; a heroin habit that led to New Orleans trap houses and that she would kick only after the fatal overdose of her best friend; her own near-lethal overdoses and the deaths of still more friends from drugs and suicide; an emotionally explosive, tabloid-dominating romance with a figure she dubs “The Artist��; a whirlwind, short-lived marriage and her trials as a single parent striving to support her young son. Yet as extraordinary as her story is, its universality is what makes it so powerful. Fox doesn’t just capture her improbable evolution from grade-school outcast to fashion-world icon, she captures her transition from girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. Family and friendship, sex and death, violence and love, money and power, innocence and experience—it’s all here, in raw, remarkable and riveting detail.

More than a year before the book’s publication, Fox’s description of it as “a masterpiece�� in a red carpet interview went viral. As always, she was just being honest. Down the Drain is a true literary achievement, as one-of-a-kind as its author.]]> 318 Julia Fox 1668011506 Claire 4 audiobook, memoir, nonfiction 4.38 2023
author: Julia Fox
name: Claire
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: audiobook, memoir, nonfiction
review:

]]> 180633984 June Hur, bestselling author of The Red Palace, crafts a devastating and pulse-pounding tale that will feel all-too-relevant in today’s world, based on a true story from Korean history.

Hope is dangerous. Love is deadly.

1506, Joseon. The people suffer under the cruel reign of the tyrant King Yeonsan, powerless to stop him from commandeering their land for his recreational use, banning and burning books, and kidnapping and horrifically abusing women and girls as his personal playthings.

Seventeen-year-old Iseul has lived a sheltered, privileged life despite the kingdom’s turmoil. When her older sister, Suyeon, becomes the king’s latest prey, Iseul leaves the relative safety of her village, traveling through forbidden territory to reach the capital in hopes of stealing her sister back. But she soon discovers the king’s power is absolute, and to challenge his rule is to court certain death.

Prince Daehyun has lived his whole life in the terrifying shadow of his despicable half-brother, the king. Forced to watch King Yeonsan flaunt his predation through executions and rampant abuse of the common folk, Daehyun aches to find a way to dethrone his half-brother once and for all. When staging a coup, failure is fatal, and he’ll need help to pull it off—but there’s no way to know who he can trust.

When Iseul's and Daehyun's fates collide, their contempt for each other is transcended only by their mutual hate for the king. Armed with Iseul’s family connections and Daehyun’s royal access, they reluctantly join forces to launch the riskiest gamble the kingdom has ever

Save her sister. Free the people. Destroy a tyrant.

Also by June
The Silence of Bones
The Forest of Stolen Girls
The Red Palace]]> 363 June Hur 1250858100 Claire 0 to-read 3.97 2024
author: June Hur
name: Claire
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 20587888 Here is Richard McGuire's unique graphic novel based on the legendary 1989 comic strip of the same name.

Richard McGuire's groundbreaking comic strip Here was published under Art Spiegelman's editorship at RAW in 1989.

Built in six pages of interlocking panels, dated by year, it collapsed time and space to tell the story of the corner of a room - and its inhabitants - between the years 500,957,406,073 BC and 2313 AD.

The strip remains one of the most influential and widely discussed contributions to the medium, and it has now been developed, expanded and reimagined by the artist into this full-length, full-colour graphic novel - a must for any fan of the genre.]]> 304 Richard McGuire 0241145961 Claire 5 4.19 2014
author: Richard McGuire
name: Claire
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/27
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 53152636
Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.]]> 320 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0525620788 Claire 3 audiobook 3.66 2020
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Claire
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/29
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: audiobook
review:

]]>