Chris's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 04 Apr 2025 19:50:29 -0700 60 Chris's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Testimony (Kindle County Legal Thriller #10)]]> 31933450
Bill ten Boom has walked out on everything he thought was important to him: his career, his wife, even his country. Invited to become a prosecutor at The Hague’s International Criminal Court, it was a chance to start afresh.

But when his first case is to examine the disappearance of four hundred Roma refugees � an apparent war crime left unsolved for ten years � it’s clear this new life won’t be an easy one . . .

Whispered rumours have the perpetrators ranging from Serb paramilitaries to the U.S. Army, but there’s no hard evidence to hold either accountable, and only a single witness to say it happened at all.

To get to the truth, Boom must question the integrity of every person linked to the case � from Layton Merriwell, a disgraced US Major General, to flirtatious barrister, Esma Czarni � as it soon becomes apparent that every party has a vested interest and no qualms in steering the investigation their way . . .]]> 416 Scott Turow 1478971045 Chris 5 ]]> 3.51 2008 Testimony (Kindle County Legal Thriller #10)
author: Scott Turow
name: Chris
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2017/07/31
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves:
review:
A terrific, lively, thoughtful exploration of a possible war crime -- a possible act of genocide -- told with Turow's always elegant, always honest, always compelling prose. Another wonderful novel from one of our literary treasures.

]]> The Wedding People 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Chris 0 currently-reading 4.11 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Chris
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Deep Cuts 214269394
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.]]> 277 Holly Brickley 0593799089 Chris 5 3.81 2025 Deep Cuts
author: Holly Brickley
name: Chris
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves:
review:
Super fun novel. Reminiscent in all the best ways of TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW. Millennials in the first decade of the 21st century falling in and out of love, writing (and performing) music, and having VERY strong opinions about pop and rock classics. Stayed with me like a great bridge in a great song.
]]> <![CDATA[Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism]]> 55338982
What makes “cults� so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . .

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

Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,� revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish� everywhere.]]> 309 Amanda Montell 0062993151 Chris 5 3.83 2021 Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
author: Amanda Montell
name: Chris
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:
CULTISH is among the smartest, moist astute, and (sometimes) funniest books I have read lately. Amanda Montell brilliantly walks us through the language of cults, her research thorough and thought-provoking, and makes us realize that the very word "cult" is insufficient to convey the differences between a "cult" that leads to hundreds of people dying far from home and one that is all about fitness and leggings. I loved this book, every anecdote, every observation, every page. I picked it up as research for a novel I'm writing, but -- like the best research books I read when immersed in a novel -- quickly became the sort of wonderful book that transcended work for me.
]]> Broken Country 214151202 “The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.�

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.

A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.]]> 320 Clare Leslie Hall 166807818X Chris 5 4.44 2025 Broken Country
author: Clare Leslie Hall
name: Chris
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
review:
An absolute banger of a book. Claire Leslie Hall moves between 1968 and the late 1950s in the Dorset countryside, tracing the love story between Beth and Gabriel, a farmer's daughter and a young Martin Amis-esque novelist just before his career takes off. But it is also a riveting mystery about a farmer's death, and suddenly Beth's husband is on trial for murder and Gabriel seems to know a lot more than he's letting on. I was hypnotized by this one, utterly under its spell.
]]> <![CDATA[Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver, #2)]]> 59445976
Who killed Emily Vaughn?

Prom Night. Longbill Beach, 1982. Emily Vaughn dresses carefully for what's supposed to be the highlight of any high school career. But Emily has a secret. And by the end of the night, because of that secret, she will be dead.

Nearly forty years later, Andrea Oliver, newly qualified as a US Marshal, receives her first assignment: to go to Longbill Beach to protect a judge receiving death threats. But Andrea's real focus isn't the judge � it's Emily Vaughn. Ever since she first heard Emily's name a year ago, she's been haunted by her brutal death. Nobody was ever convicted � her friends closed ranks, her family shut themselves off in their grief, the town moved on � so the killer is still out there. But now Andrea has a chance to find out what really happened…]]> 400 Karin Slaughter 0062858114 Chris 5 3.99 2022 Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver, #2)
author: Karin Slaughter
name: Chris
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves:
review:
SO far behind in my reviews. (A book tour will do that.) But I devoured this mystery from the brilliant Karin Slaughter: a judge getting death threats, a new U.S. Marshall a part of her protection team, and a pregnant teen murdered nearly a half-century earlier are just some of the threads that Slaughter weaves together seamlessly. There are few novelists out there who so beautifully entwine precise character development and page-turning drama. Slaughter is a treasure.
]]> <![CDATA[Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English]]> 210582563 A spot-on guide to how and why Americans have become so bloody keen on Britishisms—for good or ill

The British love to complain that words and phrases imported from America—from French fries to Awesome, man!—are destroying the English language. But what about the influence going the other way? Britishisms have been making their way into the American lexicon for more than 150 years, but the process has accelerated since the turn of the twenty-first century. From acclaimed writer and language commentator Ben Yagoda, Gobsmacked! is a witty, entertaining, and enlightening account of how and why scores of British words and phrases—such as one-off, go missing, curate, early days, kerfuffle, easy peasy, and cheeky—have been enthusiastically taken up by Yanks.

After tracing Britishisms that entered the American vocabulary in the nineteenth century and during the world wars, Gobsmacked! discusses the most-used British terms in America today. It features chapters on the American embrace of British insults and curses, sports terms, and words about food and drinks. The book also explores the American adoption of British spellings, pronunciations, and grammar, and cases where Americans have misconstrued British expressions (for example, changing can’t be arsed to can’t be asked) or adopted faux-British usages, like pronouncing divisive as “divissive.� Finally, the book offers some guidance on just how many Britishisms an American can safely adopt without coming off like an arse.

Rigorously researched and documented but written in a light, conversational style, this is a book that general readers and language obsessives will love. Its revealing account of a surprising and underrecognized language revolution might even leave them, well, gobsmacked.]]> 288 Ben Yagoda 0691262292 Chris 5 3.45 Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English
author: Ben Yagoda
name: Chris
average rating: 3.45
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves:
review:
I loved this book, and seeing how so many of my favorite writers, such as Sarah Lyall and Dwight Garner of the New York Times, helped bering British words and slang across the pond. Many of you know that I love the word "gobsmacked." Well, from this fine exploration of language, I may have a new favorite Briticism: "shitgibbin." It works well as both an adjective ("Well, that was one shitgibbin move.") and a noun ("Well, he was one annoying little shitgibbin.").
]]> Martyr! 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

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

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Chris 5 4.23 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Chris
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves:
review:
In 1988, the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 665, a passenger jet, having mistaken it for an attacking aircraft. We learn early on that the mother of the protagonist of Kaveh Akbar's surprising, moving, rhythmically luminescent, and often very funny first novel was on that plane. Our Iranian-American hero, Cyrus Shams, might very well have been a passenger, too, but he was so very young that his mother left him behind with his father on what was supposed to be Mom's brief vacation from motherhood. And now Cyrus is in his late-twenties, living in Indiana, melancholic (though far from humorless) and obsessed with how meaningless most deaths are -- including his mother's. When he reads about an Iranian artist actively dying in a Brooklyn museum and using her death as an artistic installation, he has to meet her. And we're off on a tale that is strange, surreal, and beautiful.
]]> The Vulnerables 125930473
Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.

Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez’s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.]]> 256 Sigrid Nunez 0593715519 Chris 5 3.59 2023 The Vulnerables
author: Sigrid Nunez
name: Chris
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
Devoured this short novel about a female writer (perhaps not unlike Nunez herself) in lockdown in the first seasons of Covid in Manhattan, who is in a strange apartment with a charismatic parrot and a young man who is supposed to be away at college, but -- well, this is the spring of 2020 -- isn't. While the world is unraveling, the two of them don't do much. (Imagine.) And yet every page of this book was a treasure for me as a writer and as a reader. Focus on the whole section that begins, "I remember," or the character cameo of an editor who recalls a childhood movie with the line, "Let the men do it," and instantly sees a wry title for a novel. Nunez is not merely an astute and beautiful writer. She is also very, very funny.
]]> <![CDATA[This Is Why We Lied (Will Trent, #12)]]> 199793571 The next thrilling suspense featuring Will Trent and Sara Linton from Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Girls and After That Night!

Everyone here is a liar, but only one of us is a killer�

A secluded cabin retreat

For GBI investigator Will Trent and medical examiner Sara Linton, McAlpine Lodge seems like the ideal getaway to celebrate their honeymoon. Set on a gorgeous, off-the-grid mountaintop property, it’s the perfect place to unplug and reconnect. Until a bone-chilling scream cuts through the night.

A murderer in their midst

Mercy McAlpine, the manager of the Lodge, is dead. With a vicious storm raging and the one access road to the property washed out, the murderer must be someone on the mountain. But as Will and Sara investigate the McAlpine family and the other guests, they realize that everyone here is lying�.Lying about their past. Lying to their family. Lying to themselves.

Who killed Mercy McAlpine?

It soon becomes clear that normal rules don’t apply at McAlpine Lodge, and Will and Sara are going to have to watch their step at every turn. Trapped on the resort, they must untangle a decades-old web of secrets to discover what happened to Mercy. And with the killer poised to strike again, the trip of a lifetime becomes a race against the clock…]]> 464 Karin Slaughter 0063336723 Chris 5 4.19 2024 This Is Why We Lied (Will Trent, #12)
author: Karin Slaughter
name: Chris
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves:
review:
I have devoured a lot of the brilliant Karin Slaughter's mysteries and thrillers, and I love the Will Trent series -- and TV adaptation. In any case, THIS IS WHY WE LIED is both a terrific addition to the Will Trent series and a fantastic stand-alone mystery novel. Also, that ending -- or, to be precise, that series of endings? So smart and so surprising, and Karin Slaughter does one of the things she does best: she pulls the rug out from under us over and over. The ending is Aristotelian: both utterly surprising and absolutely inevitable.
]]> Memorial Days 212806569 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey toĚýpeace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofâ€�Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz � just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy � collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied waysĚýthose ofĚýother cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between soulsĚýthat exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]> 224 Geraldine Brooks 059365398X Chris 5 4.36 2025 Memorial Days
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Chris
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:
Geraldine Brooks's memoir of her life in the days immediately after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Tony Horwitz, in 2019 -- and, then, three years later on a rugged island off the coast of Tasmania -- is beautiful. Every single page, every single word. It's not merely an unflinching exploration of grief, it's a precise examination of the nitty-gritty, often infuriating work demanded of the souls left behind. Instead of mourning, there are the mundane details of probate and the terrifying details of making sure your children still have health insurance. And yet Brooks never loses her sense of humor or remarkable ability to convey a landscape or bring people you'll never meet to life. Brooks is one of our literary treasures and Horwitz was one of our literary treasures. Read this book. Then read one of Tony's. Or, better still, take a month or two and read every single book this remarkable couple has gifted us.
]]> The Message 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 Chris 5 4.52 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Chris
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War]]> 1283566 This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual.

The eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.

Faust details the logistical challenges involved when thousands were left dead, many with their identities unknown, on the fields of places like Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. She chronicles the efforts to identify, reclaim, preserve, and bury battlefield dead, the resulting rise of undertaking as a profession, the first widespread use of embalming, the gradual emergence of military graves registration procedures, the development of a federal system of national cemeteries for Union dead, and the creation of private cemeteries in the South that contributed to the cult of the Lost Cause. She shows, too, how the war victimized civilians through violence that extended beyond battlefields-from disease, displacement, hardships, shortages, emotional wounds, and conflicts connected to the disintegration of slavery.]]> 346 Drew Gilpin Faust 037540404X Chris 5 4.03 2008 This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
author: Drew Gilpin Faust
name: Chris
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:
A deeply moving exploration of how the death of 620,000 soldiers -- plus civilians -- during the Civil War changed Americans' views of death. Drew Gilpin Faust examines (among many things) how the carnage shattered our views of the afterlife, changed the literalness of Christian faith and resurrection, led to an obsession with "spiritualism," and created the South's "lost cause" movement. Always fascinating and sometimes riveting.
]]> Lazarus Man 205363936 In this electrifying novel, Richard Price, the author of Clockers and a writer on The Wire, shines a light in every corner of New York City.Boom! A June morning on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. Suddenly, where a five-story building had stood is nothing but fuming low hills of rubble, the cars parked in front pancaked and coated in ash. Sirens. Havoc. Confusion. Destruction. And people missing.Richard Price, our greatest chronicler of the city today, describes the effect of the disaster on the outer and inner lives of a rich and compelling group of characters. Anthony Walker is pulled from the rubble and, miraculously, survives, to find himself inspired by a religious sense of mission. Royal Lyons, who owns a failing funeral parlor, discovers a new lease on life. And Mary Roe, a hard-bitten NYPD detective, embarks on a personal quest to find a man who is missing.Price's first novel since the bestselling Lush Life presents a bravura portrait of a community on the edge of disintegration. Rich with indelible characters and incredible drama, Lazarus Man is a compelling work of suspense and social vision by one of our preeminent writers.]]> 352 Richard Price 0374168156 Chris 5 3.46 2024 Lazarus Man
author: Richard Price
name: Chris
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves:
review:
Harlem, 2008: a small apartment building collapses and after 36 hours under the rubble, Anthony Carter is pulled out alive: Lazarus Man. He's the fulcrum around which Richard Price spins a study of a half-dozen or so very engaging characters and perhaps that many subplots. But make no mistake, while one of those characters is a detective trying to find someone who's disappeared and doesn't seem to have been amidst the debris, this isn't a cop drama. Instead, it's an exploration of how we can try and (almost literally) reinvent ourselves after the tragedies that life throws at us -- failed marriages, estrangement from the ones we love, mental illness -- but that doesn't make it easier most days to put one foot in front of the other. And for a book that begins with a building collapse, Price gives us a lot of reasons to smile in this novel that rarely failed to surprise me.
]]> Boy With Wings 221943422
About the book: Johnny Cruel is born with strange appendages on his back, frightening his neighbors and leaving him struggling to find a home. Johnny ends up in a “freak show� traveling the 1930s South, where he bares his back to onlookers who come to gape and fawn. Is he a horror or an angel? Should he hide himself to live his life?

As Johnny comes to grips with his uniqueness, he embarks on a journey of love and finds the miracles that give our lives meaning. Mustian’s thrilling and emotional story of self-discovery is perfect for book clubs and fans of historical fiction.]]> 338 Mark Mustian Chris 5 3.85 2025 Boy With Wings
author: Mark Mustian
name: Chris
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves:
review:
BOY WITH WINGS is a brilliant fever dream of a novel, a haunting coming of age story reminiscent of both Franz Kafka and Charles Dickens. Depression-era America and the carnival life is rendered vividly, but so is the beauty and courage of, yes, a boy with wings.
]]> Nightbitch 55835474
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. She had imagined - what was it she had imagined? Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.

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

With its clear eyes on contemporary womanhood and sharp take on structures of power, Nightbitch is an outrageously original, joyfully subversive read that will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. Addictive enough to be devoured in one sitting, this is an unforgettable novel from a blazing new talent.]]> 256 Rachel Yoder 0385546815 Chris 5 3.47 2021 Nightbitch
author: Rachel Yoder
name: Chris
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves:
review:
NIGHTBITCH is a spellbindingly beautiful novel -- hilarious one moment, insightful and astute the next. Can a stay-at-home mom who, once upon a time, had a promising career in the arts, find her inner dog before she loses her mind? And what of those seemingly perfect moms in the book buddies preschool play group: might they have already found their inner dogs? And is "nightbitch," the mom, really transforming into a dog, and is she -- as a result -- becoming a better mother? With ferocity and wit, Rachel Yoder has given us a Kafka-esque heroine you will fall in love with, even if she does, on occasion, eat a bunny.
]]> <![CDATA[One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest]]> 332613 9780451163967

Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy � the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.]]> 325 Ken Kesey Chris 5 4.20 1962 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
author: Ken Kesey
name: Chris
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:
When I was researching my novel, THE LIONESS, I read POISONER IN CHIEF, Stephen Kinzer's account of the CIA search for "mind control" and its experimentation with LSD. Ken Kesey volunteered to be among the study participants at a Menlo Park V.A. hospital, and wound up as a night attendant there. Thus was born ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. The novel holds up over six decades later: there is McMurphy (who will always be Jack Nicholson), Nurse Ratched, and (of course) Chief Bromden. What struck me most was the brilliant choice of having Bromden narrate the tale, a patient everyone assumes -- mistakenly -- is deaf, and so, as readers, we are privy to a lot we might have missed. And Kesey's ending? As surprising as ever.
]]> Waterline 218431713 In this deeply moving debut, a close-knit Armenian-American family grapples with the aftermath of losing one of their own.

Outside Detroit on the island of Gross Ile, the Kurkjians receive news that Mari, the eldest of their youngest generation, has swum into the middle of Lake Michigan with no intent of returning to shore—the consequences of which drag out a deeply rooted pain passed down from generations before.

More than a century earlier, Gregor, the great-grandfather and patriarch of the Kurkjian family, survived the Armenian Genocide after fighting for his freedom atop Musa Dagh. In the present day, his epic mythos is inherited by his family as they navigate living in its shadow, decades later and miles away. As the Kurkjians struggle with their new, devastating loss, secrets and shortcomings rise to the surface, until each relative must Where does their own story fit in the narrative of their family’s fraught history?

For fans of Tommy Orange’s There, There and Thao Thai’s Banyan Moon, Waterline explores the complex beauty of diaspora, the weight of inherited trauma, and the echoes of the Genocide on contemporary Armenian life. This is a searing portrait of a family afloat in grief and the perseverance needed to rise above.]]> 288 Aram Mrjoian 0063393522 Chris 5 4.61 Waterline
author: Aram Mrjoian
name: Chris
average rating: 4.61
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves:
review:
"Waterline" is smart and beautiful and breathtaking in its Rashomon-like chronicle of the ripple effect of a young woman's suicide. The depth of Aram Mrjoian's exploration of an extended family in crisis is stunning, and his insights into grief and loss are profound. I was awed by this first novel.
]]> <![CDATA[Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space]]> 199798785
On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like 9/11 or JFK’s assassination, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th-century history—yet the details of what took place that day, and why, have largely been forgotten. Until now.

Based on extensive archival records and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a tale of optimism and promise undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and ultimately kept from the public.

Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers, and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space.]]> 576 Adam Higginbotham 198217661X Chris 5 4.53 2024 Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Chris
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:
Riveting. Wrenching. Haunting. And brilliant. Here's the tale of the spectacular human error, malfeasance, and bad judgment, that cost the seven-person crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger their lives. Higginbotham, who also wrote the devastating "Midnight in Chernobyl," has given us the story of the crew, the engineers, the scientists, and the bureaucrats behind the nightmare. Also? He introduces us to the heroes who fought AGAINST the launch that January day in 1986, the folks who feared that disaster loomed. We often call books "page-turners" or discuss how we couldn't put a book down. "Challenger" really is that sort of reading experience.
]]> Going Home 211399769
Except, underneath the surface, not much has changed at all. He's still the boy seeking his father's approval; the young man playing late-night poker with his best friend, unreliable, infuriating Ben Mossam; the one still desperately in love with the enigmatic Lia.

Lia's life, on the other hand, has been transformed: now a single mum to two-year-old Joel, she doesn't have time for anyone - not even herself.

When the unthinkable happens, Joel finds himself at the centre of a strange constellation of men - TĂ©o, Vic, Ben - none of whom is fully equipped to look after him, but whose strange, tentative attempts at love might just be enough to offer him a new place to call home.]]> 304 Tom Lamont 0593803248 Chris 5 3.76 2024 Going Home
author: Tom Lamont
name: Chris
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves:
review:
"Going Home" was a revelation for me: a debut novel that is funny, smart, poignant, and tender -- without EVER becoming mawkish or sentimental. A London mom in her early thirties kills herself, leaving behind a 2 and 1/2 year old boy and NO clue who the father is. Can two of her male friends, one of the mate's elderly father, and a female rabbi care for the boy until social services can find the biologic father or (at least) a foster home? This novel is reminiscent of the wit and irony that marks the best of Nick Hornby, the insight into "youngish" adults of Sally Rooney, and the melancholy of Claire Keegan. Mark your calendars: this gem arrives in January 2025.
]]> The Blue Hour 207252770
Once home to Vanessa: A famous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared twenty years ago.

Now home to Grace: A solitary creature of the tides, content in her own isolation.

But when a shocking discovery is made in an art gallery far away in London, a visitor comes calling.

And the secrets of Eris threaten to emerge . . .

A masterful novel that is as page-turning as it is unsettling, The Blue Hour recalls the sophisticated suspense of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith, and cements Hawkins’s place among the very best of our most nuanced and stylish storytellers.]]> 320 Paula Hawkins 0063396521 Chris 5 3.25 2024 The Blue Hour
author: Paula Hawkins
name: Chris
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves:
review:
A lot of the discussion of this fine novel begins with the premise it's a thriller and a mystery -- which it is. But I sometimes fear when we present a book in terms of genre, its intellectual chops get lost in the "page-turner" expectations. "The Blue Hour" felt to me like a far deeper book than a page-turner. (And, I should note, I love page-turners. It's only good to write a book that's a page-turner, in my opinion.) Paula Hawkins's new novel is reminiscent of the best of Daphne du Maurier or Patricia Highsmith: yes, it is a mystery triggered by a human bone in a work of art, but it's more than that. It's a smart and moving exploration of class, and the role that art plays in class distinctions -- and how, very much like the Buchanans in The Great Gatsby, the very rich can be very awful, with consequences that lead to someone (literally) dead in the water.
]]> North Woods 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire.ĚýA crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Chris 5 4.12 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Chris
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves:
review:
My gosh, I was so late to the party on NORTH WOODS, which is inexplicable to me because I loved Daniel Mason's novel, THE WINTER SOLDIER. His 2023 novel, NORTH WOODS, is a very different animal from his earlier work: it's actually a very different animal from most novels. We have a plot of land in western New England, a house, and its inhabitants over hundreds (literally) years of history. The characters (and their ghosts) come and go, as do the apple trees and flowers -- the native plants and the invasives, which could be said about the people, too. And running through the narrative is spectacular wit. For all our discussion of this novel's polyphony and brilliance, let's, please, never lose sight of just how funny Daniel Mason can be. This book is a classic.
]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Chris 5 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Chris
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves:
review:
A decade and a half late to the party, but I adored this coming-of-age novel. Two young girls --then young women -- in post World War Two Naples, discovering all the joy and beauty and sadness and disappointment that mark every life. The supporting characters are all exquisitely drawn, as are the homes and cafes and cobbler shops. But what I loved most was the precision of the narrator's interior world, and the way competition and love walk hand in hand in almost every close friendship.
]]> First Lie Wins 164444179 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593492918.

Evie Porter has everything a nice Southern girl could want: a doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence, a tight group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter doesn’t exist.

The identity comes first: Evie Porter. Once she’s given a name and location by her mysterious boss, Mr. Smith, she learns everything there is to know about the town and the people in it. Then the mark: Ryan Sumner. The last piece of the puzzle is the job.

Evie isn’t privy to Mr. Smith’s real identity, but she knows this job isn’t like the others. Ryan has gotten under her skin, and she’s starting to envision a different sort of life for herself. But Evie can’t make any mistakes—especially after what happened last time.

Evie Porter must stay one step ahead of her past while making sure there’s still a future in front of her. The stakes couldn’t be higher—but then, Evie has always liked a challenge. . . .]]> 340 Ashley Elston Chris 5 3.97 2024 First Lie Wins
author: Ashley Elston
name: Chris
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves:
review:
This thriller was massive amounts of fun. It has to be among the most intricately plotted novels I've read in the last two or three years, and I say that as a deep compliment. Nothing is as it seems, and no one (almost) is who we think they are. Is Evie Porter a mere grifter or something much worse? Is her squeeze, Ryan Sumner, the catch that he appears to be? (And where is he really going on Thursdays if not to the office? And then there are Luca and Rachel and the "Mr. Smith" who disguises his voice whenever he calls Evie. We call too many books "page-turners," but FIRST LIE WINS absolutely deserves that appellation.
]]> Leslie F*cking Jones 123027172
Now, I’m gonna be honest: Some of the details might be vague because a b*tch is fifty-five and she’s smoked a ton of weed. But while bits might be a touch hazy, I can promise you the underlying truth is REAL. Whether I’m talking about my childhood growing up in the South, my early stand-up days driving from gig to gig through the darkest parts of our country and praying I wouldn’t get murdered, what Chris Rock told Lorne Michaels, that time I wanted to shoot Whoopi Goldberg on SNL, and yeah, I’ll tell you all about Ghostbusters and the nudes and Supermarket Sweep and The Daily Show . . . I’m sharing it all in these pages. It’s not easy being a woman in comedy, especially when you’re a tall-*ss Black woman with a trumpet voice. I have to fight so that no one takes me for granted, and no one takes advantage. These are the stories that explain why. (Cue the Law & Order theme.)]]> 288 Leslie Jones 1538706490 Chris 5 4.09 2023 Leslie F*cking Jones
author: Leslie Jones
name: Chris
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves:
review:
I savored the audio of this memoir, because -- well -- it's Leslie F*ucking Jones. And to hear her tell her story was a treasure. It was like listening to one of her hysterical Weekend Update riffs on Saturday Night Live. But her story is also, like many people's, filled with pain and failure and loss -- and growth. Bonus? Her tales of SNL were a delight and spectacularly interesting.
]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Chris 5 3.35 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Chris
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/29
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves:
review:
A spy who is funny, sardonic, and glib. Eco-terrorists. The south of France. Neanderthals (literally). What more could anyone want in a Rachel Kushner novel? I loved CREATION LAKE, and savored the way she re-imagined the classic spy novel.
]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Chris 5 3.88 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Chris
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves:
review:
I have loved all of Sally Rooney's novels, but was nonetheless unprepared for how powerfully moving Intermezzo would be. It's a tale of two estranged brothers and the three women in their lives. As always, her ear for dialogue -- how people really speak -- is spot-on, and her insights into the ways we can sabotage ourselves (and our best selves) when in love are precise. But what is particularly beautiful about this novel are the ways she shows how the ties that bind siblings can become frayed. Is reconciliation possible? In a Rooney novel, as in life, the people are flawed and real. . .and so. . .the answer is maybe. . .
]]> Colored Television 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Chris 5 3.54 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Chris
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves:
review:
This is one of my new favorite novels about writing -- and writing for television. Smart and surprising and really captures the love so many novelists have for TV, and the way we believe (mistakenly!) that it's easy to transform, chameleon-like, from writing books to writing scripts. There are moments with kids that will break your heart because of their honesty, and moments with adults that will leave you smiling because of the grownups' phoniness. Also, and this matters, Danzy Senna really sticks the landing: a great ending I never saw coming, and I do this for a living!
]]> Delicate Condition 62976325 The Push meets The Silent Patient in a gripping thriller that follows a woman convinced a sinister figure is going to great lengths to make sure her pregnancy never happens—while the men in her life refuse to believe a word she says.

Anna Alcott is desperate to be pregnant. But as she tries to balance her increasingly public life with a grueling IVF journey, she starts to suspect that someone is going to great lengths to make sure her pregnancy never happens. Crucial medicines are lost. Appointments get swapped without her knowledge. And even when she finally manages to get pregnant, not even her husband is willing to believe that someone's playing a twisted game with her.

When the increasingly cryptic threats drive her out of her Brooklyn brownstone and into hiding in the cold, gray ghost town that is the Hamptons in the depths of winter, Anna is almost at the end of her rope.

Then her doctor tells her she's had a miscarriage—except Anna's convinced she's still pregnant, despite everything the grave-faced men around her claim. Could it be that her mind is playing tricks on her? Or is something more sinister at play? As her symptoms become ever more horrifying and the sense of danger ever more present, Anna can't help but wonder what exactly she's carrying inside of her...and why no one will listen when she says something is horribly, painfully wrong.]]> 432 Danielle Valentine 1728276888 Chris 5 3.61 2023 Delicate Condition
author: Danielle Valentine
name: Chris
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/30
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves:
review:
Danielle Valentine's novel was the inspiration for the most recent incarnation of "American Horror Story" -- the season in which Kim Kardashian joins Emma Roberts -- and it's a gem. I should note that I loved, loved, loved that season of "American Horror Story." You think you are reading a re-imagining of "Rosemary's Baby" set in the world of IVF, though in the case the mother herself is the actor who has just gotten a very big break, but Valentine (and the wonderful TV series) explore something very different. Tense, surreal, and awash in surprise, "Delicate Condition" is a fantastic choice for your spooky season selections.
]]> Her Last Affair 58269326
Every marriage has its secrets�.

Skyla lives alone in the shadow of the defunct drive-in movie theater that she and her husband ran for nearly fifty years. Ever since Hollis’s death in a freak accident the year before, Skyla spends her nights ruminating about the regrets and deceptions in her long marriage. That is, until she rents a cottage on the property to a charming British man, Teddy Cornwell�.

A thousand miles away, Linelle is about to turn fifty. Bored by her spouse and fired from her job when a questionable photo from her youth surfaces on social media, her only source of joy is an on-line affair with her very first love, a man she’s not seen in nearly thirty years, Teddy Cornwell�

While in New York City, Jeremy, a failed and bitter writer, accepts an assignment to review a new restaurant in Providence. Years ago, Providence was the site of his first great love and first great heartbreak—and maybe, just maybe, he’ll look her up when he’s back in town�

Part page-turning thriller, part homage to film noir, and dazzling in its insight into the often desperate desires of the human heart, Her Last Affair is a tense and atmospheric novel of love lost and found again.]]> 336 John Searles 0062199447 Chris 5 3.57 2022 Her Last Affair
author: John Searles
name: Chris
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/06
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:
John Searles brings the misfits among us to life with the clarity of Carson McCullers � and then scares us with the brilliance of Stephen King. Her Last Affair is a perfect, page-turning example of the heart and horror that makes me love his work so very, very much.
]]> How Lucky 57302099 For readers of TheĚýCurious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Nothing to See Here, a first novel as suspenseful and funny as it is moving, the unforgettable story of a fiercely resilient young man grappling with a physical disability, and his efforts to solve a mystery unfolding right outside his door.Ěý

Daniel leads a rich life in the university town of Athens, Georgia.Ěý He’s got a couple close friends, a steady paycheck working for a regional airline, and of course, for a few glorious days each Fall, college football tailgates. He considers himself to be a mostly lucky guy—despite the fact that he’s suffered from aĚýdebilitating diseaseĚýsince he was a small child, one that has left him unable to speak or to move without a wheelchair.Ěý

Largely confined to his home, Daniel spends the hours he’s not online communicating with irate air travelers observing his neighborhood from his front porch. One young woman passes by so frequently that spotting her out the window has almost become part of his daily routine. Until the day he’s almost sure he sees her being kidnapped.Ěý

How Lucky is the unforgettable story of a fiercely resilient young man grappling with a physical disability, and his efforts to solve a mystery unfolding right outside his door.Ěý
]]> 298 Will Leitch 0063073064 Chris 5 4.08 2021 How Lucky
author: Will Leitch
name: Chris
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/19
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:
“How Lucky is a gem: a riveting plot and a narrator who is charming, engaging, and downright inspiring. Will Leitch brilliantly juggles hilarity and horror. I loved this novel � every page.�
]]> The Secret History 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Chris 5 4.17 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: Chris
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/17
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves:
review:
I read The Secret History when it first was published in 1992, and introduced Donna Tartt when she spoke at a bookstore in Burlington, VT (now long gone) called Chassmen & Bem. I reread the novel earlier this month, and it really holds up. I loved it every bit as much as I did 32 years ago. (Thirty-two years. . .how is that possible?) If you have not read it, please do. The tale of six eccentric college students at a fictional version of Bennington who murder part of their posse (not a spoiler, the narrator shares this tidbit in the opening paragraph), is poignant and surprising and dark and sometimes very funny. The characters are not, by design, especially likable, and yet they are so strange that you gravitate to them like a moth to summer porch lights. The novel also captures perfectly college life in an era before every moment was chronicled for the socials, and the lies we tell ourselves (and others) to fit in. (One last thought: Tartt's choice of names is very clever, i.e., twins names Charles and Camilla, and I'm not sure I had picked up on that back in the day.)
]]> Vanishing Maps 74872351 From the acclaimed author of Dreaming in Cuban a follow-up novel that tracks four generations of the del Pino family against the tumultuous backdrops of Cuba, the U.S., Germany, and Russia in the new millennium.

Celia del Pino, the matriarch of a far-flung Cuban family, has watched her descendants spread out across the globe, struggling to make sense of their transnational identities and strained relationships with one another. In Berlin, the charismatic yet troubled Ivanito performs on stage as his drag queen persona while being haunted by the ghost of his mother. Pilar Puente, adrift in Los Angeles, is a struggling sculptor and the single mother of a young son. In Moscow, Ivanito's cousin, Irina, has become the wealthy owner of a lingerie company, but she remains deeply lonely in the wake of her parents' deaths and her estrangement from her Cuban heritage. Meanwhile, in Havana, Celia prepares to reunite with her lost lover, Gustavo, and wonders whether age and the decades spent apart have altered their bond.

Cut off from their Cuban roots, yet still feeling the island's ineluctable pull, Ivanito and his extended family try to re-imagine where--and with whom--they belong. Over the course of a momentous year, each will grapple with their histories as they are pulled to Berlin for a final, explosive reunion.

Set twenty years after the events in Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina GarcĂ­a's new novel is an epic tale of family, devotion, and the timeless search for home.]]> 273 Cristina GarcĂ­a 0593534751 Chris 5 3.76 2023 Vanishing Maps
author: Cristina GarcĂ­a
name: Chris
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/06
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves:
review:
"Vanishing Maps is a beautiful novel: hilarious one moment, haunting the next. Cristina Garcia brings us to Cuba, Germany, Russia, Spain, and the United States in this wonderful mad dash of a tale, but the topography she knows best is the human heart. I devoured this book. You will, too."
]]> Foster 8143909
Winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize, Foster is now published in a revised and expanded version. Beautiful, sad and eerie, it is a story of astonishing emotional depth, showcasing Claire Keegan's great accomplishment and talent.]]> 89 Claire Keegan 0571255655 Chris 5 4.32 2010 Foster
author: Claire Keegan
name: Chris
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/06
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves:
review:
Claire Keegan is both a brilliant stylist and a writer who illuminates the human soul with precision. FOSTER is told from the perspective of a young girl being sent to live with apparently childless strangers -- though friends of her parents -- while her mother gives birth to another baby. And in the day-to-day "normalcy" in her temporary home, she discovers little by little both what makes this couple caring for her very happy and very sad. Never does the narrative become cloying or precious, a testimony to Keegan's remarkable ability to make even a young child's voice as authentic as it is moving.
]]> The White Album 421 The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.]]> 224 Joan Didion 0374532079 Chris 5 4.06 1979 The White Album
author: Joan Didion
name: Chris
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves:
review:
A little embarrassed to admit that I hadn't read THE WHITE ALBUM until this past August. But, though late to the party, I'm very glad I got there. It was, in some ways, a return to my childhood -- both moments I could recall and some that I could not because I was too little (the Doors or the Manson murders I recall only dimly, and then only through the reactions of my parents). But Didion was one of our most astute observers of the changing world of the 1960s and 1970s, and most of these essays transcend the era in which she wrote them. Her thoughts on Hawaii, Malibu, and Los Angeles traffic are downright timeless.
]]> <![CDATA[The Tinderbox: Underground Movement]]> 209601434 What if Romeo and Juliet had survived and become middle-aged parents?

In this riveting standalone followup to the The Soldier Of Indira we are presented this question along with the other realities that happen long after the 'happily ever after' of fairy tales.

Through twenty years of prosperity and progress, King Everson and Queen Allegra have lovingly nurtured peace between the once mortal enemies, Indira and Mano. The war which nearly drowned both worlds in chaos is merely a memory.

But peace can be fragile...

Unexplained tremors beneath the ground can no longer be ignored. They grow stronger each day. Impossible to miss. Some claim it's nothing. Others, that it foretells the apocalypse.

This new and unforeseen threat opens old wounds and creates fresh fissures within the palace, throwing the court into a maelstrom of palace intrigue, conspiracy theories, paranoia and political posturing.

Can Everson and Allegra hold the kingdom together? Or is it doomed to split once more...

Actor and writer Lou Diamond Phillips returns with this epic Science Fantasy tale, with illustrations done by the incomparable Yvonne Phillips. This story stands alone as it tells a story of service, family, and the lengths we'll go to keep the things we love together.]]> 398 Lou Diamond Phillips Chris 5 4.62 The Tinderbox: Underground Movement
author: Lou Diamond Phillips
name: Chris
average rating: 4.62
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/08/24
shelves:
review:
An epic science fiction saga of worlds at war � and a timely parable of how easy it is for one galaxy's fragile peace to be upended by duplicity and violence. Lou Diamond Phillips, with the help of Yvonne Phillips’s haunting illustrations, has given fantasy readers the perfect followup to his first novel, The Tinderbox, and a wonderful new story.
]]> Long Island Compromise 55777544 “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?�

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives� successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives� tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.]]> 464 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0593133498 Chris 5 3.72 2024 Long Island Compromise
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Chris
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves:
review:
A big, sprawling family saga that is riveting, funny, surprising, and smart -- and deeply moving. A successful Long Island father and businessman is kidnapped, and now, roughly forty years later, he and his wife and his mother and his three children are still coping (badly, SO badly) with the legacy. They're all haunted, damaged by the trauma even if (in theory) the kidnapping ended well: Dad came home! But beneath the surface swim the sharks of trauma. It's a brilliant book and I loved it in much the same way I devoured Jonathan Franzen's THE CORRECTIONS and Jenny Jackson's PINEAPPLE STREET.
]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

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

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Chris 5 4.16 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Chris
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves:
review:
"The God of the Woods" has to be among the smartest, surprising, most literate mysteries I've read in a while. The setting is an Adirondack summer camp in the 1960s and 1970s, and not one but two children of monied New York State royalty disappear there: a boy in 1961 and a girl in 1975. Part police procedural -- and what a great cop Liz Moore has given us, a smart young woman whom the old male detectives don't take seriously -- and part character study of a wealthy family with an awful lot of skeletons in their rambling, walk-in closets, I really did stay up one until two in the morning to finish this treasure of a tale. And because I am writing this on the last day of the Olympics, let me add: wowza, does Moore stick the landing.
]]> The Cliffs 200634908 A novel of family, secrets, ghosts, and homecoming set on the seaside cliffs of Maine, by the New York Times best-selling author of Friends and Strangers.

On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house, lavender with gingerbread trim, a home that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother.

Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The new owner, Genevieve, a summer person from Beacon Hill, has gutted it, transforming the house into a glossy white monstrosity straight out of a shelter magazine. Strangely, Genevieve is convinced that the house is haunted—perhaps the product of something troubling Genevieve herself has done. She hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there. The story Jane uncovers—of lovers lost at sea, romantic longing, shattering loss, artistic awakening, historical artifacts stolen and sold, and the long shadow of colonialism—is even older than Maine itself.

Enthralling, richly imagined, filled with psychic mediums and charlatans, spirits and past lives, mothers, marriage, and the legacy of alcoholism, this is a deeply moving novel about the land we inhabit, the women who came before us, and the ways in which none of us will ever truly leave this earth.]]> 384 J. Courtney Sullivan 059331915X Chris 5 3.51 2024 The Cliffs
author: J. Courtney Sullivan
name: Chris
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/07/30
shelves:
review:
I'm a huge fan of J. Courtney Sullivan, but I was still unprepared for the way I would devour her new novel. Imagine -- I am not kidding -- the brilliant ghost story, POLTERGEIST, meets Daniel Mason's brilliant novel, NORTH WOODS. Sullivan's latest, THE CLIFFS, is a sweeping tale of a woman trying to claw her way back from the alcoholic sinkhole of her life in a coastal Maine town. Her research into the abandoned house she adored as a teen, which has now become a gentrified McMansion, turns up the ghosts of Shakers, indigenous people ensnared and enslaved by the European settlers, a horrifying shipwreck within sight of land, adulterous trysts, and a dead girl who wants her mother to know her corpse has been moved. And it works, every page. Every single page. Another treasure from Sullivan.
]]> <![CDATA[A Royal Duty by Paul Burrell (3-Jun-2004) Paperback]]> 129829275 Excellent Book 0 Paul Burrell Chris 5 4.00 2000 A Royal Duty by Paul Burrell (3-Jun-2004) Paperback
author: Paul Burrell
name: Chris
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/16
date added: 2024/07/28
shelves:
review:
Really enjoyed this memoir by Princess Diana's butler and then, post-divorce, her (for lack of a better word) right-hand-person and "handler." I know author Paul Burrell is a controversial figure among "Royals" watchers, but I savored his perspective on the People's Princess and friendship with the woman. I have no idea whether he was, in fact, her "rock," but he surely meant a lot to her -- and his stories are incredibly interesting.
]]> The Jackal's Mistress 214537772 In this Civil War love story, inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy lines, the wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she’s willing to risk for the life of a stranger, from the New York Times bestselling author of such acclaimed historical fiction as Hour of the Witch and The Sandcastle Girls.

ĚýĚýĚýĚýVirginia, 1864—Libby Steadman’s husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand, and his wife, all the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and South, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield.Ěý
ĚýĚýĚýĚýAnd then she finds a gravely injured Union officer left for dead in a neighbor’s house, the bones of his hand and leg shattered. Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is her enemy â€� but he’s also a human being, and Libby must make a terrible Does she leave him to die alone? Or does she risk treason and try to nurse him back to health? And if she succeeds, does she try to secretly bring him across Union lines, where she might negotiate a trade for news of her own husband?Ěý
ĚýĚýĚýĚýA vivid and sweeping story of two people navigating the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violence, The Jackal’s Mistress is a heart-stopping new novel, based on a largely unknown piece of American history, from one of our greatest storytellers.]]> 336 Chris Bohjalian 0385547641 Chris 0 to-read 4.14 2025 The Jackal's Mistress
author: Chris Bohjalian
name: Chris
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Margo's Got Money Troubles 199534613
Margo braucht Geld. Seit sie ungewollt von ihrem Collegeprofessor, der sie jetzt mit dem Kind alleinlässt, schwanger wurde, mehr denn je. Wie Margo es auch dreht und wendet, kein Job scheint passend zu sein, oder könnte auch nur ansatzweise ihr Leben mit einem Baby finanzieren. Durch einen Zufall wird sie auf die Plattform OnlyFans aufmerksam, und Margo ist fasziniert von dieser Welt, in der Frauen mit sich und ihrem Körper experimentieren, und offenbar gut dabei verdienen. Also beginnt auch sie, Inhalte zu produzieren. Dabei erhält sie Unterstützung von ihrer Mitbewohnerin Suzie, einem großen Cosplay-Fan, und auch von ihrem Vater Jinx, einem Ex-Wrestlingprofi. Ehe sie sich versieht, ist Margo ein Online-Phänomen. Könnte dies die Antwort auf all ihre Probleme sein, oder hat der Internet-Ruhm einen zu hohen Preis?]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Chris 5 3.87 2024 Margo's Got Money Troubles
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Chris
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves:
review:
Rufi Thorpe is fascinated by professional wrestling, and the literary world is a better place for it. Her new novel, MARGO'S GOT MONEY TROUBLES, is wildly funny and deeply moving. Margo, a college student, is knocked up by her smarmy, married English professor, and she decides to keep the baby. And there she discovers what a dumpster fire it is to be a 20-year-old single mom in America, especially given that her own single mother is clearly going to be useless. Thank God, she had a former professional wrestler for a dad: the guy was not involved to any great degree in raising her, but he's fallen on hard times now, moves in with her, and things begin to look up. . .especially when Margo starts getting rich from her "Only Fans" account. Ah, but then Margo's baby's father decides he wants custody, and the tension mounts along with the comedy. This novel is a delight and Margo's voice -- and Thorpe, in a deeply meta twist, offers it in both the first and Margo-written third person versions -- is a delight. Another gem from Rufi Thorpe.
]]> Entitlement 209330233 A novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.]]> 288 Rumaan Alam 0593718461 Chris 5 3.00 2024 Entitlement
author: Rumaan Alam
name: Chris
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves:
review:
"Entitlement" is hypnotic: a brilliant fever dream of the allure of money and what money means. But this is no ordinary tale of grifters and schemers: it's a story of one woman seduced by the world of philanthropy, who begins to confuse what people need with what she wants -- and the unraveling is catnip for a reader like me. I devoured LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND and devoured this one, too. I love Alam's work for a lot of reasons, but I think a big one is this: he understands well the most eerie, uncomfortable corners of the human psyche and brings them to light. This new novel arrives in September. You'll love it.
]]> I Am Not Sidney Poitier 6080748

An irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

Percival Everett’s hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: “What’s your name?� a kid would ask. “Not Sidney,� I would say. “Okay, then what is it?�

]]> 234 Percival Everett 1555975275 Chris 5 3.97 2009 I Am Not Sidney Poitier
author: Percival Everett
name: Chris
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/06
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves:
review:
A delightful, surprising, and spectacularly meta novel about the boy who is named (yes) "Not Sidney Poitier," and raised by (wait for it) Ted Turner, and counts among his professors when he goes to college. . .Percival Everett. I dove in after reading Everett's magnificent JAMES and then saw this earlier tale among the New York Times list of the funniest novels published in the 21st century.
]]> <![CDATA[When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day]]> 199797834
D-Day is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military and human triumphs. Though the full campaign lasted just over a month, the surprise landing of over 150,000 Allied troops on the morning of June 6, 1944, is understood to be the moment that turned the tide for the Allied forces and ultimately led to the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. Now, a new book from bestselling author and historian Garrett M. Graff explores the full impact of this world-changing event—from the secret creation of landing plans by top government and military officials and organization of troops, to the moment the boat doors opened to reveal the beach where men fought for their lives and the future of the free world.

Fascinating, action-packed, and filled with impressive detail, When the Sea Came Alive captures a human drama like no other, and offers a fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.]]> 608 Garrett M. Graff 166802781X Chris 5 4.49 2024 When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day
author: Garrett M. Graff
name: Chris
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/24
date added: 2024/06/24
shelves:
review:
Garrett Graff is a treasure: a historian rather like Erik Larson with a vast curiosity. He's written some of the very best books out there on UFOs, Watergate, and 9/11. (THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY: AN ORAL HISTORY OF 9/11 is brilliant -- and not for the faint of heart.) Now he has turned his attention to D-Day, the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, and again he has added so much to what we know and what happened that day (and in the months leading up to it). Using the words of the men and women who were there -- some famous, most not -- he has crafted a moment by moment and beach by beach narrative that is riveting. As the nephew of a member of the 101st Airborne, Easy Company, it was deeply moving to learn more specifically what my uncle experienced. But, the fact is, you don't need a personal connection to someone who was there to have "all the feels." This is the sort of book that is smart, inspiring, and powerful -- and adds so much to our knowledge of what that day was like and its historic importance forever.
]]> Night Watch 62951865
The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.]]> 276 Jayne Anne Phillips 0451493338 Chris 5 3.56 2023 Night Watch
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Chris
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/21
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves:
review:
I've been a fan of Jayne Anne Philips for years, and yet (somehow) I missed this one until it won the Pulitzer Prize. Well, thank you Team Pulitzer for bringing it to my attention, because it's fantastic. Moving back and forth between 1864 and 1874, between the cataclysm of the Battle of the Wilderness and the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia (a real place), this beautiful novel follows the lives of three people still reeling from the Civil War: scarred, silent, confused. And very, very damaged. Phillips is a brave, unflinching storyteller, and NIGHT WATCH is a gem.
]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Chris 5 3.54 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Chris
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/10
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves:
review:
Yes, there's lots of sex, but what struck me most was how beautiful and moving this novel was about a woman at absolute mid-life and her fears that the second half will be a deep dive into despair and ever lessening pleasures. That doesn't mean that the novel also isn't funny as hell: it often is. The tone is wry and gently comic, and some of the smallest asides had me laughing out loud. But there is a depth to the tale that's easy to miss if you're focused only the narrator's exploration of what she craves physically.
]]> The Ministry of Time 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats� from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge�: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as �1847� or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,� “Spotify,� and “the collapse of the British Empire.� But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Chris 5 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Chris
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/06
date added: 2024/06/06
shelves:
review:
Once more I have fallen behind in my reviews. I mention that because if you look at the dates I started and finished this spectacularly fine debut novel, you'd think it took me a while to finish it. Nope. I inhaled it. Imagine a brilliant sci-fi story about time travel; a beautiful romance between a forward-thinking 21st-century executive and an eighteenth-century arctic explorer; and a riveting tale about spy craft and sage houses. This novel is all that in one perfect mash-up. I loved it. (PS: While you'll be fascinated by the eighteenth-century-explorer, you'll really devour the tart who survived the seventeenth-century plague.)
]]> Small World 60838158 “[A] brave and heartfelt book of truths.”�New York Times Book Review (A Group Text Pick and Editors' Choice)

From bestselling author Laura Zigman comes a heartfelt novel about two offbeat and newly divorced sisters who move in together as adults—and finally reckon with their childhood

A year after her divorce, Joyce is settling into being single again. She likes her job archiving family photos and videos, and she’s developed a secret comforting hobby: trolling the neighborhood social networking site, Small World, for posts that help solve life’s easiest problems. When her older sister, Lydia, also divorced, calls to tell her she’s moving back east from Los Angeles after almost thirty years away, Joyce invites Lydia to move into her Cambridge apartment. Temporarily. Just until she finds a place of her own.

But their unlikely cohabitation—not helped by annoying new neighbors upstairs—turns out to be the post-divorce rebound relationship Joyce hadn’t planned on. Instead of forging the bond she always dreamed of having with Lydia, their relationship frays. And they rarely discuss the loss of their sister, Eleanor, who was significantly disabled and died when she was only ten years old. When new revelations from their family’s history come to light, will those secrets further split them apart, or course correct their connection for the future?

Written with wry humor and keen sensitivity, Small World is a powerful novel of sisterhood and hope—a reminder that sometimes you have to look back in order to move ahead.]]> 304 Laura Zigman 0063088282 Chris 5
Merged review:

Small World is a treasure: a family story that is wistful one moment, witty and wry the next. Few novelists write as beautifully about the damaged heart and the wounded soul as Laura Zigman, or understand the emotional bonds of siblings and sisters. I loved this novel.]]> 3.46 2023 Small World
author: Laura Zigman
name: Chris
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/17
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves:
review:
Small World is a treasure: a family story that is wistful one moment, witty and wry the next. Few novelists write as beautifully about the damaged heart and the wounded soul as Laura Zigman, or understand the emotional bonds of siblings and sisters. I loved this novel.

Merged review:

Small World is a treasure: a family story that is wistful one moment, witty and wry the next. Few novelists write as beautifully about the damaged heart and the wounded soul as Laura Zigman, or understand the emotional bonds of siblings and sisters. I loved this novel.
]]> <![CDATA[The Midnight Club: An Intriguing Dark Academia Thriller with Mysterious Secrets, Uncover the Truth]]> 208169549 Four friends. A campus reunion. A dark new way to relive the past.

“How could you leave the past undisturbed when it was hiding parts of you from yourself?�

It’s been twenty-five years since The Midnight Club last convened. A tight-knit group of college friends bonded by late nights at the campus literary magazine, they’re also bonded by something the death of their brilliant friend Jennet junior year. But now, decades later, a mysterious invitation has pulled them back to the pine-shrouded Vermont town where it all began.

As the estranged friends gather for a weeklong campus reunion, they soon learn that their host has an ulterior she wants them to uncover the truth about the night Jennet died, and she’s provided them with an extraordinary method—a secret substance that helps them not only remember but relive the past.

But each one of the friends has something to hide. And the more they question each other, the deeper they dive into their own memories, the more they understand that nothing they thought they knew about their college years, and that fateful night, is true.

Twisty, nostalgic, and emotionally thrilling, The Midnight Club explores that innate desire to revisit our first loves, our biggest mistakes, and the gulf between who we are and who we hoped we’d be.]]> 370 Margot Harrison 0369760328 Chris 5 3.48 2024 The Midnight Club: An Intriguing Dark Academia Thriller with Mysterious Secrets, Uncover the Truth
author: Margot Harrison
name: Chris
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/04
date added: 2024/06/04
shelves:
review:
I devoured THE MIDNIGHT CLUB. It's a smart, surprising, and gripping mystery about the reality that we can't change who we were back in college, but we'd all be a lot better off if we could. And, for the characters in this fine novel, one of them might even still be alive.
]]> Ordinary People 160251 (back cover)]]> 263 Judith Guest Chris 5 3.92 1976 Ordinary People
author: Judith Guest
name: Chris
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1976
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/20
date added: 2024/05/20
shelves:
review:
A classic for good reason: a devastating exploration of the losses that tear a family apart, and how, after an inexplicable tragedy, the survivors try to move forward. Beautifully written and impeccably observed -- and without a single wrong note. Just a treasure.
]]> The Hunter (Cal Hooper, #2) 174156145
Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He’s found it, more or he’s built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he’s gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey’s long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn’t want protecting. What she wants is revenge.

A nuanced, atmospheric tale that explores what we’ll do for our loved ones, what we’ll do for revenge, and what we sacrifice when the two collide.]]> 467 Tana French 0593493435 Chris 5 3.96 2024 The Hunter (Cal Hooper, #2)
author: Tana French
name: Chris
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
shelves:
review:
Tana French has become an auto buy for me. Her mysteries are smart, surprising, and driven by character -- which is what matters most to me in a novel, I think. This is the second of her novels featuring retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper in Western Ireland, a classic fish out of water, and local teen Trey Reddy, a quiet girl who is the embodiment of the truism that still waters run deep. When Trey's waster of a dad returns with a get-rich-quick scheme for the small village, things grow dark fast. Another gem from Tana French.
]]> Table for Two 195474144 From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles. The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter six stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of compromise which operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novel, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September, 1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood� describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age. Throughout the stories, two characters often find themselves sitting across a table for two where the direction of their futures may hinge upon what they say to each other next. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting historical fiction.]]> 451 Amor Towles 0593296370 Chris 5 4.15 2024 Table for Two
author: Amor Towles
name: Chris
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/13
date added: 2024/05/13
shelves:
review:
A little behind on my reviews -- my apologies. But I savored every tale in Amor Towles's new collection. Each one is smart, surprising, irreverent, and rich with lush and idiosyncratic detail. Also? These stories are fun. Really fun. Towles movies seamlessly between the present and the past, and between New York and L.A. I devoured the book: you will, too.
]]> The Gathering 186872450 A detective investigating a grisly crime in rural Alaska finds herself caughtĚýup in the dark secrets andĚýsuperstitions of a small town in this riveting novel from the acclaimed author of The Chalk Man

Deadhart, Alaska. 873. Living.

In a small Alaska town, a boy is found with his throat ripped out and all the blood drained from his body. The inhabitants of Deadhart haven’t seen a killing like this in twenty-five years. But they know who’s responsible: a member of the Colony, an ostracized community of vampyrs living in an old mine settlement deep in the woods.

Detective Barbara Atkins, a specialist in vampyr killings, is called in to officially determine if this is a Colony killing—and authorize a cull. Old suspicions die hard in a town like Deadhart, but Barbara isn’t so sure. Determined to find the truth, she enlists the help of a former Deadhart sheriff, Jenson Tucker, whose investigation into the previous murder almost cost him his life. Since then, Tucker has become a recluse. But he knows the Colony better than almost anyone.

As the pair delve into the town’s history, they uncover secrets darker than they could have imagined. And then another body is found. While the snow thickens and the nights grow longer, a killer stalks Deadhart, and two disparate communities circle each other for blood. Time is running out for Atkins and Tucker to find the truth: Are they hunting a bloodthirsty monster . . . or a twisted psychopath? And which is more dangerous?]]> 336 C.J. Tudor 0593356594 Chris 5 3.86 2024 The Gathering
author: C.J. Tudor
name: Chris
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/02
date added: 2024/05/02
shelves:
review:
Imagine a police procedural about. . .vampyrs (note spelling). Imagine S.A. Cosby's ALL THE SINNERS BLEED meets Justin Cronin's THE PASSAGE. C.J. Tudor's THE GATHERING is that good. A detective is investigating the murder of a teenage boy in a very cold place called Deadheart, Alaska, and all signs point to one of the vampyrs at the nearby colony. But is that really the case? This one gots its fangs into me early on. I loved it.
]]> <![CDATA[My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me]]> 155685403
Caleb Carr has had special relationships with cats since he was a young boy in a turbulent household, famously peopled by the founding members of the Beat Generation, where his steadiest companions were the adopted cats that lived with him both in the city and the country. As an adult, he has had many close feline companions, with relationships that have outlasted most of his human ones. But only after building a three-story home in rural, upstate New York did he enter into the most extraordinary of all of his cat Masha, a Siberian Forest cat who had been abandoned as a kitten, and was languishing in a shelter when Caleb met her. She had hissed and fought off all previous carers and potential adopters, but somehow, she chose Caleb as her savior.
Ěý
For the seventeen years that followed, Caleb and Masha were inseparable. Masha ruled the house and the extensive, dangerous surrounding fields and forests. When she was hurt, only Caleb could help her. When he suffered long-standing physical ailments, Masha knew what to do. Caleb’s life-long study of the literature of cat behavior, and his years of experience with previous cats, helped him decode much of Masha’s inner life. But their bond went far beyond academic studies and experience. The story of Caleb and Masha is an inspiring and life-affirming relationship for readers of all backgrounds and interests—a love story like no other.
Ěý]]> 344 Caleb Carr 0316503606 Chris 5 4.11 2024 My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me
author: Caleb Carr
name: Chris
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/29
date added: 2024/04/29
shelves:
review:
I reviewed this memoir earlier this month for the Washington Post. It's fantastic: curmudgeon novelist Caleb Carr is actually a wonderful softie at heart. . .at least when it comes to Masha, the cat he rescued from a shelter in Vermont and with whom he would live for over a decade and a half in upstate New York. It was just the two of them, and this memoir chronicles their love for each other and how much they needed each other as they battled bears and age and, alas, cancer. Be prepared for all the feels in this beautiful chronicle of how much we, humans, need our companion animals.
]]> The Great Divide 181110028
It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection.

Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn enough money for her ailing sister’s surgery. When she sees a young man—Omar—who has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid.

John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now, his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada’s bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a sweeping tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers—those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.]]> 321 Cristina Henríquez 0063291320 Chris 5 3.62 2024 The Great Divide
author: Cristina HenrĂ­quez
name: Chris
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/20
date added: 2024/04/20
shelves:
review:
THE GREAT DIVIDE is a smart, moving, and wonderful novel. And while the title ostensibly refers to the Panama Canal, the real divide -- and this is the brilliance of Cristina Henriquez -- is between the Americans who want to build the canal and the people who are supposed to carve a passage through the isthmus. With meticulous care, Henriquez brings her characters to life, and reminds us of the human cost of the massive construction project.
]]> The Diana Chronicles 522622
–Academy Award ® Winning Actress Helen Mirren

Ten years after her death, Princess Diana remains a mystery. Was she “the people’s princess,� who electrified the world with her beauty and humanitarian missions? Or was she a manipulative, media-savvy neurotic who nearly brought down the monarchy?

Only Tina Brown, former Editor-in-Chief of Tatler , England’s glossiest gossip magazine; Vanity Fair ; and The New Yorker could possibly give us the truth. Tina knew Diana personally and has far-reaching insight into the royals and the Queen herself.

In The Diana Chronicles, you will meet a formidable female cast and understand as never before the society that shaped them: Ěý Diana's sexually charged mother, her scheming grandmother,Ěýthe stepmother she hated but finally came to terms with,Ěýand bad-girl Fergie, her sister-in-law, who concealedĚýwounds of her own.ĚýĚýMost formidable of them allĚýwas her mother-in-law, the Queen, whose admiration Diana sought till the day she died. Add Camilla Parker-Bowles, the ultimate "other woman" into this combustible mix, and it's no wonder that Diana broke out of her royal cage into celebrity culture, where she found her own power and used it to devastating effect. Ěý]]> 542 Tina Brown 0385517084 Chris 5 3.74 2007 The Diana Chronicles
author: Tina Brown
name: Chris
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/17
date added: 2024/04/17
shelves:
review:
I've now read this book twice: the first time was as research for the novel that would become THE PRINCESS OF LAS VEGAS, and the second was when I was preparing for that novel's book tour. And it remains for me "the" book to learn about the People's Princess. Tina Brown is a terrific journalist and really did her homework. And, yes, you will really come to care for Diana Spencer and the tragedy of her death at 36.
]]> Mustique Island 58842704 From bestselling author Sarah McCoy, a sun-splashed romp with a rich divorcee and her two wayward daughters in 1970s Mustique, the world's most exclusive private island, where Princess Margaret and Mick Jagger were regulars and scandals stayed hidden from the press...


]]> 336 Sarah McCoy 0062984373 Chris 5 3.38 2022 Mustique Island
author: Sarah McCoy
name: Chris
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/15
date added: 2024/04/15
shelves:
review:

]]> Grief Is for People 127282631 Following the death of her closest friend, Sloane Crosley explores multiple kinds of loss in this disarmingly witty and poignant memoir.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.]]> 208 Sloane Crosley 0374609845 Chris 5 3.85 2024 Grief Is for People
author: Sloane Crosley
name: Chris
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves:
review:
One of the smartest, most beautiful, and most moving meditations on grief I've ever read. And, because this is Sloan Crosley telling the story, it's often very, very funny. (It is a rare essayist indeed who finds the humor in a burglary and a suicide, but Crosley is pretty much one of a kind.) I am going to be haunted (for a variety of reasons) by this memoir for a long time, and I am going to carry with me her descriptions of pool parties when people (once) were young and the vibrancy of publishing and New York when we were naive enough to believe that old age was deep in the future and sadness was just a blip. Everything about this book, right down to the sentence rhythms and the small asides, is a treasure.
]]> The New Couple in 5B 128007059 A couple inherits an apartment with a spine-tingling past in this binge-worthy thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six.

Rosie and Chad Lowan are barely making ends meet in New York City when they receive life-changing news: Chad’s late uncle has left them his luxury apartment at the historic Windermere in glamorous Murray Hill. With its prewar elegance and impeccably uniformed doorman, the building is the epitome of old New York charm. One would almost never suspect the dark history lurking behind its perfectly maintained facade.

At first, the building and its eclectic tenants couldn’t feel more welcoming. But as the Lowans settle into their new home, Rosie starts to suspect that there’s more to the Windermere than meets the eye. Why is the doorman ever-present? Why are there cameras everywhere? And why have so many gruesome crimes occurred there throughout the years? When one of the neighbors turns up dead, Rosie must get to the truth about the Windermere before she, too, falls under its dangerous spell.]]> 384 Lisa Unger 0778333345 Chris 5 3.55 2024 The New Couple in 5B
author: Lisa Unger
name: Chris
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:
Lisa Unger is a wonderful storyteller and her stories are, yes, thrilling. In her new one, a young married couple inherits an apartment in a building that may (or may not) be cursed in the Murray Hill neighborhood in Manhattan. Imagine "Rosemary's Baby" meets "The Shining" -- or the Bramford meets the Overlook. It's that much fun. And while the novel is set in New York City, it has more twists than a Tuscan road.
]]> Ball Four 762563
When first published in 1970, Ball Four stunned the sports world. The commissioner, executives, and players were shocked. Sportswriters called author Jim Bouton a traitor and "social leper." Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force him to declare the book untrue. Fans, however, loved the book. And serious critics called it an important social document. Today, Jim Bouton is still not invited to Oldtimer's Days at Yankee Stadium. But his landmark book is still being read by people who don't ordinarily follow baseball.]]> 465 Jim Bouton 0020306652 Chris 5 4.04 1970 Ball Four
author: Jim Bouton
name: Chris
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/10
date added: 2024/03/10
shelves:
review:
I've read this memoir at least three (and maybe four) times, but this time I listened to the audio that Bouton narrated himself. And, as always, it was the perfect way to christen the new baseball season, when hope is green grass and a diamond, and -- once upon a time -- an ex-Yankee nicknamed the Bulldog tried to make a comeback with a knuckleball, a pitch that some days is as easy to control as a butterfly in a windstorm.
]]> Jackie 201816294
The world has divided my life into three:

Life with Jack
Life with Onassis
Life as a woman who goes to work because she wants to.

My life is all of these things, and it is none of these things. They continue to miss what’s right in front of them. I love books. I love the sea. I love horses. Children. Art. Ideas. History. Beauty. Because beauty blows us open to wonder.
Even the beauty that breaks your heart.

Jackie is the story of a woman—deeply private with a nuanced, formidable intellect—who forged a legacy out of grief and shaped history even as she was living it. It is the story of a love affair, a complicated marriage, and the fracturing of identity that comes in the wake of unthinkable violence.

When Jackie meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy in Georgetown, she is twenty-one and dreaming of France. She has won an internship at Vogue. Kennedy, she thinks, is not her kind of adventure: “Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy.� Yet she is drawn to his mind, his humor, his drive. The chemistry between them ignites. During the White House years, the love between two independent people deepens. Then, a motorcade in Dallas: “Three and a half seconds—that’s all it was—a slivered instant between the first shot, which missed the car, and the second, which did not. . . . A hypnotic burst of sunlight off her bracelet as she waved.�

This vivid, exquisitely written novel is at once a captivating work of the imagination and a window into the world of a woman who led many lives: Jackie, Jacks, Jacqueline, Miss Bouvier, Mrs. Kennedy, Jackie O.]]> 496 Dawn Tripp 0812997212 Chris 5 4.22 2024 Jackie
author: Dawn Tripp
name: Chris
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/22
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves:
review:
The reason we read historical fiction is because sometimes the facts just aren’t enough. A brilliant, beautiful book like Dawn Tripp’s, Jackie, touches the soul in ways conventional biographies can’t. I devoured this novel, and felt the power of history and a remarkable woman.
]]> Come and Get It 127482608
It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior.]]> 400 Kiley Reid 0593328205 Chris 5 3.33 2024 Come and Get It
author: Kiley Reid
name: Chris
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/21
date added: 2024/02/21
shelves:
review:
"Come and Get It" is another treasure from Kiley Reid, a novel that begins with hilarity and ends with heartbreak -- but it is heartbreak with resilience. Reid has a brilliant ear for dialogue and how people REALLY speak, and is one of the most astute observers we have of social mores. In this one, the kids are not all right. Not at all. Neither are the grownups who are supposed to care for them. It's been a long time since I was in college, but everything about this remarkable novel felt spot-on. I loved it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Passenger (The Passenger #1)]]> 60581087
Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.]]> 385 Cormac McCarthy 0593535227 Chris 5

Merged review:

A brilliant fever dream of a novel. So many wounded souls. The mysteries of a plane, deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with a missing passenger. Food and booze in New Orleans. Muscle cars in the south. Siblings with secrets. Madness aplenty. Yup, just another Cormac McCarthy novel. I loved it. Every page.


Merged review:

A brilliant fever dream of a novel. So many wounded souls. The mysteries of a plane, deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with a missing passenger. Food and booze in New Orleans. Muscle cars in the south. Siblings with secrets. Madness aplenty. Yup, just another Cormac McCarthy novel. I loved it. Every page.


Merged review:

A brilliant fever dream of a novel. So many wounded souls. The mysteries of a plane, deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with a missing passenger. Food and booze in New Orleans. Muscle cars in the south. Siblings with secrets. Madness aplenty. Yup, just another Cormac McCarthy novel. I loved it. Every page.


Merged review:

A brilliant fever dream of a novel. So many wounded souls. The mysteries of a plane, deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with a missing passenger. Food and booze in New Orleans. Muscle cars in the south. Siblings with secrets. Madness aplenty. Yup, just another Cormac McCarthy novel. I loved it. Every page.]]> 3.58 2022 The Passenger (The Passenger #1)
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Chris
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/11
date added: 2024/02/09
shelves:
review:
A brilliant fever dream of a novel. So many wounded souls. The mysteries of a plane, deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with a missing passenger. Food and booze in New Orleans. Muscle cars in the south. Siblings with secrets. Madness aplenty. Yup, just another Cormac McCarthy novel. I loved it. Every page.


Merged review:

A brilliant fever dream of a novel. So many wounded souls. The mysteries of a plane, deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with a missing passenger. Food and booze in New Orleans. Muscle cars in the south. Siblings with secrets. Madness aplenty. Yup, just another Cormac McCarthy novel. I loved it. Every page.


Merged review:

A brilliant fever dream of a novel. So many wounded souls. The mysteries of a plane, deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with a missing passenger. Food and booze in New Orleans. Muscle cars in the south. Siblings with secrets. Madness aplenty. Yup, just another Cormac McCarthy novel. I loved it. Every page.


Merged review:

A brilliant fever dream of a novel. So many wounded souls. The mysteries of a plane, deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with a missing passenger. Food and booze in New Orleans. Muscle cars in the south. Siblings with secrets. Madness aplenty. Yup, just another Cormac McCarthy novel. I loved it. Every page.


Merged review:

A brilliant fever dream of a novel. So many wounded souls. The mysteries of a plane, deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with a missing passenger. Food and booze in New Orleans. Muscle cars in the south. Siblings with secrets. Madness aplenty. Yup, just another Cormac McCarthy novel. I loved it. Every page.
]]> The Nude 199532684 A gripping, provocative, and sensual debut novel about an art historian who journeys to a Greek island in pursuit of a found sculpture and quickly finds herself immersed in a cultural tug-of-war and a complicated love affair.

1999: An island off the southern coast of Greece. Art historian Elizabeth Clarke arrives with the intent to acquire a rare female sculpture. But what begins as a quest for a highly valued cultural artifact evolves into a trip that will force Elizabeth to contend with her career, her ambition, and her troubling history.

Disoriented by jet lag, debilitating migraines, and a dependence on prescription pills, Elizabeth turns to her charming and guileless translator to guide her around the labyrinthine island. Soon, the island’s lushness—its heat and light, its textures and tastes—take hold of Elizabeth. And when she’s introduced to her translator’s inscrutable wife—a subversive artist whose work seeks to deconstruct the female form—she becomes unexpectedly enthralled by her. But once the nude’s acquisition proves to be riskier than Elizabeth could have ever imagined, Elizabeth’s and the statue’s fate are called into question. To find a way out, Elizabeth must grapple with her past, the role she’s played in the global art trade, and the ethical fallouts her decisions could leave behind.

The Nude is an evocative and intense exploration of art, cultural theft, and what it means to be a woman helming morally complicated negotiations in a male-directed world.]]> 272 C. Michelle Lindley 1668032953 Chris 5 3.36 2024 The Nude
author: C. Michelle Lindley
name: Chris
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/07
date added: 2024/02/07
shelves:
review:
“The Nude" is a remarkable debut, a slow-burn page-turner that turns a sweltering Greek island into a haunting house of mirrors. C. Michelle Lindley would have made Patricia Highsmith and Graham Greene proud.
]]> <![CDATA[What Really Happens in Vegas: True Stories of the People Who Make Vegas, Vegas]]> 124949052 What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas—until now. James Patterson shows the real Vegas in a dazzling journey through “lively tales of those who labor and dream in Sin City" (Kirkus).

“Wild and wonderful…The magic of Sin City doesn’t just happen.ĚýPatterson and Seal tell its secrets in beautifully presented snippets that often overlap not just surprisingly, but charmingly too.â€� â€�TelegraphĚý(UK)
Ěý

Las Vegas is on Luxury Standard every clock in the airport is a Rolex. No dream is too big, no wish is too small—the VIP hosts in Vegas fulfill guests� every (legal) desire. Jackpots hit when least expected. The Nevada Gaming Control Board has days to find a man who unknowingly won over $200,000 at the slots. “I love love�: the inventor of the Elvis impersonator wedding and the drive-thru wedding has performed hundreds of marriages—and believes in them all. Glamorous yogis take a helicopter across the desert to the Valley of Fire, where they perform sun salutations to the glory of Las Vegas. A gambling VIP “whale� loses $1 million at the casinos, yet still leaves saying, "Had a great time. I'll be back." �
InĚýWhat Really Happens in Vegas,Ěýfull of surprises for both newcomers and Las Vegas regulars, James Patterson andĚýVanity FairĚýcontributing editor Mark Seal transport readers from the thrill of adrenaline-fueled vice to the glitter of A-list celebrity and entertainment.]]> 345 James Patterson 0316406902 Chris 5 3.78 2023 What Really Happens in Vegas: True Stories of the People Who Make Vegas, Vegas
author: James Patterson
name: Chris
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/04
date added: 2024/02/04
shelves:
review:
Read this to remind myself of all the things that fascinated me about Las Vegas when I began writing THE PRINCESS OF LAS VEGAS three years ago -- and as book tour "prep." Also, the ONLY blurb on my first novel (the single worst first novel ever published, bar none) was. . .James Patterson. Thank you again, James!
]]> <![CDATA[More: A Memoir of Open Marriage]]> 70251573
"An intimate portrait of a woman on an earnest search to reclaim her passion and her body from the quotidian obligations of her various roles."—Christie Tate, bestselling author of Group and BFF

Molly Roden Winter was a mom of two young children in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a husband, Stewart, who often worked late. One night when Stewart missed the kids' bedtime, again , she stormed out of the house to clear her head. At impromptu drinks with a friend, she met Matt, an unbelievably hot younger man. When Molly told her husband that Matt had asked her out, she was surprised that he encouraged her to accept.

So begins Molly's unexpected open marriage, and with it a life-changing journey of self-discovery. Molly and Stewart, who also begins to see other people, set ground rules to Don’t date an ex. Don’t date someone you work with. Don't go to anyone's house. And above all, don't fall in love. Spoiler They end up breaking most of their rules, even the most important one.

Molly follows her sexual desire onto dating sites and to public places around New York City. In therapy sessions, fueled by the discovery that her parents had an open marriage, too, she grapples with her past and what it means to be both a mother and her truest self. Molly Roden Winter narrates her journey with warmth and style in this magnetic, intensely personal debut memoir.]]> 304 Molly Roden Winter 0385549458 Chris 5 3.42 2024 More: A Memoir of Open Marriage
author: Molly Roden Winter
name: Chris
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/28
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves:
review:
Yes, the polyamory part of this memoir is what has people talking -- and that element IS incredibly interesting and revealing (pun intended). Molly Roden Winter is a terrific storyteller and writer, and like any good memoirist, has absolutely no filter. But what I really loved about her story is how it's fundamentally a tale of one woman coming to terms with being in that sandwich generation, caring for aging parents while raising her own kids, and trying to understand her own demons and desires. Also? This is a happy marriage book and a love story, and I savored that part, as well. You will, too.
]]> Ilium 134118345
The young English narrator of Lea Carpenter’s dazzling new novel has grown up unhappily in London, dreaming of escape, pretending to be someone else and obsessed with a locked private garden. On the eve of her twenty-first birthday, at a party near that garden, she meets its charismatic and mysterious new owner, Marcus, thirty-three years older, who sweeps her off her feet. Before long they are married at his finca in Mallorca, and at last she has escaped into a new role � but at what price? On their honeymoon in Croatia, Marcus reveals there is something she can do for him—a plan is in place and she can help with “a favor.�

This turns out to be posing as an art advisor to a family on Cap Ferret, where Marcus asks her to simply “listen.� A helicopter deposits her at a remote, highly guarded and lavishly appointed compound on a spit of land in the Atlantic. It’s presided over by an enigmatic, charming patriarch Edouard, along with his wife Dasha, children Nikki and Felix, and populated by a revolving cast of other guests—some suspicious, some intriguing, perhaps none, like her, what they seem.

Brilliantly compelling, this is a spellbinding and unexpectedly poignant story of a long- planned, high-stakes CIA-Mossad operation that only needed the right asset to complete.]]> 240 Lea Carpenter 0593536606 Chris 5 ]]> 3.50 2024 Ilium
author: Lea Carpenter
name: Chris
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/17
date added: 2024/01/17
shelves:
review:
I reviewed this one for the New York Times and enjoyed it immensely. What seems, on the surface, to be a tale of a CIA-led plot to assassinate a Russian KGB killer, is much deeper: a tale of a young woman, a CIA asset, who discovers how much she cares for the family of the KGB officer -- and how much she likes even the target himself. This is the sort of moral ambiguity that seems to fascinate novelist Lea Carpenter, the way living a double life and every day making your cover, that critical and deeply embedded lie, feels real to everyone around you. It’s also what makes “Ilium� such an unexpectedly moving novel. Bonus? Carpenter really knows her spy craft.

]]> Family Meal 123414019 From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss.

Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?

When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.]]> 320 Bryan Washington 0593421094 Chris 5 3.51 2023 Family Meal
author: Bryan Washington
name: Chris
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/16
date added: 2024/01/16
shelves:
review:

]]> Only She Came Back 123204371
On July 28 at 6:30 p.m., Kiri Dunsmore walks out of the desert wearing her boyfriend’s sweatshirt, covered in his blood. Dazed and on the verge of unconsciousness, she tells a cashier that he’s still out there and most likely dead. The disappearance of Callum Massey, a “survival guru� with hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers, rocks the nation. And Kiri is a prime suspect.
Ěý
Back in Kiri's hometown, true-crime fanatic Sam Ěý is completely hooked on the case—especially now that she recognizes the suspect as shy Katie from high school. Although they didn’t know each other well, that doesn’t stop Sam from reaching out to befriend her old classmate.
Ěý
But when Kiri starts to confide in her, Sam realizes there’s more to the story than she had imagined. Can she keep Kiri’s secrets even though revealing them could put her where she's always longed to be—at the center of the story?]]> 320 Margot Harrison 0316536083 Chris 5 3.23 2023 Only She Came Back
author: Margot Harrison
name: Chris
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves:
review:
It seems 2023 was the year when all those podcasts about murders became the subjects themselves of terrific books and TV series: Rebecca Makkai's I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS for you and the streaming series, ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING and BASED ON A TRUE STORY immediately come to mind. Add to that list Margot Harrison's riveting, smart, and insightful new novel, ONLY SHE CAME BACK. A teenage girl in Vermont, who's an aspiring podcaster, sees an opportunity when a classmate gets involved with a celebrity influencer, a twenty-something heart throb who is now presumed dead in the deserts of the American southwest. The classmate -- the she who came back -- was making videos with him, and returned from the desert with his bloody sweatshirt wrapped around her. Ah, but did she kill him? Harrison uses this investigation to keep us riveted, but what makes the novel so memorable is the deep dive she takes into the serial awkwardness of being a teenager. I loved everything about this one.
]]> <![CDATA[The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War]]> 37542581
The man was a spy for MI6. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. No spy had done more to damage the KGB. The Safeway bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia.

So began one of the boldest and most extraordinary episodes in the history of spying. Ben Macintyre reveals a tale of espionage, betrayal and raw courage that changed the course of the Cold War forever...]]> 384 Ben Macintyre 0771060335 Chris 5 4.48 2018 The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
author: Ben Macintyre
name: Chris
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/21
date added: 2023/12/22
shelves:
review:
Ben Macintyre has written some of my favorite histories of espionage, including A SPY AMONG FRIENDS and ROGUE HEROES. This one is the tale of a Russian KGB officer who is working secretly for MI6. It's riveting, including a section on how close we came to nuclear armageddon in the 1980s, and a last act that is unbelievably tense.
]]> Day 123033397
April 5, 2019 : In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. Meanwhile Nathan, age ten, is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.

April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe, while Nathan attempts to skirt her rules. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.

April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.

From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.]]> 273 Michael Cunningham 0399591346 Chris 5 3.50 2023 Day
author: Michael Cunningham
name: Chris
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/20
date added: 2023/12/20
shelves:
review:
There will be lots of novels about the Covid pandemic. Already I've read at least a half dozen. But Michael Cunningham, with his luminous prose and profound insight into the human soul -- what makes us long to breathe and be seen (or not) -- has written a portrait of life between 2019 and 2021 that is so beautiful it transcends those years. It's a family portrait with characters you are going to worry about and wonder about long after you've finished this remarkable novel.
]]> Red, White, Blue 37007774
Anna is the beloved only child of the charismatic Noel, a New York City banker--and a mother who abandoned her. When Noel dies in a mysterious skiing accident in Switzerland the day before his daughter's wedding, Anna, consumed by grief, grows increasingly distant from her prominent music-producing husband, who begins running for office. One day, while on her honeymoon in the south of France, Anna meets an enigmatic stranger who will cause perhaps even greater upheaval in her life. It will soon become clear that this meeting was no chance this man once worked with Anna's father and has information about parts of Noel's life that Anna never knew. When she arrives back in New York, she receives a parcel that contains a series of cryptic recordings and videos showing Noel at the center of a brutal interrogation. Soon, everything Anna knows about her father's life--and his death--is called into question, launching her into a desperate search for the truth.

Smart, fast-moving, and suspenseful, Red, White, Blue plunges us into the inner workings of the CIA, a China Ops gone wrong, and the consequences of a collision between one's deepest personal ties and the most exacting and fateful professional commitment.]]> 308 Lea Carpenter 1524732141 Chris 5 2.96 2018 Red, White, Blue
author: Lea Carpenter
name: Chris
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/04
date added: 2023/12/04
shelves:
review:
Inhaled this wonderful exploration of a young woman whose dad, it turns out, was a spy -- and perhaps a double agent. Lea Carpenter really knows her espionage, and the nuts and bolts of spy craft alone had me entranced.
]]> Absolution 101404407
In Saigon in 1963, two young American wives form a wary alliance. Tricia is a starry-eyed newlywed, married to a rising oil engineer “on loan� to US Navy Intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a talented hostess and determined altruist, on a mission to relieve the “wretchedness� she sees all around her.

When Tricia miscarries, Charlene sweeps her into a cabal of well-dressed do-gooder American wives. Armed with baskets filled with candy and toys, they descend on hospitals, orphanages, and a leper colony on the coast, determined to relieve suffering, no matter the cost.

Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter reaches out to Tricia, now widowed and living in Washington. As the two relive their shared experience in Saigon, they are forced to come to terms with the ways their own lives have been shaped and stunted by Charlene’s pursuit of “inconsequential good.�

With a narrative impact that recalls Graham Greene’s The Quiet American , Alice McDermott confronts the unresolved mysteries and ironies of America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.]]> 324 Alice McDermott 0374610487 Chris 5 3.69 2023 Absolution
author: Alice McDermott
name: Chris
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/19
date added: 2023/11/19
shelves:
review:
Having filled my novel, THE GUEST ROOM, with Armenian (and some American) Barbies, I was fascinated to see how one "enterprising" American wife in Vietnam in 1963 creates Saigon Barbies in Alice McDermott's haunting new novel, ABSOLUTION. As we all saw in Greta Gerwig's brilliant "Barbie" movie this past summer, the Barbie Doll's Tantalus vase of meanings is an entry into the exploration of gender role socialization -- and a way to travel back and forth in time, given the different and iconic roles the doll has played in its history. But the Saigon Barbies are but one of the many remarkable ways that McDermott brings to life Saigon in the months before the Kennedy Assassination. And, as always, for McDermott, character comes first, and the two generations of women we meet in this moving novel gave me -- a novelist who has written one book about, in part, the legacies the Vietnam War for Americans -- new insights into what that world was like for the wives of the spies and "engineers" and "advisors" sent there in the early 1960s.
]]> Dracula (Restless Classics) 100101805 400 Bram Stoker 1632060655 Chris 5 4.09 1897 Dracula (Restless Classics)
author: Bram Stoker
name: Chris
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1897
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/10
date added: 2023/11/10
shelves:
review:
I reread Dracula the week before and days after Halloween, and was fascinated both by how much I recalled from reading it as a middle-schooler, and how much is now critical to our culture in books and on screens big and small. The edition I read included a foreword by Alexander Chee that is absolutely brilliant. If you read or reread the novel, this is a wonderful edition.
]]> The Midnight Library 52578297
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.

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

Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?]]> 288 Matt Haig 0525559477 Chris 5 3.96 2020 The Midnight Library
author: Matt Haig
name: Chris
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/06
date added: 2023/11/06
shelves:
review:
Very late to the party on this one, but I devoured THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY. Fascinated by this funny, moving, surprising exploration of the idea that the smallest of things can change a whole life. Also? Matt Haig should be the therapist for a world in flames, where we're all a mess and we've all been scarred.
]]> Wellness 65650229 A witty and poignant novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture and the bonds that keep people together

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit.ĚýFast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.Ěý]]> 611 Nathan Hill 0593536118 Chris 5 3.97 2023 Wellness
author: Nathan Hill
name: Chris
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/25
date added: 2023/10/25
shelves:
review:
Highly unlikely I will ever write a book this poignant, surprising, haunting, and emotionally astute. A beautifully written exploration of marriage, how our relationships change as we age, and the ways our inabilities to forgive ourselves diminish us. Also? Great satire of the "wellness" industries. Yes, I loved this novel.
]]> Bad Cree 60839741 In this gripping debut tinged with supernatural horror, a young Cree woman's dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.

When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.

Night after night, Mackenzie's dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina's untimely death: a weekend at the family's lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too--a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina--Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.

Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams--and make them more dangerous.

What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina's death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?]]> 259 Jessica Johns 0385548699 Chris 5 3.91 2023 Bad Cree
author: Jessica Johns
name: Chris
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/25
date added: 2023/10/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Without Warning: The Saga of Gettysburg, A Reluctant Union Hero, and the Men He Inspired]]> 53847247
The winds of war grow dark around General George Meade, appointed to command the Army of the Potomac just three days before a brewing battle against Robert E. Lee, charismatic leader of the Confederate forces. No one—not even the outgoing commander—seems to know where Lee’s army is, except that they are somewhere on Northern soil, possibly pushing toward a decisive battle deep in the heart of the Union.

Bound by duty to take a position he did not seek and does not want, Meade reluctantly accepts Lincoln’s appointment, and overnight, the fate of nearly 100,000 Union soldiers is in his hands.

Meade is a planner—a quiet, capable engineer whose commitment to modesty and restraint is second only to his commitment to honor, duty, and country. While the winds of war swirl around him, he struggles to concoct a battle plan without even the most basic information, in order to defeat an enemy he cannot find, on ground he has not yet seen. Thwarted by insufficient military intelligence, and betrayed by the machinations of an unscrupulous general with dreams of glory, Meade knows it will take all his skill and the heroism of his troops to best the formidable and hitherto undefeated Lee. The fate of the Republic itself hangs in the balance.

Without Warning is the gripping saga of the Battle of Gettysburg, the Union patriots who fought it, and the man who led them. It scrutinizes the role character plays in leadership and the challenge of the unexpected. Built firmly upon the annals of history, this epic historical novel brings to vivid life seven unforgettable days in the lives and trials of a Union general and his men as they brave the winds of war to save the United States of America.]]> 762 Terry C. Pierce Chris 5 4.62 Without Warning: The Saga of Gettysburg, A Reluctant Union Hero, and the Men He Inspired
author: Terry C. Pierce
name: Chris
average rating: 4.62
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/19
date added: 2023/10/19
shelves:
review:
Fascinating and incredibly well-researched novel about the battle of Gettysburg from the perspective of George Meade and his Union staff -- and Meade's ongoing and human angst about being put in charge of the Army only days before the pivotal battle. Terry C. Pierce is an immensely gifted storyteller, and history buffs will appreciate the sweep of the attacks -- as well as the strategies behind them.
]]> <![CDATA[D-Day: The Battle for Normandy]]> 2455549 632 Antony Beevor 067088703X Chris 5 4.17 2009 D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
author: Antony Beevor
name: Chris
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/12
date added: 2023/10/12
shelves:
review:
Once more, late with my review. My apologies. In any case, my uncle, Warren Nelson, was 101st Airborne and jumped on D-Day and Market Garden, and would be wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. (His best friend has a cameo, when the friend dies, in Band of Brothers.) Last month I finally visited Normandy and Omaha Beach, and this history was the prefect companion. I had it with me as I visited many of the sites near the Seine between Omaha and Paris.
]]> Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma 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 Chris 5 3.76 2023 Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
author: Claire Dederer
name: Chris
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/30
date added: 2023/09/30
shelves:
review:
A masterpiece. One of the most insightful explorations of "feelings" and how the soul responds to work that, alas, has been created by monsters. Claire Dederer is not merely super smart, she can be very, very funny. Once you read this extraordinary book, you will be fascinated by your deeply personal responses to the work of Woody Allen, Miles Davis, Doris Lessing, and so many others.
]]> My Dog Tulip 97472 208 J.R. Ackerley 0940322110 Chris 5 3.29 1956 My Dog Tulip
author: J.R. Ackerley
name: Chris
average rating: 3.29
book published: 1956
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/25
date added: 2023/09/25
shelves:
review:
Again, so behind in my reviews. But, as a dog lover, I fell in love with Tulip. Now, a lot of Ackerley's views about animals are dated. . .as is his language. This memoir was published in 1956. But the bottom line? It was delightful to see a cranky old man fall in love with a dog.
]]> <![CDATA[The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean]]> 63241875 From bestselling author Susan Casey, an awe-inspiring portrait of the mysterious world beneath the waves, and the men and women who seek to uncover its secrets

For all of human history, the deep ocean has been a source of wonder and terror, an unknown realm that evoked a singular, compelling question: What’s down there? Unable to answer this for centuries, people believed the deep was a sinister realm of fiendish creatures and deadly peril. But now, cutting-edge technologies allow scientists and explorers to dive miles beneath the surface, and we are beginning to understand this strange and exotic underworld: A place of soaring mountains, smoldering volcanoes, and valleys 7,000 feet deeper than Everest is high, where tectonic plates collide and separate, and extraordinary life forms operate under different rules. Far from a dark void, the deep is a vibrant realm that’s home to pink gelatinous predators and shimmering creatures a hundred feet long and ancient animals with glass skeletons and sharks that live for half a millennium—among countless other marvels.

Susan Casey is our premiere chronicler of the aquatic world. For The Underworld she traversed the globe, joining scientists and explorers on dives to the deepest places on the planet, interviewing the marine geologists, marine biologists, and oceanographers who are searching for knowledge in this vast unseen realm. She takes us on a fascinating journey through the history of deep-sea exploration, from the myths and legends of the ancient world to storied shipwrecks we can now reach on the bottom, to the first intrepid bathysphere pilots, to the scientists who are just beginning to understand the mind-blowing complexity and ecological importance of the quadrillions of creatures who live in realms long thought to be devoid of life.

Throughout this journey, she learned how vital the deep is to the future of the planet, and how urgent it is that we understand it in a time of increasing threats from climate change, industrial fishing, pollution, and the mining companies that are also exploring its depths. The Underworld is Susan Casey’s most beautiful and thrilling book yet, a gorgeous evocation of the natural world and a powerful call to arms.]]> 352 Susan Casey 0385545576 Chris 5 4.17 2023 The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean
author: Susan Casey
name: Chris
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/14
date added: 2023/09/14
shelves:
review:
Okay, the pun is irresistible: dive in, friends, dive in. The water's fine. Yes, it's deep -- some of the deepest parts of the ocean floor -- and Susan Casey brings it all to life. The flora, the fauna, the future, the beauty, the strangeness, and (Yes!) the danger. Casey is a terrific journalist and explorer, and her enthusiasm for the deep underworld of our watery planet is contagious. You'll be (NO pun, NO pun) hooked.
]]> Thunderstruck & Other Stories 18339643 The Giant’s House�finalist for the National Book Award—comes a beautiful new story collection, her first in twenty years. Laced through with the humor, the empathy, and the rare and magical descriptive powers that have led Elizabeth McCracken’s fiction to be hailed as “exquisite� (The New York Times Book Review), “funny and heartbreaking� (The Boston Globe), and “a true marvel� (San Francisco Chronicle), these nine vibrant stories navigate the fragile space between love and loneliness. In “Property,� selected by Geraldine Brooks for The Best American Short Stories, a young scholar, grieving the sudden death of his wife, decides to refurbish the Maine rental house they were to share together by removing his landlord’s possessions. In “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey,� the household of a successful filmmaker is visited years later by his famous first subject, whose trust he betrayed. In “The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston,� the manager of a grocery store becomes fixated on the famous case of a missing local woman, and on the fate of the teenage son she left behind. And in the unforgettable title story, a family makes a quixotic decision to flee to Paris for a summer, only to find their lives altered in an unimaginable way by their teenage daughter’s risky behavior.
Ěý
In Elizabeth McCracken’s universe, heartache is always interwoven with strange, charmed moments of joy—an unexpected conversation with small children, the gift of a parrot with a bad French accent—that remind us of the wonder and mystery of being alive. Thunderstruck & Other Stories shows this inimitable writer working at the full height of her powers.]]> 240 Elizabeth McCracken 0385335776 Chris 5 3.91 2014 Thunderstruck & Other Stories
author: Elizabeth McCracken
name: Chris
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2014/05/09
date added: 2023/09/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Such Kindness 62585977
In constant pain, addicted to painkillers at the cost of his relationships with his wife and son, Tom slowly comes to realize that he can never work again. If he is not a working man, who is he? He is not, he believes, the kind of person who lives in subsidized housing, though that is where he has ended up. He is not the kind of person who hatches a scheme to commit convenience-check fraud, together with neighbors he considers lowlifes, until he finds himself stealing his banker’s trash.

Who is Tom Lowe, and who will he become? Can he find a way to reunite hands and heart, mind and spirit, to be once again a giver and not just a taker, to forge a self-acceptance deeper than pride? To one man’s painful moral journey, Dubus brings compassion with an edge of dark absurdity, forging a novel as absorbing as it is profound.]]> 336 Andre Dubus III 1324000465 Chris 5 3.93 2023 Such Kindness
author: Andre Dubus III
name: Chris
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/04
date added: 2023/09/04
shelves:
review:
SUCH KINDNESS is another gem from Andre Dubus III. His compassion for his characters -- abused by an uncaring universe and the careless humans who walk the planet -- is so full and nonjudgmental that you will come to respect them and care for them in the ways we all deserve. We talk a lot in writing classes about things like a "hero's journey." In Dubus's latest, we see that walk with all its pain, and what can happen when -- despite remorseless physical and emotional agony -- we get to the other side.
]]> Learned by Heart 62874041 Eliza and Lister have never been this wide-awake in their lives, and the Slope, with its curtains drawn wide, is bright with starlight. They talk in whispers, not to disturb the maids who lie sleeping on the other side of the box room. The question Eliza’s been needing to ask swells like a great berry in her mouth, and all at once she’s not scared to let it out, not scared at all, not scared of anything . . .

In 1805, fourteen-year-old Eliza Raine is a school girl at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York. The daughter of an Indian mother and a British father, Eliza was banished to this unfamiliar country as a little girl. When she first stepped off the King George in Kent, Eliza was accompanied by her older sister, Jane, but now she boards alone at the Manor, with no one left to claim her. She spends her days avoiding the attention of her fellow pupils until, one day, a fearless and charismatic new student arrives at the school. The two girls are immediately thrown together and soon Eliza’s life is turned inside out by this strange and curious young woman.

Learned by Heart, Emma Donoghue’s mesmerising new novel, tells the heartbreaking story of the tangled lives of two women whose intense, and unlikely, relationship will change them for ever.]]> 336 Emma Donoghue 0316564435 Chris 5 3.47 2023 Learned by Heart
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Chris
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/03
date added: 2023/09/03
shelves:
review:
Emma Donoghue is among the most fearless contemporary novelists we have: an immensely talented writer who is a great storyteller and, based on her extensive body of work, unafraid of subjects that give her less-courageous peers pause. She is best known for “Room,� a daring novel about a young mother’s desperate attempt to help her 5-year-old son escape the shed in which she and the boy are held captive. But she has also written outstanding historical fiction, such as “The Wonder,� “The Pull of the Stars,� and “Slammerkin,� which is both a terrific book and a fabulous word. (Look it up. You’ll thank me.) Her latest, “Learned by Heart,� is a fascinating story set at an English girls school in 1805 and � wait for it � what we once called an insane asylum in 1815. It has characters with complex internal lives, insights into the human soul, and a wrenching love story. I loved it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I]]> 101024521 The hidden history of one of the world’s greatest inventors, a man who disrupted the status quo and then disappeared into thin air on the eve of World War I—this book answers the hundred-year-old mystery of what really became of Rudolf Diesel.

September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between Belgium and England. On board is one of the most famous men in the world, Rudolf Diesel, whose new internal combustion engine is on the verge of revolutionizing global industry forever. But Diesel never arrives at his destination. He vanishes during the night and headlines around the world wonder if it was an accident, suicide, or murder.

After rising from an impoverished European childhood, Diesel had become a multi-millionaire with his powerful engine that does not require expensive petroleum-based fuel. In doing so, he became not only an international celebrity but also the enemy of two extremely powerful men: Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world.

The Kaiser wanted the engine to power a fleet of submarines that would finally allow him to challenge Great Britain’s Royal Navy. But Diesel had intended for his engine to be used for the betterment of mankind and refused to keep the technology out of the hands of the British or any other nation. For John D. Rockefeller, the engine was nothing less than an existential threat to his vast and lucrative oil empire. As electric lighting began to replace kerosene lamps, Rockefeller’s bottom line depended on the world’s growing thirst for gasoline to power its automobiles and industries.

At the outset of this new age of electricity and oil, Europe stood on the precipice of war. Rudolf Diesel grew increasingly concerned about Germany’s rising nationalism and military spending. The inventor was on his way to London to establish a new company that would help Britain improve its failing submarine program when he disappeared.

Now, New York Times bestselling author Douglas Brunt reopens the case and provides an astonishing new conclusion about Diesel’s fate. “Equal parts Walter Isaacson and Sherlock Holmes, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel yanks back the curtain on the greatest caper of the 20th century in this riveting history� (Jay Winik, New York Times bestselling author).]]> 384 Douglas Brunt 1982169923 Chris 5 4.08 2023 The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I
author: Douglas Brunt
name: Chris
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/22
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
review:
I loved this book as mesmerizing, you-can’t-make-this-up history about political leaders, inventors, and robber barons in the run-up to World War One; but I also devoured it as one of the strangest celebrity disappearing acts in modern history. Absolutely riveting.
]]> The Guest 61986136 A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.]]> 304 Emma Cline 0812998626 Chris 5 3.29 2023 The Guest
author: Emma Cline
name: Chris
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/28
date added: 2023/08/28
shelves:
review:
My daughter, who has narrated a lot of my audiobooks, observed in college after reading a draft of my novel, CLOSE YOUR EYES, HOLD HANDS, "Dad, take this as a compliment, because I mean it that way. But I think one of your sweet spots as a writer is seriously messed up young women." So, the work of Emma Cline? I love it and I loved THE GUEST. But take a breath, friends, and know that Alex is fascinating BECAUSE she makes so many bad choices. Also? We all have to discuss that ending.
]]> The Good Ones 62558826 An engrossing work of literary suspense that illuminates the push and pull of female friendship and the costs of being "good" when the rules for women begin to chafe.

The last time Nicola Bennett saw Lauren Ballard she was scraping a key along the side of a new cherry-red Chevy Silverado. That was the night before her friend mysteriously vanished from her home, leaving a bloodstained washcloth and signs of a struggle--as well as her grieving husband and young daughter--behind.

Now, nearly twenty years later, Nicola, newly unemployed and still haunted by the disappearance of her childhood friend, is returning to her Appalachian hometown. For Nicola, Tyndall County has remained frozen in time. Everywhere she turns she's reminded of Lauren. Yet shockingly, her former friends and neighbors have all moved on. Drawn to stories of missing girls, Nicola obsessively searches the internet, hoping to discover a clue to Lauren's ultimate fate.

Driven by a desperate need to know what happened to her friend, Nicola takes a job in her hometown, determined to uncover any bit of information, any small clue, that can help. Deep down she knows the answers are tucked in the hollows and valleys of this small Blue Ridge county. As secrets come to light and the truth begins to unravel, will Nicola finally find release and break free of the past--or lose herself completely to unanswered questions from her adolescence?]]> 291 Polly Stewart 0063234157 Chris 5 3.14 2023 The Good Ones
author: Polly Stewart
name: Chris
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/21
date added: 2023/08/21
shelves:
review:
Again, behind on my reviews. Finished this novel earlier this month. A terrific mystery with deep character development, plenty of twists (and red herrings), and one heck of a well-done surprise at the end.
]]> Beware the Woman 62366771 From New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Megan Abbott, an eerie and prescient novel about a family outing that takes a terrifying turn.

Honey, I just want you to have everything you ever wanted. That’s what Jacy’s mom always told her.

And Jacy felt like she finally did. Newly married and with a baby on the way, Jacy and her new husband Jed embark on their first road trip together to visit his father, Doctor Ash, in Michigan’s far-flung Upper Peninsula. The moment they arrive in the cozy cottage in the lush woods, Jacy feels bathed in love by the warm and hospitable Doctor Ash, if less so by his house manager, the enigmatic Mrs. Brandt.

But their Edenic first days take a turn when Jacy has a health scare. Swiftly, vacation activities are scrapped, and all eyes are on Jacy’s condition. At the same time, whispers about Jed’s long-dead mother and complicated family history seem eerily to be impeding upon the present. As the days pass, Jacy begins to feel trapped in the cottage, her every move surveilled, her body under the looking glass. But are her fears founded or is it paranoia, or cabin fever, or—as is suggested to her—a stubborn refusal to take necessary precautions? The dense woods surrounding the cottage are full of dangers, but are the greater ones inside?]]> 320 Megan Abbott 0593084934 Chris 5 3.22 2023 Beware the Woman
author: Megan Abbott
name: Chris
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/14
date added: 2023/08/14
shelves:
review:
Oh, Lord, I thought I had posted a review months ago. Clearly I did not. In any case, I devoured this wonderful new novel from Megan Abbott. A powerful, chilling, tale of a woman "kidnapped" by her own family because she is. . .wait for it. . .pregnant, and years earlier had had an abortion. The thriller is smart, timely, and -- like all of Abbott's book's -- a page-turning slow burn of a tale. Just fantastic.
]]> The Rachel Incident 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 Chris 5 4.06 2023 The Rachel Incident
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Chris
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/05
date added: 2023/08/05
shelves:
review:
If you love the work of Sally Rooney -- as I do -- you will devour this wonderful novel. It was catnip for me: so moving and so smart and, yes, often so funny. And while this is, like Rooney's novels, a tale of young people and falling in (and out) of love and utter emotional upheaval, it also has an important and timely message about women's reproductive rights.
]]> All the Sinners Bleed 61884832 A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.

As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction� (The Washington Post).]]> 338 S.A. Cosby 1250831911 Chris 5 4.19 2023 All the Sinners Bleed
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Chris
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/29
date added: 2023/07/29
shelves:
review:
You will devour S.A. Cosby's ALL THE SINNERS BLEED. Heaven knows, I did. Cosby writes gripping page-turners that are rich with heart and beautifully written. His characters are as real as your neighbors, and harbor both the deepest evils and the most wrenching kindnesses.
]]> The Prospectors 90586177 A sweeping rags-to-riches story of survival and greed across American history following a family transformed by the Klondike Gold Rush

The middle daughter of struggling California fruit farmers, Alice Bush is accustomed to feeling inferior and destitute. But when her elder sister’s husband strikes a vein of gold in the Yukon Territory, Alice finally seizes control of her destiny by joining a wave of white settlers making the dangerous trek to the Klondike. What follows is an awakening of ambition for the quietly opportunistic Alice, who, by luck and circumstance, becomes tightly intertwined in her sister and brother-in-law’s newfound fortune, as well as the beginning of a generations-long family quest for wealth that unfolds against the icy Canadian wilderness and the booming oilfields of California. One hundred years later, in 2015, Alice’s great-great-granddaughter Anna must grapple with moral conflict and questions of justice as she travels to the Klondike to bequeath her would-be inheritance to the First Nations peoples who paid the price for its creation.]]> 448 Ariel Djanikian 0063289733 Chris 5 3.59 2023 The Prospectors
author: Ariel Djanikian
name: Chris
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/24
date added: 2023/07/24
shelves:
review:
The Prospectors is smart, surprising, and epic: the sort of adventure that brings to life both a nineteenth-century gold rush and a twenty-first century fight for the family riches that remain. It's more than a golden nugget of a novel. It's the motherlode and I absolutely loved it.
]]> <![CDATA[I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home]]> 61605476 Lorrie Moore's first novel since A Gate at the Stairs--a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart

From "one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation" (Caryn James; The New York Times)--a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things--seen and unseen.

A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all . . .

With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.]]> 193 Lorrie Moore 0307594149 Chris 5 3.26 2023 I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Chris
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/14
date added: 2023/07/14
shelves:
review:
Another gem from Lorrie Moore, with so many funny, surprising, and unexpected observations. The “talking corpse� in this novel should have a Netflix standup comedy special. Moore is as insightful and moving as ever…and she writes great material for the dead.
]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Chris 5 3.84 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Chris
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/25
date added: 2023/06/25
shelves:
review:
Yellowface is at once timely and timeless. I loved it. A thriller set in the world of publishing, this smart novel is catnip if (like me) you devour a good page-turner; savor stories about publishing and bookselling; and are interested in the cultural dialogue about who can write what. But it's also about the eternal human need for validation, and that's what might, in fact, be its brilliant, beating heart.
]]> The Road from Belhaven 150249268 From the New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel about a young woman whose gift of second sight complicates her coming of age in late 19th century Scotland

Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective—she doesn’t, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her “pictures� foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful she may glimpse the future, but she can seldom change it.

Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis, visiting Belhaven for the harvest, begins to court her. Why have the adults around her not revealed that the touch of a hand can change everything? After following Louis to Glasgow, though, she learns the limits of his devotion. Faced with a seemingly impossible choice, she makes a terrible mistake. But her second sight may allow her a second chance.

Luminous and transporting, The Road from Belhaven once again displays “the marvelous control of a writer who conjures equally well the tangible, sensory world . . . and the mysteries, stranger and wilder, that flicker at the border of that world.� (The Boston Globe)]]> 274 Margot Livesey 059353705X Chris 5 3.98 2024 The Road from Belhaven
author: Margot Livesey
name: Chris
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/23
date added: 2023/06/23
shelves:
review:
Margot Livesey is a treasure: a writer who understands the magic and mysteries of the human soul, and brings that wisdom to novels that are both riveting and lush. The Road from Belhaven is a smart, profound, and beautiful book that draws you in and holds you tight.
]]> <![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]]> 29496076 Ěý
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,� roamed � virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward Native Americans that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly riveting, but also emotionally devastating.]]> 359 David Grann 0385534256 Chris 5 4.12 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: Chris
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/14
date added: 2023/06/14
shelves:
review:
Brilliant journalism; a riveting true-crime mystery; and a chapter of American history that will leave you gutted. This is another magnificent chronicle of a moment in time -- the murders of the Osage by a white conspiracy to gain control of their oil -- that is absolutely extraordinary. David Grann is a masterful researcher, writer, and storyteller.
]]> The Madstone 123200277
Texas hill country, 1868. As nineteen-year-old Benjamin Shreve tends to business in his workshop, he witnesses a stagecoach strand a passenger. When the man, a treasure hunter, persuades Benjamin to help track down the vanished coach—and a mysterious fortune left aboard—Benjamin is drawn into a drama whose scope he could never have imagined, for they discover on reaching the coach that its passengers include Nell, a pregnant young woman, and her four-year-old son, Tot, who are fleeing Nell’s brutal husband and his murderous brothers.

Having told the Freedmen’s Bureau the whereabouts of her husband’s gang—a sadistic group wanted for countless acts of harassment and violence against Black citizens—Nell is in grave danger. If her husband catches her, he will kill her and take their son. Learning of their plight, Benjamin offers to deliver Nell and Tot to a distant port on the Gulf of Mexico, where they can board a ship to safety. He is joined in this chivalrous act by two other companions: the treasure hunter whose stranding began this endeavor and a restless Black Seminole who is a veteran of wars on both sides of the Rio Grande and who has an escape plan of his own.

​Fraught with jeopardy from the outset, the trek across Texas becomes still more dangerous as buried secrets, including a cursed necklace, emerge. And even as Benjamin falls in love with Nell and imagines a life as Tot’s father, vengeful pursuers are never far behind. With its vivid characters and expansive canvas, The Madstone calls to mind Lonesome Dove, yet Elizabeth Crook’s new novel is a singular achievement. Told in Benjamin’s resolute and unforgettable voice, it is full of eccentric action, unrelenting peril, and droll humor—a thrilling and beautifully rendered story of three people sharing a hazardous and defining journey that will forever bind them together.]]> 288 Elizabeth Crook 0316564346 Chris 5 4.03 2023 The Madstone
author: Elizabeth Crook
name: Chris
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/09
date added: 2023/06/09
shelves:
review:
The Madstone is a treasure: a brilliant, beautiful page-turner of a book. Elizabeth Crook has re-imagined the western, giving us a poignant love story and a riveting road novel. I devoured it � and you will, too.
]]> Chain-Gang All-Stars 61190770
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.]]> 367 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 0593317335 Chris 5 4.13 2023 Chain-Gang All-Stars
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Chris
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/03
date added: 2023/06/03
shelves:
review:
This novel is a revelation: so creative and so smart and so moving. A dystopian future in which criminals become gladiatorial bloodsport, hoping to "fight" their way to freedom in battles before a rabid TV and live audience that knows one convict will die in every match. The novel is a commentary on the flaws of the U.S. prison system, our cultural obsession with violent sports, and a deeply moving love story about the ties that bind (literally, in some cases) the chain-gang all-stars. And that ending? Never saw it coming. This novel is a gem. All the stars.
]]> <![CDATA[Life B: Overcoming Double Depression]]> 62337504
Expanded from Bethanne’s popular ELLE piece, Life B is a powerful meditation on how to navigate through the stubborn, thorny roots that engulf mental illness, and how to fight for a path to recovery. Recognizing the intergenerational effects of trauma and mental health struggles, Bethanne unearths the stories of her past—through her grandmother, her mother, her sister—in order to forge a better future for her two daughters, dismantling the stigmas surrounding mental illness in the process.

With the acute self-awareness of Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind and the honesty and vulnerability of Daphne Merkin’s This Close to Happy, Life B is Prozac Nation for baby boomers. It’s an intimate portrait we haven’t yet seen—of a lifelong struggle with depression, of midlife diagnosis and renewal and late-found strength. and, most importantly, a life-affirming blueprint of how to accept it and live alongside it.]]> 208 Bethanne Patrick 1640091297 Chris 5 3.84 2023 Life B: Overcoming Double Depression
author: Bethanne Patrick
name: Chris
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/29
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves:
review:
LIFE B is courageous, powerful, and riveting � and among the most moving memoirs I’ve ever read. Bethanne Patrick, one of our most important literary influencers and critics, offers a stunning and honest account of her depression, and the ways it scarred her and her family -- and what it took to learn to live with it. To overcome it. Her story will make you recall Plato: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.�
]]>