Sarah's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 09 Apr 2025 10:55:22 -0700 60 Sarah's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Wednesday's Child 203579192 A new collection—about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life—by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.

A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone s’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.

Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living—exile, assimilation, loss, love—with her trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.]]> 256 Yiyun Li 1250338387 Sarah 0 currently-reading 3.50 2023 Wednesday's Child
author: Yiyun Li
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Held 221502414 A breathtaking and ineffable new novel from the author of the international bestsellers Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault--a novel of love and loyalty across generations, at once sweeping and intimate

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls--a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand.

So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and reignite as the century unfolds. In radiant moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Held is affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom, and compassion, a novel by a writer at the height of her powers.]]> 240 Anne Michaels 0593470842 Sarah 0 currently-reading 2.00 2023 Held
author: Anne Michaels
name: Sarah
average rating: 2.00
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Heroes' Welcome (My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, #2)]]> 22573877
Only 23, former soldier Riley Purefoy and his bride, Nadine Waveney, have their whole lives ahead of them. But Riley’s injuries from the war have created awkward tensions between the couple, scars that threaten to shatter their marriage before it has truly begun.

Peter and Julia Locke are facing their own trauma. Peter has become a recluse, losing himself in drink to forget the horrors of the war. Desperate to reach her husband, Julia tries to soothe his bitterness, but their future together is uncertain.

Drawn together in the aftermath of the war, the couples become tightly intertwined. Haunted by loss, guilt, and dark memories, contending with uncertainty, anger, and pain, they are left with the question: is love strong enough to help them move forward?

The incandescent follow up to the international bestseller My Dear I Want to Tell You, The Heroes� Welcome is a powerful and intimate novel chronicling the turbulence of 1919—a year of perilous beginnings, disturbing realities, and glimmerings of hope.]]> 263 Louisa Young 0062354493 Sarah 0 to-read 3.82 2014 The Heroes' Welcome (My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, #2)
author: Louisa Young
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, #1)]]> 13068810
While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home.

Beautiful, obsessive Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: each day Julia goes through rituals to prepare for her beloved husband’s return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises - but how can they when the future is not in their hands? And Rose? Well, what did happen to the traditionally brought-up women who lost all hope of marriage, because all the young men were dead?]]> 336 Louisa Young 0061997153 Sarah 3
let me start off with things i enjoyed: the prose was very nicely done, and the constant shifting of years and locations to accurately portray the multifaceted war was fantastic. it’s hard to pull off twenty something scene changes in a book! this was a very ambitious novel and for the excellent setting, it was good!

generally, and this isn’t entirely the books fault but my own for having specific standards for narration and POVs, i don’t think multiple focalizations AND povs work. i think we should stay in the head of the reigning character in a scene. jumping back and forth is distracting and not often well done. for example, we’d start off the scene in rose’s head but suddenly i knew what nadine was thinking? it just didn’t have the effect i thought it would.

my second qualm is that sometimes writers don’t trust the readers to come to the same conclusion as them. if you think we need that added sentence to explain the previous sentence, YOU DON’T. i struggle with this as a writer too but pleaseeeeee TRUST YOUR READER!

and my third qualm is locke. COME ON. we could have had such a lovely character arc!!! julia, as annoying as she was, deserved better. and so did locke, my beloved. i love that man!!!!!!

if you’re dismayed by my review, i would turn you over to alice quinn’s “in memoriam� to fully get the true experience of reading a WW1 book that’s, now that i’m thinking about it, shockingly similar to this one.
]]> 3.57 2011 My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, #1)
author: Louisa Young
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars. I’M BACK IN MY HISTORICAL FICTION ERAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!! okay so this book was not what i expected.

let me start off with things i enjoyed: the prose was very nicely done, and the constant shifting of years and locations to accurately portray the multifaceted war was fantastic. it’s hard to pull off twenty something scene changes in a book! this was a very ambitious novel and for the excellent setting, it was good!

generally, and this isn’t entirely the books fault but my own for having specific standards for narration and POVs, i don’t think multiple focalizations AND povs work. i think we should stay in the head of the reigning character in a scene. jumping back and forth is distracting and not often well done. for example, we’d start off the scene in rose’s head but suddenly i knew what nadine was thinking? it just didn’t have the effect i thought it would.

my second qualm is that sometimes writers don’t trust the readers to come to the same conclusion as them. if you think we need that added sentence to explain the previous sentence, YOU DON’T. i struggle with this as a writer too but pleaseeeeee TRUST YOUR READER!

and my third qualm is locke. COME ON. we could have had such a lovely character arc!!! julia, as annoying as she was, deserved better. and so did locke, my beloved. i love that man!!!!!!

if you’re dismayed by my review, i would turn you over to alice quinn’s “in memoriam� to fully get the true experience of reading a WW1 book that’s, now that i’m thinking about it, shockingly similar to this one.

]]> Possession 41219 A beautiful hardback edition of the Booker Prize-winning novel. A romance, a literary quest, a modern classic.

A pair of young scholars investigate the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time. Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story.]]> 555 A.S. Byatt 0679735909 Sarah 0 to-read 3.89 1991 Possession
author: A.S. Byatt
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Secret History 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Sarah 0 to-read 4.17 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> As I Lay Dying 10974 As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren's family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through multiple voices, As I Lay Dying vividly brings to life Faulkner's imaginary South, one of literature's great invented landscapes, and is replete with the poignant, impoverished, violent, and hypnotically fascinating characters that were his trademark.

Along with a new foreword by E. L. Doctorow, this edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Faulkner expert Noel Polk.]]> 231 William Faulkner 0375504524 Sarah 0 to-read 3.83 1930 As I Lay Dying
author: William Faulkner
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1930
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Death Comes for the Archbishop]]> 545951 297 Willa Cather 0679728899 Sarah 0 to-read 3.93 1927 Death Comes for the Archbishop
author: Willa Cather
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Catalina 202907408 A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world with no place for the undocumented. Her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties, and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: She is both fascinated and repulsed.

Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved?]]> 224 Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 0593449096 Sarah 2 3.57 2024 Catalina
author: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
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could have been executed far better. choppy and disorganized, which is unfortunate because it was a wonderful premise
]]> O Sinners! 213618149 A journalist investigates a seductive and mysterious cult and its leader, an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran, in this not-to-be-missed novel.

Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist reeling from the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed in a cult called The Nameless. Based in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic Vietnam War-veteran named Odo, The Nameless adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as “THERE IS NO GOD BUT THE NAMELESS,� “ALL SUFFERING IS DISTORTION,� and “SEE ONLY BEAUTY.� Faruq, skeptical but committed to unraveling the mystery of The Nameless, extends his stay over months, as he gets deeper into the cult's inner workings, compassionate teachings, and closer to Odo. Faruq himself begins to unravel, forced to come-to-terms with the memories he has been running from while trying to resist Odo's spell.

Told in three seamlessly interwoven threads between Faruq’s present-day investigation, Odo’s time before the formation of the movement as a Black infantryman during the Vietnam War, alongside three other Black soldiers, and a documentary script that recounts The Nameless� clash with a Texan fundamentalist church, O SINNERS! examines both longing and belonging. Ultimately the novel What is it that we seek from cults and, inevitably, from each other?]]> 464 Nicole Cuffy 0593597443 Sarah 0 to-read 3.70 2025 O Sinners!
author: Nicole Cuffy
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> Wandering Stars 174147294
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.]]> 315 Tommy Orange 0593318250 Sarah 0 to-read 3.83 2024 Wandering Stars
author: Tommy Orange
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> Where Reasons End 40147915
"Li has converted the messy and devastating stuff of life into a remarkable work of art.”� TheWall Street Journal

WINNER OF THE PEN/JEAN STEIN AWARD � LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD � NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST FICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Parul Seghal, The New York Times � NPR � The Guardian � The Paris Review

The narrator of Where Reasons End writes, � I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing it over again, this time by words .�

Yiyun Li meets life’s deepest sorrows as she imagines a conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Composed in the months after she lost a child to suicide, Where Reasons End trespasses into the space between life and death as mother and child talk, free from old images and narratives. Deeply moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity of a relationship.

Written with originality, precision, and poise, Where Reasons End is suffused with intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love.]]> 170 Yiyun Li 198481737X Sarah 0 to-read 3.77 2019 Where Reasons End
author: Yiyun Li
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Dutch House 44318414
The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.

Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives, they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.]]> 337 Ann Patchett 0062963678 Sarah 0 to-read 4.08 2019 The Dutch House
author: Ann Patchett
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)]]> 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands ’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 382 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 Sarah 0 to-read 4.66 2025 Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.66
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> Yoko: A Biography 214151491 An intimate and revelatory biography of Yoko Ono from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Boy.

John Lennon once described Yoko Ono as the world’s most famous unknown artist. “Everybody knows her name, but no one knows what she does.� She has only been important to history insofar as she impacted Lennon. Throughout her life, Yoko has been a caricature, curiosity, and, often, a villain—an inscrutable seductress, manipulating con artist, and caterwauling fraud. The Lennon/Beatles saga is one of the greatest stories ever told, but Yoko’s part has been missing—hidden in the Beatles� formidable shadow, further obscured by flagrant misogyny and racism. This definitive biography of Yoko Ono’s life will change that. In this book, Yoko Ono takes centerstage.

Yoko’s life, independent of Lennon, was an amazing journey. Yoko spans from her birth to wealthy parents in pre-war Tokyo, her harrowing experience as a child during the war, her arrival in avant-garde art scene in London, Tokyo, and New York City. It delves into her groundbreaking art, music, feminism, and activism. We see how she coped under the most intense, relentless, and cynical microscope as she was falsely vilified for the most heinous cultural crime breaking up the greatest rock-and-roll band in history.

This book was nearly a half century in the making. In 1980, David Sheff met Yoko and John when Sheff conducted an in-depth interview with them just months before John’s murder. In the aftermath of the killing, he and Yoko became close as she rebuilt her life, survived threats and betrayals, and went on to create groundbreaking art and music while campaigning for peace and other causes. Drawing from his experiences and interviews with her, her family, closest friends, collaborators, and many others, Sheff shows us Yoko’s nine decades—one of the most unlikely and remarkable lives ever lived.

Yoko is a harrowing, moving, propulsive, and vastly entertaining biography of a woman whose story has never been accurately told. The book not only rehabilitates Yoko Ono’s reputation but elevates it to iconic status.]]> 384 David Sheff 1982188243 Sarah 0 to-read 4.39 Yoko: A Biography
author: David Sheff
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> Notes to John 223889073 An extraordinary work from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.� She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood—misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe—and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, “what it’s been worth.� The analysis would continue for more than a decade.

Didion’s journal was crafted with the singular intelligence, precision, and elegance that characterize all of her writing. It is an unprecedently intimate account that reveals sides of her that were unknown, but the voice is unmistakably hers—questioning, courageous, and clear in the face of a wrenchingly painful journey.]]> 224 Joan Didion 0593803671 Sarah 0 to-read 3.67 Notes to John
author: Joan Didion
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.67
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> My Name Is Emilia del Valle 217245557 In this spellbinding historical novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea and The Wind Knows My Name, a young writer journeys to South America to uncover the truth about her father—and herself.

In San Francisco 1866, an Irish nun, left pregnant and abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia Del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman.

To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of sixteen, she begins to publish pulp fiction under a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds can't contain her sense of adventure any longer, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at the San Francisco Examiner to hire her. There she is paired with another talented reporter, Eric Whelan.

As she proves herself, her restlessness returns, until an opportunity arises to cover a brewing civil war in Chile. She seizes it, along with Eric, and while there, begins to uncover the truth about her father and the country that represents her roots. But as the war escalates, Emilia finds herself in danger and at a crossroads, questioning both her identity and her destiny.

A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, My Name is Emilia del Valle introduces a character who will never let hold of your heart.]]> 304 Isabel Allende 059397509X Sarah 0 to-read 4.06 2025 My Name Is Emilia del Valle
author: Isabel Allende
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> Glorious Exploits 211003856 An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.]]> 304 Ferdia Lennon 1250893682 Sarah 0 to-read 4.21 2024 Glorious Exploits
author: Ferdia Lennon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> Eros the Bittersweet 150255 Eros is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the constraints of the scholarly exercise for an evocative and lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos William's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.
]]> 190 Anne Carson 1564781887 Sarah 0 to-read 4.48 1986 Eros the Bittersweet
author: Anne Carson
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> Jilted 217388009 Bramble's first never-before-published title from #1 New York Times bestseller Vi Keeland is Jilted, a slow-burn, swooning romance where 27 Dresses meets The Hating Game.

Weddings. I spend every working minute thinking and talking and writing about weddings, when the very concept makes me want to scream. After my fiancé abandoned me at the altar last year, my dream job at Bride magazine has turned reoccurring nightmare.

To add insult to injury, I’ve been conscripted into the bridal party of some bridezilla just because she knows the owners� son. So of course I spend all afternoon bickering with one of the groomsmen and all evening making out with him.

Things only get better when I learn that of course ’s the owner’s son and I’ll have to spend the rest of the season working with him at every single wedding I cover this year.

Can the jilted bride and the man who is afraid of love find a way to heal each other?

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 272 Vi Keeland 1250359856 Sarah 0 to-read 4.41 2025 Jilted
author: Vi Keeland
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> Metallic Realms 220160165 A wildly inventive and entertaining novel about a sci-fi writing group whose fictional universe and personal dramas begin to collide and collapse from the critically acclaimed author of the “timeless and original� (The New York Times) The Body Scout.

Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln’s life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns—he has a greater calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written The Star Rot Chronicles. Written collectively by Michael’s best (and perhaps only) friend Taras K. Castle and his misfit sci-fi writing group, the Orb 4, the stories follow Captain Baldwin and his fearless crew on their mind-bending adventures across the Metallic Realms, from solar whales swallowing suns at the edge of spacetime to interstellar love triangles. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished—until now.

But the most urgent story Michael must tell takes place in the more intimate (if no less dramatic) confines of literary Brooklyn. Behind the greatest multiverse ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the funhouse reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, and the true reasons for the group’s fallout begin to emerge. As he labors away in hiding, Michael has just one to bring the Metallic Realms to the world. No matter the cost.

Metallic Realms is a genre-breaking ode to golden-age science fiction, friendship, creativity, and the power and perils of storytelling.]]> 320 Lincoln Michel 1668058677 Sarah 0 to-read 3.91 Metallic Realms
author: Lincoln Michel
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> The Emperor of Gladness 219848315 Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

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

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing � formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness � are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 416 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Sarah 0 to-read 4.36 2025 The Emperor of Gladness
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.36
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]]> The Antidote 214537790 FromPulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestsellingauthor of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples� memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 432 Karen Russell 059380225X Sarah 0 to-read 4.03 2025 The Antidote
author: Karen Russell
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.03
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]]> Wild Dark Shore 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Sarah 0 to-read 4.32 2025 Wild Dark Shore
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
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]]> <![CDATA[Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath]]> 48721389 The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.

*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES*

Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath's scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment, and evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Sylvia's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; and her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a true marriage of minds that would change the course of poetry in English.

Clark's clear-eyed sympathy for Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.]]> 1154 Heather Clark 1473579236 Sarah 0 to-read 4.56 2020 Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
author: Heather Clark
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2020
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]]> The Idiot 30962053 A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.

At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.]]> 423 Elif Batuman 1594205612 Sarah 0 to-read 3.67 2017 The Idiot
author: Elif Batuman
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

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

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

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Sarah 0 to-read 4.55 2025 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
author: John Green
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies]]> 199774593
It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things. Hasn’t it always been so? When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors� offspring. But come the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of men are tending babies, sometimes right from birth. How can this be happening? Puzzled and dazzled by the tender expertise of new fathers around the world—several in her own family—celebrated evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy set out to trace the deep history of male nurturing and explain a surprising departure from everything she had assumed to be “normal.�

In Father Time , Hrdy draws on a wealth of research to argue that this ongoing transformation in men is not only cultural, but profoundly biological. Men in prolonged intimate contact with babies exhibit responses nearly identical to those in the bodies and brains of mothers. They develop caring potential few realized men possessed. In her quest to explain how men came to nurture babies, Hrdy travels back through millions of years of human, primate, and mammalian evolution, then back further still to the earliest vertebrates—all while taking into account recent economic and social trends and technological innovations and incorporating new findings from neuroscience, genetics, endocrinology, and more. The result is a masterful synthesis of evolutionary and historical perspectives that expands our understanding of what it means to be a man—and what the implications might be for society and our species.]]> 432 Sarah Blaffer Hrdy 0691238774 Sarah 0 to-read 3.98 Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies
author: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.98
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]]> The Road 6288
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,� are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.]]> 241 Cormac McCarthy 0307265439 Sarah 0 to-read 3.99 2006 The Road
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/24
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]]> Clear 176443690
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 196 Carys Davies 1668030667 Sarah 0 to-read 3.85 Clear
author: Carys Davies
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.85
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]]> 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 s’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because s’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now s’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 Sarah 0 to-read 4.11 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> A Gorgeous Excitement 211953309 A dazzling debut novel set in 1980s New York, when cocaine is as easy to get as ice cream, about one young woman’s summer of infinite possibility—and looming danger.

It was the summer of 1986, when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, s’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that s’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents� medicine cabinet.

Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed, whom every girl wants to sleep with and every guy wants to be. After s’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?

Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,� but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.]]> 368 Cynthia Weiner 0593798848 Sarah 0 to-read 3.72 A Gorgeous Excitement
author: Cynthia Weiner
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.72
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]]> Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2) 199798868 New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 294 Colm Tóibín 1476785112 Sarah 0 to-read 3.68 2024 Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2)
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both]]> 185767233 Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise meets Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in a Black woman’s coming-of-age story, chronicling a life-changing friendship, the interplay between music fandom and identity, and the slipperiness of sanity

Set in the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is an immersive journey into the life and mind of Khaki Oliver, who’s perennially trying to disappear into something: a codependent friendship, an ill-advised boyfriend, the punk scene, or simply, the ether. These days it’s a meaningless job and a comfortingly empty apartment. Then, after a decade of estrangement, she receives a letter from her former best friend. Fiona’s throwing a party for her newly adopted daughter and wants Khaki to join the celebration.

Khaki is equal parts terrified and tempted to reconnect. Their platonic love was confusing, all-consuming, and encouraged their worst impulses. While stalling her RSVP, Khaki starts crafting the perfect mixtape—revisiting memories of formative shows, failed romances, and the ups and downs of desire and denial—while weighing the risks and rewards of saying yes to Fiona again.

One song at a time, from 1980s hardcore to 2010s emo, the shared and separate contours of each woman’s mind come into focus. Will listening to the same old songs on repeat doom Khaki to a lonely life of arrested development? Or will hindsight help her regain her sense of self and pave a healthy path for the future, with or without Fiona?]]> 336 Mariah Stovall 1593767609 Sarah 0 to-read 3.17 2024 I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both
author: Mariah Stovall
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/14
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]]> I Am the Cage 217245667
“A brilliant book about what we survive—and how. Visceral, wrenching, and beautiful.� –John Green, #1 bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars

“A tender, heartfelt story about the wounds childhood trauma can leave on its survivors. The sense of powerlessness—and redemption—will stay with you.� –Jojo Moyes, #1 bestselling author of Me Before You

“Heartfelt, human and true—a novel that feels real from the first word to the last. I loved it.� –Markus Zusak, #1 bestselling author of The Book Thief

“Allison Sweet Grant is a natural storyteller with the keen eye and ear of a poet. Deftly toggling between past and present, childhood trauma and its painful aftershocks, I Am the Cage is a story of love, resilience, and healing. What a beautiful, moving, and insightful debut.”� –Maggie Smith, bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Grant’s YA debut emerges with a captivating sparkle... introspective and rhythmic prose.... outstanding character study.... powerful.�
–Booklist starred review

“Artfully showcases the complicated back-and-forth between keeping oneself safe and staunching one’s own growth�. Crackles with tension and sincerity� cathartic.� –Publishers Weekly

Fish Creek, Wisconsin—Beautiful. Quiet. Isolated. Anonymous. It’s all that nineteen-year-old Elisabeth needs, and everything she wants. Cloistered in her tiny cabin, Elisabeth is determined to be alone, hiding from her memories and making sure that no one can ever hurt her again.

But when a massive snowstorm strikes, plunging the town into darkness, Elisabeth finally allows herself to accept help from her neighbor, Noah, the town’s young sheriff. Forced to show him more vulnerability than she ever intended, Elisabeth realizes she can no longer outrun the scars of her childhood, and facing the darkness might be exactly what she needs to let the light in.

In a searing own-voices story accented by poignant childhood flashbacks and stunning poetry, Allison Sweet Grant’s young adult debut is a quietly powerful portrait of a young woman’s journey to confront the medical trauma inflicted to “fix� her—and heal her heart in the process. An emotional coming-of-age story about a young woman running away from herself, yet grasping to find a way back. Deeply moving, authentically raw, and humming with the possibility of a new love.]]> 304 Allison Sweet Grant 059361691X Sarah 0 to-read 4.04 2025 I Am the Cage
author: Allison Sweet Grant
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3)]]> 211721797 The third installment in the heartwarming and enchanting Emily Wilde series, about a curmudgeonly scholar of folklore and the fae prince she loves.

Emily Wilde has spent her life studying faeries. A renowned dryadologist, she has documented hundreds of species of Folk in her Encyclopaedia of Faeries. Now she is about to embark on her most dangerous academic project studying the inner workings of a faerie realm—as its queen.

Along with her former academic rival—now fiancé—the dashing and mercurial Wendell Bambleby, Emily is immediately thrust into the deadly intrigues of Faerie as the two of them seize the throne of Wendell’s long-lost kingdom, which Emily finds a beautiful nightmare filled with scholarly treasures.

Emily has been obsessed with faerie stories her entire life, but at first she feels as ill-suited to Faerie as she did to the mortal How can an unassuming scholar such as herself pass for a queen? Yet there is little time to settle in, for Wendell’s murderous stepmother has placed a deadly curse upon the land before vanishing without a trace. It will take all of Wendell’s magic—and Emily’s knowledge of stories—to unravel the mystery before they lose everything they hold dear.]]> 358 Heather Fawcett 0593500229 Sarah 0 to-read 4.21 2025 Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3)
author: Heather Fawcett
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> Deep End 212808709 A competitive diver and an ace swimmer jump into forbidden waters in this steamy college romance from the New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis.

Scarlett Vandermeer is swimming upstream. A Junior at Stanford and a student-athlete who specializes in platform diving, Scarlett prefers to keep her head down, concentrating on getting into med school and on recovering from the injury that almost ended her career. She has no time for relationships—at least, that’s what she tells herself.

Swim captain, world champion, all-around aquatics golden boy, Lukas Blomqvist thrives on discipline. It’s how he wins gold medals and breaks records: complete focus, with every stroke. On the surface, Lukas and Scarlett have nothing in common. Until a well-guarded secret slips out, and everything changes.

So they start an arrangement. And as the pressure leading to the Olympics heats up, so does their relationship. It was supposed to be just a temporary, mutually satisfying fling. But when staying away from Lukas becomes impossible, Scarlett realizes that her heart might be treading into dangerous water...]]> 464 Ali Hazelwood Sarah 3 3.96 2025 Deep End
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
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i mean it was fine. not a single likable character though. plot basically nonexistent. definitely my least favorite ali hazelwood book but i can see the appeal. personally i don’t love this much spice or this type of spice rather, but that’s just preference!
]]> Ambessa: Chosen of the Wolf 220609748 Set in the blockbuster and award-winning universe of League of Legends: Arcane and written by award-winning author C. L. Clark, discover a thrilling epic fantasy novel where Ambessa Medarda truly learns what it means to be a Chosen of the Wolf.

Medarda over all.

Ambessa Medarda: Warrior, general, mother. She is a woman to be feared, and the Medardas are unrivaled in their pursuit of glory. She has led conquests and armies. She has slain legendary beasts. She has made grave sacrifices in her ascent up the ranks. And for this she was rewarded: She entered the realm of death and was granted a vision of herself upon the throne of the vast Noxian empire.

But before she can lead her empire, she must become head of her own clan. Yet the title is contested by her cousin and former confidante, Ta'Fik. He knows the bloody sins of Ambessa's past. And he knows he cannot allow her to rise.

They will fight a war for the very soul of the Medardas.

But the war won't be fought on battlefields alone. Ambessa's daughter, Mel, can deftly break through the walls around anyone's heart, and she'll put her talents to use for her mother. Yet despite Mel's strength, Ambessa sees only a child who lacks her killer instincts. Mel knows she can be the leader Ambessa wants her to be, if only she gives her time.

With her family betraying her, enemies closing in on all sides, and unseen forces moving in the shadows, every day proves more dangerous than the last. But Ambessa will not bow. She will burn the world down to claim her place in it.]]> 448 C.L. Clark 0316470058 Sarah 0 to-read 3.98 2025 Ambessa: Chosen of the Wolf
author: C.L. Clark
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> Hot Wax 224103430 The new novel from the bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift—a vivid and immersive tale of one woman’s reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood, and made her who she is

Summer, 1989: ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father’s forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills� wild ride to glory. But fame has sharper fangs than anybody realized, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning—one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come.

The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband Rob. But when her father’s sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers. Hitching her fate and Gil’s beloved car to two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home, she finds everything she thought she’d lost desire, adventure, and the woman she once wanted to be. But Rob refuses to let her go. Determined to bring her back where she belongs, he chases her across the country—and drives her to a desperation all her own.

Drenched in knock-down drag-out rock and roll, Hot Wax is a raucous, breakneck ride to hell and back—where getting lost might be the only way to find yourself and save your soul.]]> 400 M.L. Rio 1668070022 Sarah 0 to-read 3.94 2025 Hot Wax
author: M.L. Rio
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory]]> 60222011 From the creator and executive producer of the beloved and universally acclaimed television series BoJack Horseman, a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love--the best and worst thing in the universe

Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg's stories will make readers laugh, weep, and shiver in uncomfortably delicious recognition. In "A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion," a young couple planning a wedding is forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices. "Missed Connection--m4w" is the tragicomic tale of a pair of lonely commuters eternally failing to make that longed-for contact. The members of a rock band in "Up-and-Comers" discover they suddenly have superpowers--but only when they're drunk. And in "The Serial Monogamist's Guide to Important New York City Landmarks," a woman maps her history of romantic failures based on the places she and her significant others visited together.

Equally at home with the surreal and the painfully relatable (or both at once), Bob-Waksberg delivers a killer combination of humor, romance, whimsy, cultural commentary, and crushing emotional vulnerability. The resulting collection is a punchy, perfect bloody valentine.]]> 243 Raphael Bob-Waksberg Sarah 0 to-read 3.95 2019 Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory
author: Raphael Bob-Waksberg
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
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]]> Alchemy of Secrets: A Novel 222706197 The HOTLY ANTICIPATED adult debut novel by the beloved, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING author of the Caraval and Once Upon a Broken Heart series

It starts with a class in an old movie theater.

Folklore 517: Local Legends and Urban Myths, taught by a woman called the Professor. Most students believe the Professor’s stories are just fiction, but Holland St. James has always been convinced that magic is real. When she tracks down a local legend named the Watch Man, who can supposedly tell you when you’ll die, the world finally makes sense. Except that the Watch Man tells her she will die at midnight tomorrow unless she finds an ancient object called the Alchemical Heart.

With the clock ticking, Holland is pulled deeper into this magical world in the heart of Los Angeles—and into the path of a magnetic stranger. Everything about him feels like a bad idea, but he promises Holland that her sister sent him to protect her. As they chase clues and stories that take them closer to the Alchemical Heart, Holland realizes everyone in this intoxicating new world is lying to her, even this stranger. And if she can’t figure out whom to trust, not even the Alchemical Heart will save her.]]> 336 Stephanie Garber 125078915X Sarah 0 to-read 4.65 2025 Alchemy of Secrets: A Novel
author: Stephanie Garber
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf]]> 215749331 For readers of Also a Poet, Orwell’s Roses, and My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers—as well as the legions of Virginia Woolf fanatics—the acclaimed poet and author of The Crying Bookcrafts a deeply moving, immersive, and lyrical hybrid memoir about her mother, Woolf, and the transformative power of writing.

When Heather Christle realizes that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.

On a recent visit to London's Kew Gardens, Heather Christle’s mother revealed a shocking secret from her she had been sexually assaulted as a young girl growing up in London, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather's own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.

Her private, British mother’s revelation—a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship—propels Christle down a deep and destabilizing rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother's past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England’s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family's "birthday hill" in Kew Gardens, the tourist-ified homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf—both famously depressed in life and exuberant on the page—and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother’s story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.

Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. It is also a book unlike any other, and one that will send readers down rabbit holes of their own.]]> 288 Heather Christle 1643755927 Sarah 0 to-read 4.30 In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf
author: Heather Christle
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> Blood Over Bright Haven 208430658 Magic has made the city of Tiran an industrial utopia, but magic has a cost—and the collectors have come calling.

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

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

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

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

(Content warnings for gore, sexual assault, and suicidal ideation)]]> 430 M.L. Wang 0593873351 Sarah 0 to-read 4.40 2023 Blood Over Bright Haven
author: M.L. Wang
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People's Business]]> 123195171 Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individual topics: Can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting?

In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication’s “Work Friend� columnist, Gay reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights. Opinions is a collection of her best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years. Covering a wide range of topics—politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more—with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay’s devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.]]> 320 Roxane Gay 0063341468 Sarah 0 to-read 4.01 2023 Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People's Business
author: Roxane Gay
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> Black Friend: Essays 56969544
Ziwe made a name for herself by asking guests like Alyssa Milano, Fran Lebowitz, and Chet Hanks direct questions. In Black Friend, she turns her incisive perspective on both herself and the culture at large. Throughout the book, Ziwe combines pop-culture commentary and personal stories, which grapple with her own (mis)understanding of identity. From a hilarious case of mistaken identity via a jumbotron to a terrifying fight-or-flight encounter in the woods, Ziwe raises difficult questions for comedic relief.

From Black Friend’s Introduction:

“Today, I learned that my book is ranked as the #1 new release in ‘Discrimination and Racism� on Amazon. Wow. This is a huge honor, especially considering my stiff competition in the selfpublished manifestos space. Unfortunately, this victory is bittersweet. I worry that people may get the wrong idea and think that I am pro-racism when in actuality, I am indifferent. Still, I’d love to thank everyone who made this possible. I solemnly swear to write the most discriminatory book in American history. I hope I can make you proud.

“Just kidding . . . I will not marginalize you . . . unless that’s your kink. This book of essays offers moments of extreme discomfort (and the subsequent growth) in my life around the role of ‘black friend.� Black friends come in all shapes and sizes. Yet the archetype is often a two-dimensional character meant to support the non-black protagonists� more complex humanity. Some black friends exist as the comic relief, like Donkey in any of the Shrek movies. Some are the sassy friend, like Louise from St. Louis in Sex and the City. Still others are the inexplicably sagacious companion, like Morpheus in The Matrix. It’s impossible for these individual portraits to reflect my complicated reality. To start, they are fictional. One of them is a talking ass. I do not exist just to move plot. While I am a supportive friend, I am not a supporting character. I am the protagonist of my perfectly imperfect story.”]]> 192 Ziwe 1419756346 Sarah 0 to-read 4.26 2023 Black Friend: Essays
author: Ziwe
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)]]> 256008 Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.]]> 960 Larry McMurtry 067168390X Sarah 0 to-read 4.53 1985 Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2)]]> 199347538 Somewhere Beyond the Sea is the hugely anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, one of the best-loved and best-selling fantasy novels of the past decade. Featuring gorgeous orange sprayed edges!

A magical house. A secret past. A summons that could change everything.

Arthur Parnassus lives a good life built on the ashes of a bad one.

He’s the master of a strange orphanage on a distant and peculiar island, and he hopes to soon be the adoptive father to the six dangerous and magical children who live there.

Arthur works hard and loves with his whole heart so none of the children ever feel the neglect and pain that he once felt as an orphan on that very same island so long ago. He is not alone: joining him is the love of his life, Linus Baker, a former caseworker in the Department In Charge of Magical Youth. And there’s the island’s sprite, Zoe Chapelwhite, and her girlfriend, Mayor Helen Webb. Together, they will do anything to protect the children.

But when Arthur is summoned to make a public statement about his dark past, he finds himself at the helm of a fight for the future that his family, and all magical people, deserve.

And when a new magical child hopes to join them on their island home—one who finds power in calling himself monster, a name that Arthur worked so hard to protect his children from—Arthur knows they’re at a breaking point: their family will either grow stronger than ever or fall apart.

Welcome back to Marsyas Island. This is Arthur’s story.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea is a story of resistance, lovingly told, about the daunting experience of fighting for the life you want to live and doing the work to keep it.]]> 416 T.J. Klune 125088120X Sarah 0 currently-reading 4.17 2024 Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2)
author: T.J. Klune
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> Blob: A Love Story 212994452 'A modern-day Mrs. Caliban, BLOB is a book that looks at identity and desire in profoundly interesting ways'
Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here

A hilarious and moving debut novel about a young woman who decides to turn a sentient blob into her perfect boyfriend...

The daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, Vi Liu has never quite fit into her Midwestern college town. Now at twenty-three, after getting dumped and dropping out of college, Vi works as a front desk attendant at a hotel where she refills cucumber water samovars and fends off overtures of friendship from her bubbly blond coworker, Rachel. But when Vi decides to accompany Rachel to a local drag show, her life changes forever. In the alley outside the bar, next to a trash can, is a blob with beady black eyes. Unable to leave it behind, Vi picks up the creature and, in a moment of drunken desperation, takes it home with her.

As her pet blob becomes sentient, Vi realizes it obeys her commands and she decides to mold the blob into her ideal partner. She feeds it sugary cereal and a stream of pop culture, and soon the creature transforms into a movie-star handsome white man. But as Vi's desire to be loved unconditionally threatens to spiral out of control, she is forced to confront her lonely childhood, the ex-boyfriend who has unfriended her, and the racial marginalization that has defined her relationships. Ultimately, Vi embarks on a journey of self-discovery and learns that it's impossible to control those you love.

Blending the familiar with the fantastical, BLOB tells a witty, heartfelt story of what it means to be human.

'An inventive, utterly unique debut'
Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light]]> 256 Maggie Su 0063358646 Sarah 4 3.43 2025 Blob: A Love Story
author: Maggie Su
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
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review:
super quick and engaging read! what a weird little book � and i still don’t know if the blob was ever real or just the friend we made along the way?? i do wish there was slightly more depth to the book, but i also acknowledge the structure of the book didn’t allow for that and that was the purpose. very impressive for a debut novel!
]]> The Book of George 203579186 From the author of the critically acclaimed Laura & Emma comes a The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. for our times: Kate Greathead's razor-sharp but big-hearted excavation of millennial masculinity, The Book of George.

If you haven’t had the misfortune of dating a George, you know someone who has. He’s a young man brimming with potential but incapable of following through; noncommittal to his long-suffering girlfriend, Jenny; distant from but still reliant on his mother; funny one minute, sullenly brooding the next. Here, Kate Greathead paints one particular, unforgettable George in a series of droll and surprisingly poignant snapshots of his life over two decades.

And yet, it’s hard not to root for George at least a little. Beneath his cynicism is a reservoir of fondness for Jenny’s valiant willingness to put up with him. Each demonstration of his flaws is paired with a self-eviscerating comment. No one is more disappointed in him than himself (except maybe Jenny and his mother). As hilarious as it is astute and singular as it is universal, The Book of George is a deft, unexpectedly moving portrait of one man � but also countless others.]]> 288 Kate Greathead 1250351022 Sarah 0 currently-reading 3.42 2024 The Book of George
author: Kate Greathead
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> After Life 211494315
"Forman is a master at making her readers fall in love—with a girl whose life is over, with a community of people in a small town who are barely surviving her loss, and with the incredible, surprising way everyone's stories knit together into a heartbreaking and hopeful whole." —E. Lockhart, author of We Were Liars and Genuine Fraud

One spring afternoon after school, Amber arrives home on her bike. It’s just another perfectly normal day. But when Amber’s mom sees her, she screams.

Because Amber died seven years ago, hit by a car while on the very same bicycle s’s inexplicably riding now.

This return doesn’t only impact Amber. Her sister, Melissa, now seven years older, must be a new kind of sibling to Amber. Amber’s estranged parents are battling over her. And the changes ripple farther and farther Amber’s friends, boyfriend, and even people she met only once have been deeply affected by her life and death. In the midst of everyone’s turmoil, Amber is struggling with herself. What kind of person was she? How and why was she given this second chance?

This magnificent tour de force by acclaimed author Gayle Forman brilliantly explores the porous veil between life and death, examines the impact that one person can have on the world, and celebrates life in all its beautiful complexity.]]> 272 Gayle Forman 0063346141 Sarah 0 to-read 3.61 2025 After Life
author: Gayle Forman
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> The Seers 214919127 With echoes of Zora Neale Hurston and Clarice Lispector, Sulaiman Addonia turns from the broader immigration narrative of land and nations to look closely at the erotic and intimate lives of asylum seekers.

Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, The Seers chronicles the first weeks of a young Eritrean refugee in London. As Hannah grapples with her own agency in a strange country, her sexual encounters become an unapologetic expression of self—a defiant cry against the endless bureaucracy of immigration.

In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of a life being burned up in search of refuge. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the UK asylum system, the West is both savior and abuser, seeking always to shape her, but never succeeding in suppressing her voice.]]> 232 Sulaiman Addonia 1913513513 Sarah 0 to-read 4.10 2024 The Seers
author: Sulaiman Addonia
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> Piranesi 50202953
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.]]> 272 Susanna Clarke 163557563X Sarah 0 to-read 4.22 2020 Piranesi
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> If We Were Villains 30319086
As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.]]> 354 M.L. Rio 125009528X Sarah 5 staring at the wall 4.11 2017 If We Were Villains
author: M.L. Rio
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
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staring at the wall
]]> Good Girl 195644142
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.]]> 368 Aria Aber Sarah 0 to-read 3.73 2025 Good Girl
author: Aria Aber
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> Madonna in a Fur Coat 27793819 The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.



'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.'

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul.



'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian]]> 168 Sabahattin Ali 014198127X Sarah 3 4.19 1943 Madonna in a Fur Coat
author: Sabahattin Ali
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1943
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder]]> 39899253 Scattered Minds explodes the myth of attention deficit disorder as genetically based � and offers real hope and advice for children and adults who live with the condition.

Gabor Maté is a revered physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry and psychology � and himself has ADD. With wisdom gained through years of medical practice and research, Scattered Minds is a must-read for parents � and for anyone interested how experiences in infancy shape the biology and psychology of the human brain.

Scattered Minds:
- Demonstrates that ADD is not an inherited illness, but a reversible impairment and developmental delay
- Explains that in ADD, circuits in the brain whose job is emotional self-regulation and attention control fail to develop in infancy � and why
- Shows how ‘distractibility� is the psychological product of life experience
- Allows parents to understand what makes their ADD children tick, and adults with ADD to gain insights into their emotions and behaviours
- Expresses optimism about neurological development even in adulthood
- Presents a programme of how to promote this development in both children and adults]]> 368 Gabor Maté 1785042211 Sarah 0 to-read 4.28 1999 Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder
author: Gabor Maté
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> Summer in the City 216406487 From #1New York Timesbestselling author Alex Aster comes her adult debut novelSummer in the City—a swoony, fast-paced rom-com set in New York City in which a screenwriter and a sexy tech CEO go from lovers to enemies and back to lovers again�

Twenty-seven-year-old screenwriter Elle has the chance of a lifetime to write a big-budget movie set in New York City. The only problem? S’s had writer’s block for months, and her screenplay is due at the end of the summer.

In a desperate attempt at inspiration, Elle ends up back in the city she swore she would never return to, in an apartment she could never afford (floor-to-ceiling windows, skyline views, and a new coffee shop to haunt included). It’s the perfect place to write her screenplay…until she realizes her new neighbor is tech “Billionaire Bachelor� Parker Warren, her stairwell hookup from two years ago. It’s been a lovers-to-enemies situation ever since.

When seeing him again turns into a full night of hate-fueled writing, Elle realizes her enemy/twisted muse might just be the key to finishing her screenplay... if she can stand being around her polar opposite. She writes anonymously, and ’s on the cover of every business magazine. He frequents fancy red carpeted events, and she doesn’t like leaving her emotional support five block radius.

One summer. One wall apart. He needs to fake a buzzy relationship during his company’s precarious acquisition. She needs to write a movie around a list of NYC locations. Both need a break from their unrelenting schedules, and a chance to rediscover the skyscraper glimmering, pizza crusted, sunlit charms of the city.

Summers always end, and so will this agreement. It’s all pretend. Promise.

Until it isn’t.]]> 300 Alex Aster 0063411687 Sarah 0 to-read 3.98 2025 Summer in the City
author: Alex Aster
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
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]]> The New Internationals 214339555 A stunning historical novel of post-war Paris that interweaves a coming-of-age story, a cross-cultural romance, and a portrait of the international youth at a definitive moment in contemporary history

Paris, 1947. The city, recovering from the war, is brimming with young international students � African, Indochinese, Arab, as well as American and French � balancing on the precipice of a new world. Cecile Rosenbaum, a young Jewish girl quickly developing her own intellectual and political ideals, meets Minette � a feisty, French-born girl of Senegalese descent � on the bus to a Communist Youth Conference. There, she meets and begins to fall in love with Seb, who arrived from West Africa with his sister at just seven years old.

As Seb toils for the exams that will permit him to study French architecture at the Parisian university Beaux-Arts, he also begins to dig into his roots in Dahomey, the West African kingdom where he came from. Cecile struggles at her job at the Louvre, clashes with her white, Jewish family, and reckons with her memories of a childhood under Nazi occupation and her fierce dedication to her new political ideologies. Seb and Cecile find themselves entangled, and along the course of the novel they lose and find each other again � in the corners of jazz clubs, at a Louis Armstrong concert, in the square where Seb’s exam scores will be posted, and, finally, at a protest that turns shockingly violent.

Nuanced, powerful, and sharply realized, The New Internationals is a brilliant work of historical fiction that celebrates the awakening of the post-colonial movements of the 20th century and international youth population in Paris who rose up � and came together � in the beginnings of a vibrant political moment.]]> 304 David Wright Faladé 0802164064 Sarah 0 to-read 3.24 The New Internationals
author: David Wright Faladé
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.24
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> Glorious Exploits 127278133 An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.]]> 304 Ferdia Lennon 1250893690 Sarah 0 to-read 4.15 2024 Glorious Exploits
author: Ferdia Lennon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> Archive of Unknown Universes 219838837 From the author ofThere Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, a piercing debut novel following two families in alternative timelines of the Salvadoran civil war—a stunning exploration of the mechanisms of fate, the gravity of the past, and the endurance of love.

“An important voice in U.S. fiction. Ruben Reyes Jr. is a wonder.� —Héctor Tobar

Cambridge, 2018.Ana and Luis’s relationship is on the rocks, despite their many similarities, including their mothers who both fled El Salvador during the war. In her search for answers, and against her best judgement, Ana uses The Defractor, an experimental device that allows users to peek into alternate versions of their lives. What she sees leads her and Luis on a quest through Havana and San Salvador to uncover the family histories they are desperate to know, eager to learn if what might have been could fix what is.

Havana, 1978. The Salvadoran war is brewing, and Neto, a young revolutionary with a knack for forging government papers, meets Rafael at a meeting for the People's Revolutionary Army. The two form an intense and forbidden love, shedding their fake names and revealing themselves to each other inside the covert world of their activism. When their work separates them, they begin to exchange weekly letters, but soon, as the devastating war rages on, forces beyond their control threaten to pull them apart forever.

Ruben Reyes Jr.’s debut novel is an epic, genre-bending journey through inverted worlds—one where war ends with a peace treaty, and one where it ends with a decisive victory by the Salvadoran government. What unfolds is a stunning story of displacement and belonging, of loss and love. It’s both a daring imagining of what might have been and a powerful reckoning of our past.]]> 288 Ruben Reyes Jr. 0063336316 Sarah 0 to-read 4.36 2025 Archive of Unknown Universes
author: Ruben Reyes Jr.
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 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 Sarah 0 to-read 3.81 2025 Deep Cuts
author: Holly Brickley
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Watch Me (Shatter Me: The New Republic, #1)]]> 216364822 Lose yourself in this exhilarating return to the #1 global bestselling Shatter Me universe, the first book in a new series set ten years after the fall of The Reestablishment.

James Anderson had a plan. Or half of one. All that matters is that he managed to do what his older brother, the famous Aaron Warner Anderson, never did: infiltrate Ark Island, the last refuge of The Reestablishment. In the past decade no outsider has breached the stronghold of the authoritarian regime, but James is in. In a prison cell, sure, but as far as James is concerned, a win is a win.

It’s been ten years since the fall of The Reestablishment. Ten years since the notorious duo � Juliette Ferrars and Aaron Warner Anderson � led a worldwide rebellion and established the New Republic of the West. But after a decade of unsettling quiet, The Reestablishment is ready to make a devastating move, and they have the perfect person for the job.

Rosabelle Wolff had a plan. She always has a plan. On Ark Island, where constant surveillance is packaged as security, even emotions must be experienced with caution. A trained assassin, her every movement is monitored by synthetic intelligence—and when s’s given an order to kill, she never hesitates.

Brimming with pulse-pounding action and torturous romance, Watch Me is an explosive journey through a dystopian landscape where enemies-to-lovers has never felt more impossible. Step into a beloved and breathtaking world that demands an answer to a desperate question�

Who are we when no one is watching?]]> 368 Tahereh Mafi 0063419009 Sarah 0 to-read 4.47 2025 Watch Me (Shatter Me: The New Republic, #1)
author: Tahereh Mafi
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> Martyr! 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

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

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Sarah 5 i mean. wow. 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/13
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i mean. wow.
]]> The Price of Salt 52258 The Price of Salt tells the riveting story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by an erotic epiphany - the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. Therese begins to stalk the alluring suburban housewife, who is trapped in a marriage as stultifying as Therese's job. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol in a choice between her daughter and her lover.]]> 262 Claire Morgan 0393325997 Sarah 0 to-read 4.03 1952 The Price of Salt
author: Claire Morgan
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> The Bones Beneath My Skin 211004023 A spine-tingling thriller by New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune, about a 10-year-old girl with an impossible power, her father, and an unlikely stranger, who come together to confront the dangerous forces that want her at all costs. A strange story of family, love, comets, and bacon. Perfect for fans of Stranger Things.

In the spring of 1995, Nate Cartwright has lost everything: his parents are dead, his older brother wants nothing to do with him, and he's been fired from his job as a journalist in Washington DC. With nothing left to lose, he returns to his family's summer cabin outside the small mountain town of Roseland, Oregon to try and find some sense of direction. The cabin should be empty. It's not. Inside is a man named Alex. And with him is an extraordinary little girl who calls herself Artemis Darth Vader. Artemis, who isn't exactly as she appears.

Soon it becomes clear that Nate must make a choice: let himself drown in the memories of his past, or fight for a future he never thought possible. Because the girl is special. And forces are descending upon them who want nothing more than to control her.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 416 T.J. Klune 1250890438 Sarah 0 to-read 4.13 2018 The Bones Beneath My Skin
author: T.J. Klune
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> Fresh Water for Flowers 57221112 A #1 best-seller in France and in Italy, where it was dubbed Italy’s favorite “lockdown novel,� Fresh Water for Flowers is an intimately told story about a woman who defiantly believes in happiness, despite it all.

Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Her life is lived to the predictable rhythms of the often funny, always moving confidences that casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues share with her. Violette’s routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of Julien Sole—local police chief—who has come to scatter the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. It soon becomes clear that Julien’s inexplicable gesture is intertwined with Violette’s own complicated past.]]> 483 Valérie Perrin 1609456769 Sarah 2 4.28 2018 Fresh Water for Flowers
author: Valérie Perrin
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> <![CDATA[A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2)]]> 49003616 An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.

The Carls disappeared the same way they appeared, in an instant. While they were on Earth, they caused confusion and destruction without ever lifting a finger. Well, that’s not exactly true. Part of their maelstrom was the sudden viral fame and untimely death of April May: a young woman who stumbled into Carl’s path, giving them their name, becoming their advocate, and putting herself in the middle of an avalanche of conspiracy theories.

Months later, the world is as confused as ever. Andy has picked up April’s mantle of fame, speaking at conferences and online about the world post-Carl; Maya, ravaged by grief, begins to follow a string of mysteries that she is convinced will lead her to April; and Miranda infiltrates a new scientific operation . . . one that might have repercussions beyond anyone’s comprehension.

As they each get further down their own paths, a series of clues arrive—mysterious books that seem to predict the future and control the actions of their readers; unexplained internet outages; and more—which seem to suggest April may be very much alive. In the midst of the gang's possible reunion is a growing force, something that wants to capture our consciousness and even control our reality.

A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is the bold and brilliant follow-up to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. It’s a fast-paced adventure that is also a biting social commentary, asking hard, urgent questions. How will we live online? What powers over our lives are we giving away for free? Who has the right to change the world forever? And how do we find comfort in an increasingly isolated world?]]> 452 Hank Green 152474347X Sarah 0 to-read 4.23 2020 A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2)
author: Hank Green
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> For She Is Wrath 222407127
Dania has been betrayed by her lover and falsely imprisoned for a crime she didn't commit. She's counting down the days until she can exact her revenge, when a fellow prisoner offers a chance at escape and the keys to a dangerous jinn magic.

Armed with a brand new identity and all the power she could want, Dania enacts a plan to bring down those who cheated her and her family. But when the one person standing in her way is the very man who signed her life away, retribution becomes a complicated game of cat and mouse.

Because betrayal isn't simple and revenge certainly isn't easy, not when your heart is involved.]]> 396 Emily Varga Sarah 0 to-read 3.73 2024 For She Is Wrath
author: Emily Varga
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> Anna Karenina 15823480 Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author's own views and convictions.

Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch. As Rosemary Edmonds comments, 'He leaves the shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope to bring home the meaning of the brooding words following the title, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.]]> 964 Leo Tolstoy 0345803922 Sarah 0 to-read 4.11 1878 Anna Karenina
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1878
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil]]> 215020997 London, 1837.
Boston, 2019.

Three young women, their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories tangling like roots.

One grows high, and one grows deep, and one grows wild.

And all of them grow teeth.]]> 560 Victoria E. Schwab 1035064642 Sarah 0 to-read 4.38 2025 Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> Water Moon 211479192 A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.

On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.

Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it.

Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds.

But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.]]> 384 Samantha Sotto Yambao 0593724992 Sarah 0 to-read 3.82 2025 Water Moon
author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

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

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Sarah 0 to-read 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> Katabasis 210223811 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and s’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 400 R.F. Kuang Sarah 0 to-read 4.12 2025 Katabasis
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/25
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]]> <![CDATA[The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald]]> 1734596 Book by Fitzgerald, F. Scott 615 F. Scott Fitzgerald Sarah 5 4.23 1940 The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> 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 ’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 Sarah 4 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> In Our Time 4652
"In Our Time" provides key insights into Hemingway's later works.]]> 156 Ernest Hemingway Sarah 4 3.74 1924 In Our Time
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1924
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Letter to the Father / Brief an den Vater]]> 23995376
Franz Kafka wrote this letter to his father, Hermann Kafka, in November 1919. Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, relates that Kafka actually gave the letter to his mother to hand to his father, hoping it might renew a relationship that had lost itself in tension and frustration on both sides. But Kafka’s probing of the deep flaw in their relationship spared neither his father nor himself. He could not help seeing the failure of communication between father and son as another moment in the larger existential predicament depicted in so much of his work. Probably realizing the futility of her son’s gesture, Julie Kafka did not deliver the letter but instead returned it to its author.]]> 144 Franz Kafka 0805212663 Sarah 5 4.19 1919 Letter to the Father / Brief an den Vater
author: Franz Kafka
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1919
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> Diaries, 1910-1923 17686 These diaries cover the years 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka’s death at the age of forty. They provide a penetrating look into life in Prague and into Kafka’s accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped, and the woman he could not bring himself to marry, his sense of guilt, and his feelings of being an outcast. They offer an account of a life of almost unbearable intensity.




From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-13 translated from the German by Joseph Kresh
The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-23 translated from the German by Martin Greenberg with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt]]> 521 Franz Kafka 0805209069 Sarah 5 4.29 1949 Diaries, 1910-1923
author: Franz Kafka
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1949
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> Good Morning, Midnight 45894065 208 Jean Rhys 0393357805 Sarah 3 3.87 1939 Good Morning, Midnight
author: Jean Rhys
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1939
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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review:

]]> Save the Cat! Writes a Novel 32805475
Whether you’re writing your first novel or your seventeenth, Save the Cat! breaks down plot in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step method so you can write stories that resonate! This book can help you with any of the following:

Outlining a new novel
Revising an existing novel
Breaking out of the dreaded “writer’s block�
Fixing a “broken� novel
Reviewing a completed novel
Fleshing out/test driving a new idea to see if it “has legs�
Implementing feedback from agents and/or editors
Helping give constructive feedback to other writers

But above all else, SAVE THE CAT! WRITES A NOVEL will help you better understand the fundamentals and mechanics of plot, character transformation, and what makes a story work!]]> 320 Jessica Brody Sarah 5 4.49 2018 Save the Cat! Writes a Novel
author: Jessica Brody
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/21
date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> <![CDATA[F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing]]> 207718226 A collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s remarks on his craft, taken from his works and letters to friends and colleagues—an essential trove of advice for aspiring writers.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously decreed, “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever after.� Fitzgerald's own work has gone on to be reviewed and discussed for over one hundred years. His masterpiece The Great Gatsby brims with the passion and opulence that characterized the Jazz Age—a term Fitzgerald himself coined. These themes also characterized his life: Fitzgerald enlisted in the US army during World War I, leading him to meet his future wife, Zelda, while stationed in Alabama. Later, along with Ernest Hemingway and other American artist expats, he became part of the “Lost Generation� in Europe. Fitzgerald wrote books “to satisfy [his] own craving for a certain type of novel,� leading to modern American classics including Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned.

In this collection of excerpts from his books, articles, and personal letters to friends and peers, Fitzgerald illustrates the life of the writer in a timeless way.]]> 128 Larry W. Phillips 1668070367 Sarah 4 3.58 1985 F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing
author: Larry W. Phillips
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
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I was anticipating this book for some time and while I enjoyed it, i wish there were set explanations for what Fitzgerald was referring to / the conversation happening in regards to the advice he was giving. I enjoyed the conversations between his daughter and him the most, then between him and his editor, Max. Most of this book was good advice, and then rest, just praise for ernest hemingway, but at this point, are we surprised?
]]> <![CDATA[A Winter's Promise (The Mirror Visitor, #1)]]> 40969531
Ophelia lives on Anima, an ark where objects have souls. Beneath her worn scarf and thick glasses, the young girl hides the ability to read and communicate with the souls of objects, and the power to travel through mirrors. Her peaceful existence on the Ark of Anima is disrupted when she is promised in marriage to Thorn, from the powerful Dragon clan. Ophelia must leave her family and follow her fiancée to the floating capital on the distant Ark of the Pole. Why has she been chosen? Why must she hide her true identity? Though she doesn’t know it yet, she has become a pawn in a deadly plot.]]> 446 Christelle Dabos 1787701425 Sarah 5
i can't review this. i'm speechless. yeah sorry i have nothing to say. i have no words

a bajillion out of five stars.]]> 3.90 2013 A Winter's Promise (The Mirror Visitor, #1)
author: Christelle Dabos
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves:
review:
yeah besties i'm gonna be honest

i can't review this. i'm speechless. yeah sorry i have nothing to say. i have no words

a bajillion out of five stars.
]]> Pet Sematary 33124137 This is an alternate Cover Edition for ASIN: B00K3NEE56. When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son-and now an idyllic home. As a family, they've got it all...right down to the friendly car. But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth-more terrifying than death itself-and hideously more powerful. The Creeds are going to learn that sometimes dead is better.]]> 580 Stephen King Sarah 0 to-read 4.21 1983 Pet Sematary
author: Stephen King
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Nous 216017144
L’Instinct est irrépressible et sert le NOUS.

Mais si le jeune Goliath, un Protecteur fracassé, sauve des vies, c’est aussi parce qu’il rêve de devenir Saint. Claire, elle, cache derrière son Instinct de Confidente un secret qui pourrait faire vaciller tout le système. Dans un monde où la Bureaucratie Instinctive est impénétrable, et où les détracteurs du NOUS œuvrent dans l’ombre, une chose les relie : leurs certitudes vont bientôt voler en éclats.

Une dystopie fascinante par l’autrice de LA PASSE-MIROIR.]]> 576 Christelle Dabos 2075211809 Sarah 0 to-read 4.20 Nous
author: Christelle Dabos
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Museum of Innocence 6282753
So begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red.

It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie—a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, restaurant rituals, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay—until finally he breaks off his engagement to Sibel. But his resolve comes too late.

For eight years Kemal will find excuses to visit another Istanbul, that of the impoverished backstreets where Füsun, her heart now hardened, lives with her parents, and where Kemal discovers the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the television. His obsessive love will also take him to the demimonde of Istanbul film circles (where he promises to make Füsun a star), a scene of seedy bars, run-down cheap hotels, and small men with big dreams doomed to bitter failure. In his feckless pursuit, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress and his afflicted heart’s reactions: anger and impatience, remorse and humiliation, deluded hopes of recovery, and daydreams that transform Istanbul into a cityscape of signs and specters of his beloved, from whom now he can extract only meaningful glances and stolen kisses in cars, movie houses, and shadowy corners of parks. A last change to realize his dream will come to an awful end before Kemal discovers that all he finally can possess, certainly and eternally, is the museum he has created of his collection, this map of a society’s manners and mores, and of one man’s broken heart.

A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and of the mysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence also plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half Western and half traditional—its emergent modernity, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk’s greatest achievement.]]> 536 Orhan Pamuk 0307266761 Sarah 0 to-read 3.76 2008 The Museum of Innocence
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Conversations on Love 57028269 320 Natasha Lunn 0241448735 Sarah 0 to-read 4.23 2021 Conversations on Love
author: Natasha Lunn
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Bee Sting 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, ’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Sarah 0 to-read 3.92 2023 The Bee Sting
author: Paul Murray
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/16
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Sarah 0 to-read 4.47 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Nightmare Before Kissmas (Royals and Romance, #1)]]> 206101578 Red, White & Royal Blue meets The Nightmare Before Christmas in a sexy, quirky romcom where the golden-hearted Prince of Christmas falls for the totally off-limits Prince of Halloween.

Featuring beautiful ruby sprayed edges!

Nicholas “Coal� Claus used to love Christmas. Until his father, the reigning Santa, turned the holiday into a PR façade. Coal will do anything to escape the spectacle, including getting tangled in a drunken, supremely hot make- out session with a beautiful man behind a seedy bar one night.

But the heir to Christmas is soon commanded to do his duty: he will marry his best friend, Iris, the Easter Princess and his brother’s not-so-secret crush. A situation that has disaster written all over it.

Things go from bad to worse when a rival arrives to challenge Coal for the princess’s hand…and Coal comes face-to-face with his mysterious behind-the-bar hottie: Hex, the Prince of Halloween.

It’s a fake competition between two holiday princes who can’t keep their hands off each other over a marriage of convenience that no one wants. And it all leads to one of the sweetest, sexiest, messiest, most delightfully unforgettable love stories of the year.]]> 357 Sara Raasch 1250333199 Sarah 4 3.94 2024 The Nightmare Before Kissmas (Royals and Romance, #1)
author: Sara Raasch
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature's Most Intriguing Dedications]]> 5123801 A fascinating look at the stories behind the dedications of 50 literary classics.

Mary Shelley dedicated Frankenstein to her father, her greatest champion. Charlotte Brönte dedicated Jane Eyre to William Makepeace Thackeray for his enthusiastic review of the book's first edition. Dostoyevsky dedicated The Brothers Karamazov to his typist-turned-lover Anna Grigoyevna. And, as this collection's title indicates, F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated his masterpiece The Great Gatsby to his wife Zelda.

Often overlooked, a novel's dedication can say much about an author and his or her relationship to the person for whom the book was consecrated. Once Again to Zelda explores the dedications in fifty iconic books that are an intrinsic part of both literary and pop culture, shedding light on the author's psyche, as well as the social and historic context in which the book was first published.]]> 313 Marlene Wagman-Geller 0399534628 Sarah 4 3.32 2008 Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature's Most Intriguing Dedications
author: Marlene Wagman-Geller
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves:
review:
that man was NOT that attractive, miss plath
]]> Anoxia: A Novel 212808269 In this mesmerizing psychological novel, a strange job leads a widowed photographer down a rabbit hole where the line between past and present, and the living and the dead blurs.

What is our relationship with the dead? How do we remember them? What dark secrets do our images of them hold? How do we emerge from grief to face the time we have left?

Ten years after the tragic death of her husband, Dolores Ayala, owner of an old photography studio that has run out of clients, receives the most unusual assignment of her to take a portrait of a deceased person on the day of his funeral. Accepting it leads her to meet Clemente Artés, an eccentric old man obsessed with recovering the ancient tradition of photographing the dead. Under his guidance, Dolores will explore this forgotten practice, experience the slow time of the daguerreotype, and our need for images to remember those who are no longer there. She will also discover that some of them hold dark secrets that should never be revealed and, above all, that the dead never cease to move and sometimes pounce on the memory of the living.

Miguel Ángel Hernández has written a subtle, dazzling novel about the borders between life and death, about memory and guilt, about the past that stays with us and our constant search for air to breathe.]]> 304 Miguel Ángel Hernández 1635424585 Sarah 0 to-read 4.00 2023 Anoxia: A Novel
author: Miguel Ángel Hernández
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> At Dark, I Become Loathsome 210401293 From Eric LaRocca—Bram Stoker Award–nominated and Splatterpunk Award–winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke—comes At Dark, I Become Loathsome, a grim yet gentle, horrifying yet hopeful, intense tale of death, trauma, and love.

“If you’re reading this, you’ve likely thought that the world would be a better place without you.�

A single line of text, glowing in the darkness of the internet. Written by Ashley Lutin, who has often thought the same—and worse—in the years since his wife died and his young son disappeared. But the peace of the grave is not for him—it’s for those he can help. Ashley has constructed a peculiar ritual for those whose desire to die is at war with their yearning to live a better life.

Struggling to overcome his own endless grief, one night Ashley finds connection with Jinx—a potential candidate for Ashley’s next ritual—who spins a tale both revolting and fascinating. Thus begins a relationship that traps the two men in an ever-tightening spiral of painful revelations, where long-hidden secrets are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light.

Only through pain can we find healing. Only through death can we find new life.]]> 240 Eric LaRocca Sarah 2
upon looking at larocca’s other books, this seems to be a pattern. this book is disgusting and clearly for an audience that is certainly not me. it is also 100% lacking the horror element. not for me]]> 3.44 2025 At Dark, I Become Loathsome
author: Eric LaRocca
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
review:
what.

upon looking at larocca’s other books, this seems to be a pattern. this book is disgusting and clearly for an audience that is certainly not me. it is also 100% lacking the horror element. not for me
]]> <![CDATA[The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man: Essential Stories]]> 41807452 New translation of the best stories by one of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential writers

No one has captures the modern experience, its wild dreams, strange joys, its neuroses and boredom, better than Franz Kafka. His vision, with its absurdity and twisted humour, has lost none of its force or relevance today. This essential collection, newly selected and translated by Alexander Starritt, casts fresh light on Kafka's genius.

Alongside brutal depictions of violence and justice are jokes and deceptively slight, mysterious fables. These unforgettable pieces reflect the brilliance at the core of Franz Kafka, arguably most fully expressed within his short stories. Together they showcase a writer of unmatched imaginative depth, capable of expressing the most profound reality with a wry smile.]]> 192 Franz Kafka 1782274391 Sarah 4 3.83 The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man: Essential Stories
author: Franz Kafka
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
review:
i’m so convinced this brother just wrote his weird ass dreams down and called them stories
]]> <![CDATA[The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror]]> 195790562 These are the stories that haunt us

A cemetery full of the restless dead. A town so wicked it has already burned twice, with the breath of the third fire looming. A rural, isolated bridge with a terrifying monster waiting for the completion of its summoning ritual. A lake that allows the drowned to return, though they have been changed by the claws of death. These are the shadowed, liminal spaces where the curses and monsters lurk, refusing to be forgotten.

Hauntings, and a variety of horrifying secrets, lurk in the places we once called home. Written by New York Times bestselling, and other critically acclaimed, authors these stories shed a harsh light on the scariest tales we grew up with.]]> 272 Tori Bovalino Sarah 0 to-read 3.35 2022 The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror
author: Tori Bovalino
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Shady Hollow (Shady Hollow, #1)]]> 58735031 The first book in the Shady Hollow series, in which we are introduced to the village of Shady Hollow, a place where woodland creatures live together in harmony--until a curmudgeonly toad turns up dead and the local reporter has to solve the case.

Reporter Vera Vixen is a relative newcomer to Shady Hollow. The fox has a nose for news, so when she catches wind that the death might be a murder, she resolves to get to the bottom of the case, no matter where it leads. As she stirs up still waters, the fox exposes more than one mystery, and discovers that additional lives are in jeopardy.

Vera finds more to this town than she ever suspected. It seems someone in the Hollow will do anything to keep her from solving the murder, and soon it will take all of Vera's cunning and quickness to crack the case.

A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL.
]]> 222 Juneau Black 0593315715 Sarah 0 to-read 3.77 2015 Shady Hollow (Shady Hollow, #1)
author: Juneau Black
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Letters to a Young Poet 46199 Listy do mlodego poety 80 Rainer Maria Rilke 0486422453 Sarah 0 to-read 4.32 1929 Letters to a Young Poet
author: Rainer Maria Rilke
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1929
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Family 830985 329 Ba Jin 0881333735 Sarah 0 to-read 3.91 1933 Family
author: Ba Jin
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1933
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)]]> 50548197
A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) � until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets.

There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate� or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And beware of the monsters who lurk everywhere.

El is uniquely prepared for the school’s dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.]]> 320 Naomi Novik 0593128486 Sarah 0 to-read 3.93 2020 A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)
author: Naomi Novik
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> This Is Happiness 42972008
For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now � just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity � the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.

As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community � its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs � and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.]]> 400 Niall Williams 163557420X Sarah 0 to-read 4.18 2019 This Is Happiness
author: Niall Williams
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> Fervor 176442884 A chilling and unforgettable story of a close-knit Jewish family in London pushed to the brink when they suspect their daughter is a witch.

Hannah and Eric Rosenthal are devout Jews living in North London with their three children and Eric's father Yosef, a Holocaust survivor. Both intellectually gifted and deeply unconventional, the Rosenthals believe in the literal truth of the Old Testament and in the presence of God (and evil) in daily life. As Hannah prepares to publish a sensationalist account of Yosef's years in war-torn Europe—unearthing a terrible secret from his time in the camps—Elsie, her perfect daughter, starts to come undone. And then, in the wake of Yosef’s death, she disappears. When she returns, just as mysteriously as she left, she is altered in disturbing ways.

Witnessing the complete transformation of her daughter, Hannah begins to suspect that Elsie has delved too deep into the labyrinths of Jewish mysticism and gotten lost among shadows. But for Elsie's brother Tovyah, a brilliant but reclusive student struggling to find his place at Oxford, the truth is much simpler: his sister is the product of a dysfunctional family, obsessed with empty rituals, traditions, and unbridled ambition. But who is right? Is religion the cure for the disease or the disease itself? And how can they stop the darkness from engulfing Elsie completely?

Alive with both the bristling energy of a great campus novel and the unsettling, ever-shifting ground of a great horror tale, Fervor is at its heart a family story—where personal allegiances compete with obligations to history and to mysterious forces that offer both consolation and devastation.]]> 288 Toby Lloyd 166803333X Sarah 0 to-read 3.59 2024 Fervor
author: Toby Lloyd
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>