Vaibhav's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:03:40 -0700 60 Vaibhav's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Our City That Year 229069658 1917126115 Vaibhav 0 to-read 0.0 Our City That Year
author: Shree Geetanjali & Rockwell Daisy
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 0.0
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date added: 2025/04/22
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Palaver: A Novel 222376682 A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington.

In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in Houston, particularly his mother, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they’ve last seen each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.

Separated only by the son’s cat, Taro, the two of them bristle against each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life begins to steer them in unexpected directions� the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner, and the son to cautiously getting to know a new patron of the bar—the two of them begin to see each other more clearly. Sharing meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, both mother and son try the best they can to define where “home� really is—and whether they can find it even in each other.

Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington’s Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others.]]>
336 Bryan Washington 0374609071 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.77 Palaver: A Novel
author: Bryan Washington
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/21
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Great Big Beautiful Life 218559595 Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.]]>
432 Emily Henry Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.18 2025 Great Big Beautiful Life
author: Emily Henry
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/20
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<![CDATA[Tamil: The Best Stories Of Our Times]]> 223949811 The Best Stories of Our Times, edited by Perundevi, brings together twenty-two outstanding short stories published over the past three decades by some of the finest contemporary writers of Tamil fiction. Traversing Tamil Nadu and the Tamil diaspora, these stories capture a society's encounter with the modern world, as its people grapple with what is irreducibly human in themselves and others. Along the way, they unravel the subtle intricacies of life, illuminating various transitions, identities and interiorities. Absurd, agonizing, humorous and poignant, this landmark volume offers an exhilarating glimpse into Tamil literature today.


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318 Perundevi 9365698545 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.50 Tamil: The Best Stories Of Our Times
author: Perundevi
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.50
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
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Sucker Punch: Essays 211003937 The long-awaited follow-up from one of the most original and hilarious voices writing today.

Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her signature humor and fierce intelligence to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she’s had—with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself—all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.]]>
272 Scaachi Koul 1250270502 Vaibhav 0 currently-reading 4.03 2025 Sucker Punch: Essays
author: Scaachi Koul
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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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 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.51 2025 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
author: John Green
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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Night in Delhi 222264392 About the Book
Nervy, daring, properly transgressive, Night in Delhi is Indian fiction remade, with nothing to prove and nothing to lose.' —Jeet Thayil
There are no good people here. And perhaps no truly evil ones. A small-time thief and hustler and his lover and pimp, who is a rising star in Delhi's music scene. A lost American and acolyte of a so-called guru. A young woman who hopes to save herself by becoming a boss in one of India's new mafias. And everyone floating in a world of shades of grey.
In a devastating portrait, Ranbir Sidhu's Night in Delhi invites us into a city and its underworld where at any moment the ground might collapse beneath you.

About the Author
Ranbir Sidhu is the author of six books, including Dark Star, Deep Singh Blue and Good Indian Girls. He is a winner of a Pushcart Prize and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, among other awards, and his stories and essays are published worldwide. He lives in Greece.]]>
191 Ranbir Sidhu Vaibhav 5 3.86 Night in Delhi
author: Ranbir Sidhu
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: physical-shelf, queer-rep, favorites
review:
What a magnificent book. Must read!
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Poison Roots 23357026
Critical of traditional religious practices, he scorns symbols of his high caste roots, especially the rather orthodox, autocratic attitude of his father. To overcome the shackles of his orthodox Brahmin background, he seeks intellectual interaction with erudite elders as well as a group of young Communists in his college.

National award winning author Indira Parthasarathy has traced the journey of Kesavan, from being a disillusioned adolescent in a nascent nation, to one who accepts his destiny as a member of the educated upper caste. Etched with an idiom of everyday language along with shades of superior word-craft, this novel has a universal taste of the process of growing up.]]>
244 Indira Parthasarathy 9381506442 Vaibhav 0 to-read, indian-author-tbr 4.00 2006 Poison Roots
author: Indira Parthasarathy
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/12
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Heart Lamp: Selected Stories 205544315 Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters � the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost � that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.]]>
192 Banu Mushtaq 1916751164 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.58 Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
author: Banu Mushtaq
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.58
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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<![CDATA[Deviants: The Queer Family Chronicles]]> 225674519
Vivaan, a teenager in India’s silicon plateau, has discovered love on his smartphone. Intoxicating, boundary-breaking love. His parents know he is gay, and their support is something Vivaan can count on, but they don’t know what exactly their son gets up to in the online world.

For his uncle, born thirty years earlier, things were very different. Mambro’s life changed forever when he fell for a male classmate at a time when, and in a country where, the persecution of gay people was rife under a colonial-era law criminalising homosexuality.

And before Mambro came his uncle Sukumar, a young man hopelessly in love with another young man, but forced by social taboos to keep their relationship a secret at all costs. Sukumar would never live the life he yearned for, but his story would ignite and inspire his nephew and grand-nephew after him.

Bold and bracing, intimate and heartbreaking, Deviants examines the histories we inherit and the legacies we leave behind.]]>
304 Santanu Bhattacharya 9360454230 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.25 Deviants: The Queer Family Chronicles
author: Santanu Bhattacharya
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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Naked Lunch 24832260 Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined literature. A startling tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, its formal innovation, taboo subject matter, and virtuoso style have exerted a significant influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Will Self, as well as on music, film, and the media generally. This restored edition incorporates Burroughs’s notes on the text, several essays he wrote about the book, and an appendix of new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a definitive and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.]]> 289 William S. Burroughs Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.28 1959 Naked Lunch
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1959
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
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Lohe Ka Baksa Aur Bandook 63033823 168 Mithilesh Priyadarshi 9392186754 Vaibhav 0 3.67 Lohe Ka Baksa Aur Bandook
author: Mithilesh Priyadarshi
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.67
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/30
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Nova Scotia House 218583908 ‘A work of genius� Philip Hoare
‘One of the best things I’ve read in many many years� Hilton Als
'Beautifully provocative ... the most compelling exploration of life, death, love and resistance that I've read for a very long time' Eimear McBride

A story of loss and grief, sex and love, and refusing to relinquish dreams

He said he would understand if it was too much for me, that I could leave him, that I was young, I should be living, I said to him, I am living.

Johnny Grant faces stark life decisions. Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They fell in love and made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today � but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.

As Johnny’s mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry’s of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community. Slowly, he realizes what he must do next—and attempts to restore ways of being that could be lost forever.

Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life. Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original, it marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction, and a writer with a liberating new story to tell.
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224 Charlie Porter 1802067450 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.13 2025 Nova Scotia House
author: Charlie Porter
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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<![CDATA[Beautiful World, Where Are You]]> 60127557
'Beautiful World, Where Are You is Rooney's best novel.' THE TIMES



*The Sunday Times and Global number one bestseller*
*Winner of Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards*
*A Book of the Year in The Times, the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Financial Times*

'A tour de force.' Anne Enright, Guardian

'Rooney's best novel yet.' Brandon Taylor, New York Times

'Get ready to have your heart broken all over again.' Red

'The book moved me to tears more than once.' The Times

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they worry about sex and friendship and the times they live in. Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?]]>
337 Sally Rooney Vaibhav 4 women-author 3.65 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You
author: Sally Rooney
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/05
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves: women-author
review:
Don't expect it to be like Normal People when you go in to read. It isn't like it. It's a beautiful book though. Give it a go for sure.
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Our City That Year 216269091 From the International Booker Prize-winning author-translator duo of Tomb of Sand, a powerful, kaleidoscopic novel about a fractured society, loosely based on the gathering violence that led to the demolition of the Babri Mosque by religious extremists in 1992.

“That year, in our city, Hindus abandoned their pacifism. We’ve run out of other cheeks to turn, they proclaimed. We’re helpless! they screamed. They climbed atop mosques and waved the flag of Devi from the prongs of tridents proclaiming, What was done to us will be visited on them! Wrong shall be answered with wrong!

In an unnamed city in India, violence is erupting between Hindus and Muslims, each side viewing the other with suspicion, rage, and blame. As their identities sharpen, friends and colleagues turn against each other. Hospital beds fill up and classrooms empty out. Curfews are imposed. Residents flee en masse.

Three intellectuals find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and fear. Shruti, a creative writer, spends her time writing and rewriting the same sentence. Hanif is sidelined by his academic department for his own beliefs. And Sharad finds it increasingly difficult to connect with Hanif, his childhood friend. The only one left to bear witness is the novel’s unnamed narrator, who hurries to transcribe everything that’s happening.

Explosive, raw, and uncompromising, Our City That Year unfolds in a time of rising uncertainty and dread, when nothing will go back to being as it was before. Twenty-five years after its original publication in Hindi, Shree’s clarion call to bear witness to the toxic ideology of religious nationalism is timelier than ever, speaking to the growing divisions across global borders.

Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell]]>
432 Geetanjali Shree 0063385708 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.50 1998 Our City That Year
author: Geetanjali Shree
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/10
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)]]> 24233708 343 Hank Green 1524743453 Vaibhav 4 queer-rep, favorites 4.05 2018 An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)
author: Hank Green
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/17
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: queer-rep, favorites
review:

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Evenings and Weekends 213822616 Summer in London stops for no-one. Not the half-naked boozers, stoners, and cruisers, the hen parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried fags. It’s June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city’s parks, beer gardens and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive.

Everyone but Maggie. She’s 30, pregnant and broke. Faced with moving back to the town she fought to escape, she’s wondering if having a baby with boyfriend Ed will be the last spontaneous act of her life. Ed, meanwhile, is trying to run from his past with Maggie’s best friend Phil and harbouring secret dreams of his own.

Phil hates his office job and is living for the weekend, while falling for his housemate, Keith. But there’s a problem: Keith has a boyfriend and there might not be room for three people in the relationship. Then there’s Rosaleen, Phil’s mother, who’s tired of feeling like a side character in her own life. She’s just been diagnosed with cancer and is travelling to London to tell Phil, if she can ever get hold of him.

As Saturday night approaches, all their lives are set to change forever. It’s the hottest summer on record and the weekend is about to begin…]]>
352 Oisín McKenna 0008604177 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.03 2024 Evenings and Weekends
author: Oisín McKenna
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: to-read
review:

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Regarding the Pain of Others 18915097 A brilliant, clear-eyed new consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects

Watching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity--a daily commonplace in our "society of spectacle." But are viewers inured -or incited--to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock?

In her first full-scale investigation of the role of imagery in our culture since her now-classic book On Photography defined the terms of the debate twenty-five years ago, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and Dachau and Auschwitz to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001.

As John Berger wrote when On Photography was first published, "All future discussions or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book." Sontag's new book, a startling reappraisal of the intersection of "information", "news," "art," and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster, will be equally essential. It will forever alter our thinking about the uses and meanings of images in our world.]]>
99 Susan Sontag 1466853573 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.26 2003 Regarding the Pain of Others
author: Susan Sontag
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky]]> 31658486
In “Who Will Greet You at Home,� a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In “Wild,� a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person" - with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.

Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human,What It Means When a Man Falls from the Skyheralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.]]>
240 Lesley Nneka Arimah 0735211043 Vaibhav 5
A collection of 12 stories, Lesley Nneka's debut is a masterpiece in the genre. Mostly set in Nigeria and U.S. , these stories span through the themes ranging from dystopia, parallel future, coming of age stories, science fiction, women empowerment and daily life of common people.

Nneka has been described as "a skillful storyteller who can render entire relationships with just a few lines of dialogue" (Star Tribune) and rightfully so. The stories dwell on human relationships and emotions of grief and pain.

Her writing is aware of the surroundings the stories are set in and her characters are realistic to the core, moreover the readers find themselves flabbergasted at the end of each story and the pull back to reality is rather harsh, as for a few moments it feels that the stories are the only reality possible.

Mostly every story has the flair to be a whole novel in itself but the readers are never disappointed at the end, as when and where ever the story ends, a deep feeling of satisfaction is swept over the readers and though left in awe and amazement of the story, reader is also bound to feel more fulfilled than before.

It's the most beautiful collection of stories I had the good fortune of reading after Chaya Bhuvaneswar's White Dancing Elephants and I would like to recommend it to each and everyone who wishes to be swept away by a flood of strong emotions and a feeling of restless satisfaction.

I give it 4.5/5 ⭐]]>
4.07 2017 What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
author: Lesley Nneka Arimah
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2019/10/20
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: favorites, women-author, queer-rep
review:
� What it means when a man falls from the sky" is the brilliant debut story collection by 'Lesley Nneka Arimah' , a Nigerian - American author who has the power to draw human emotions with her truly remarkable writing.

A collection of 12 stories, Lesley Nneka's debut is a masterpiece in the genre. Mostly set in Nigeria and U.S. , these stories span through the themes ranging from dystopia, parallel future, coming of age stories, science fiction, women empowerment and daily life of common people.

Nneka has been described as "a skillful storyteller who can render entire relationships with just a few lines of dialogue" (Star Tribune) and rightfully so. The stories dwell on human relationships and emotions of grief and pain.

Her writing is aware of the surroundings the stories are set in and her characters are realistic to the core, moreover the readers find themselves flabbergasted at the end of each story and the pull back to reality is rather harsh, as for a few moments it feels that the stories are the only reality possible.

Mostly every story has the flair to be a whole novel in itself but the readers are never disappointed at the end, as when and where ever the story ends, a deep feeling of satisfaction is swept over the readers and though left in awe and amazement of the story, reader is also bound to feel more fulfilled than before.

It's the most beautiful collection of stories I had the good fortune of reading after Chaya Bhuvaneswar's White Dancing Elephants and I would like to recommend it to each and everyone who wishes to be swept away by a flood of strong emotions and a feeling of restless satisfaction.

I give it 4.5/5 �
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<![CDATA[One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter]]> 34500386 For readers of Mindy Kaling, Jenny Lawson and Roxane Gay, a debut collection of fierce and funny essays about growing up the daughter of Indian immigrants in Canada, "a land of ice and casual racism," by the irreverent, hilarious cultural observer and incomparable rising star, Scaachi Koul.

In One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi deploys her razor-sharp humour to share her fears, outrages and mortifying experiences as an outsider growing up in Canada. Her subjects range from shaving her knuckles in grade school, to a shopping trip gone horribly awry, to dealing with internet trolls, to feeling out of place at an Indian wedding (as an Indian woman), to parsing the trajectory of fears and anxieties that pressed upon her immigrant parents and bled down a generation. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of colour, where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision or outright scorn. Where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, forcing her to confront questions about gender dynamics, racial tensions, ethnic stereotypes and her father’s creeping mortality—all as she tries to find her feet in the world.
With a clear eye and biting wit, Scaachi Koul explores the absurdity of a life steeped in misery. And through these intimate, wise and laugh-out-loud funny dispatches, a portrait of a bright new literary voice emerges.


From the Hardcover edition.]]>
288 Scaachi Koul 038568536X Vaibhav 4 3.97 2017 One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
author: Scaachi Koul
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2019/11/07
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: women-author, favorites, non-fiction
review:

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Giovanni’s Room 18915870
In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.]]>
178 James Baldwin 0345806573 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.36 1956 Giovanni’s Room
author: James Baldwin
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

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For Every One 36578750 New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist Jason Reynolds’s rallying cry to the dreamers of the world.

For Every One is just that: for every one. For every one person. For every one dream. But especially for every one kid. The kids who dream of being better than they are. Kids who dream of doing more than they almost dare to dream. Kids who are like Jason Reynolds, a self-professed dreamer. Jason does not claim to know how to make dreams come true; he has, in fact, been fighting on the front line of his own battle to make his own dreams a reality. He expected to make it when he was sixteen. Then eighteen. Then twenty-five. Now, some of those expectations have been realized. But others, the most important ones, lay ahead, and a lot of them involve kids, how to inspire them. All the kids who are scared to dream, or don’t know how to dream, or don’t dare to dream because they’ve NEVER seen a dream come true. Jason wants kids to know that dreams take time. They involve countless struggles. But no matter how many times a dreamer gets beat down, the drive and the passion and the hope never fully extinguish—because just having the dream is the start you need, or you won’t get anywhere anyway, and that is when you have to take a leap of faith.

A pitch perfect graduation, baby, or love my kid gift.]]>
110 Jason Reynolds 1481486268 Vaibhav 4 poetry 4.35 2018 For Every One
author: Jason Reynolds
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/07/01
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: poetry
review:

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A Thousand Mornings 17290980
In A THOUSAND MORNINGS, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life’s work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. In these pages, Oliver shares the wonder of dawn, the grace of animals, and the transformative power of attention. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her adored dog, Percy, she is ever patient in her observations and open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments.

Our most precious chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver opens our eyes to the nature within, to its wild and its quiet. With startling clarity, humor, and kindness, A THOUSAND MORNINGS explores the mysteries of our daily experience.]]>
97 Mary Oliver 1101595973 Vaibhav 3 women-author, poetry 4.31 2012 A Thousand Mornings
author: Mary Oliver
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2019/08/14
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: women-author, poetry
review:

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Cobalt Blue 23007897 But he’s also a man of mystery. He has no last name. He has no family, no friends, no history and no plans for the future.
The siblings Tanay and Anuja are smitten by him. He overturns their lives. And when he vanishes, he breaks their hearts.
Elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare, Cobalt Blue is a tale of rapturous love and fierce heartbreak told with tenderness and unsparing clarity.]]>
237 Sachin Kundalkar Vaibhav 5
With these lines opens this heart-wrenching novel of longing and desire. A man arrives as a paying guest in the Joshi family and both Tanay and Anuja end up falling in love with him. When he arrived, he was the ever attractive flame and Tanay & Anuja were the moths prone to touch him despite the obvious harm.

“I have only met men like you in novels, men who lived their own idiosyncrasies.�

The book starts after he has gone, while Tanay tries to pick the pieces, Anuja recedes into seclusion and silence. Both in the same boat, yet so far away.

Originally written in Marathi, Cobalt Blue is Sachin Kundalkar's one and only novel. Beautifully translated to English by Jerry Pinto, the novel is divided into two parts, narrated by Tanay and Anuja respectively.

“I took my clothes out of the cupboard and looked at myself in the mirror. I dropped the wet towel. I took a long, clear-eyed look at myself. That I was different was nowhere apparent.�

The novel very empathetically and sensitively portrays gay and bisexual characters. It talks about familial relationships, love, sex, longing, desire and trauma of being betrayed in love. The writing is simple yet brilliant. Lyrical but not to the extent of becoming poetry, it makes you feel what the characters are going through.

I haven't read the original, but the translation leaves no stones unturned, the writing will make you long for chai, hot & humind summer afternoons, old music, homemade food and somebody's touch.

“I felt the kind of peace you feel when you come in from a hot afternoon and pour cold water over your feet.�

I first read this book in 2018 and have since re-read it more than twice, if you haven't read this book yet, then you must change that now. Don't sit on this one, just go for it. You won't be disappointed. I wish there was a sequel or a companion novel where we could get the perspective of the paying guest too.]]>
3.98 2006 Cobalt Blue
author: Sachin Kundalkar
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2018/12/29
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: favorites, queer-rep, translated-books
review:
“That you should not be here when something we've both wanted happens is no new thing for me. Today too, as always, you're not here.�

With these lines opens this heart-wrenching novel of longing and desire. A man arrives as a paying guest in the Joshi family and both Tanay and Anuja end up falling in love with him. When he arrived, he was the ever attractive flame and Tanay & Anuja were the moths prone to touch him despite the obvious harm.

“I have only met men like you in novels, men who lived their own idiosyncrasies.�

The book starts after he has gone, while Tanay tries to pick the pieces, Anuja recedes into seclusion and silence. Both in the same boat, yet so far away.

Originally written in Marathi, Cobalt Blue is Sachin Kundalkar's one and only novel. Beautifully translated to English by Jerry Pinto, the novel is divided into two parts, narrated by Tanay and Anuja respectively.

“I took my clothes out of the cupboard and looked at myself in the mirror. I dropped the wet towel. I took a long, clear-eyed look at myself. That I was different was nowhere apparent.�

The novel very empathetically and sensitively portrays gay and bisexual characters. It talks about familial relationships, love, sex, longing, desire and trauma of being betrayed in love. The writing is simple yet brilliant. Lyrical but not to the extent of becoming poetry, it makes you feel what the characters are going through.

I haven't read the original, but the translation leaves no stones unturned, the writing will make you long for chai, hot & humind summer afternoons, old music, homemade food and somebody's touch.

“I felt the kind of peace you feel when you come in from a hot afternoon and pour cold water over your feet.�

I first read this book in 2018 and have since re-read it more than twice, if you haven't read this book yet, then you must change that now. Don't sit on this one, just go for it. You won't be disappointed. I wish there was a sequel or a companion novel where we could get the perspective of the paying guest too.
]]>
The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock 37912337
"Historical fiction at its finest, combining myth and legend with the brutal realities of the past. . . . Comparisons will be drawn to the works of contemporary authors Sarah Waters and Michael Faber . . . butThe Mermaid and Mrs Hancockhas more in common with the novels of Dickens and Austen."—Irish Times

In 1780s London, a prosperous merchant finds his quiet life upended when he unexpectedly receives a most unusual creature—and meets a most extraordinary woman—in this much-lauded, atmospheric debut that examines our capacity for wonder, obsession, and desire with all the magnetism, originality, and literary magic of The Essex Serpent.

One September evening in 1785, Jonah Hancock hears an urgent knocking on his front door near the docks of London. The captain of one of Jonah’s trading vessels is waiting eagerly on the front step, bearing shocking news. On a voyage to the Far East, he sold the Jonah’s ship for something rare and far more a mermaid. Jonah is stunned—the object the captain presents him is brown and wizened, as small as an infant, with vicious teeth and claws, and a torso that ends in the tail of a fish. It is also dead.

As gossip spreads through the docks, coffee shops, parlors and brothels, all of London is curious to see this marvel in Jonah Hancock’s possession. Thrust from his ordinary existence, somber Jonah finds himself moving from the city’s seedy underbelly to the finest drawing rooms of high society. At an opulent party, he makes the acquaintance of the coquettish Angelica Neal, the most desirable woman he has ever laid eyes on—and a shrewd courtesan of great accomplishment. This meeting sparks a perilous liaison that steers both their lives onto a dangerous new course as they come to realize that priceless things often come at the greatest cost.

Imogen Hermes Gowar, Britain’s most-heralded new literary talent, makes her debut with this spellbinding novel of a merchant, a mermaid, and a madam—an unforgettable confection that explores obsession, wonder, and the deepest desires of the heart with bawdy wit, intrigue, and a touch of magic.]]>
0 Imogen Hermes Gowar 1443456705 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.40 2018 The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock
author: Imogen Hermes Gowar
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read
review:

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The Danish Girl 11947269 Einar Wegener and his California-born wife, this tender portrait of a marriage asks: What do you do when someone you love wants to change? It starts with a question, a simple favor asked of a husband by his wife on an afternoon chilled by the Baltic wind while both are painting in their studio. Her portrait model has canceled, and would he mind slipping into a pair of women's shoes and stockings for a few moments so she can finish the painting on time. "Of course," he answers. "Anything at all." With that, one of the most passionate and unusual love stories of the twentieth century begins.]]> 316 David Ebershoff 110115733X Vaibhav 4 queer-rep 3.92 2000 The Danish Girl
author: David Ebershoff
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2019/03/21
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: queer-rep
review:

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The Deep 43438782 Octavia E. Butler meets Marvel’s Black Panther in The Deep, a story rich with Afrofuturism, folklore, and the power of memory, inspired by the Hugo Award–nominated song “The Deep� from Daveed Diggs’s rap group clipping.

Yetu holds the memories for her people—water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners—who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly is forgotten by everyone, save one—the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.

Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities—and discovers a world her people left behind long ago.

Yetu will learn more than she ever expected about her own past—and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity—and own who they really are.

The Deep is “a tour de force reorientation of the storytelling gaze…a superb, multilayered work,� (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and a vividly original and uniquely affecting story inspired by a song produced by the rap group clipping.]]>
175 Rivers Solomon Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.81 2019 The Deep
author: Rivers Solomon
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: to-read
review:

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The Far Field 43514906 “Remarkable... Vijay traces the fault lines of history, love, and obligation running through a fractured family and country.� —Anthony Marra, New York Times–bestselling authorWinner of the 2019 JCB Prize for LiteratureGorgeously tactile and sweeping in historical and socio-political scope, Pushcart Prize–winner Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field follows a complicated flaneuse across the Indian subcontinent as she reckons with her past, her desires, and the tumultuous present.In the wake of her mother’s death, Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir’s politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love.With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt, and the limits of compassion.“A chance to glimpse the lives of distant people captured in prose gorgeous enough to make them indelible—and honest enough to make them real.� —The Washington Post“A singular story of mother and daughter.� —Entertainment Weekly]]> 483 Madhuri Vijay 0802146376 Vaibhav 5 favorites, women-author 4.05 2019 The Far Field
author: Madhuri Vijay
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2019/06/12
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: favorites, women-author
review:

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Long Way Down 35506547 “An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.� �Booklist (starred review)
“Astonishing.� �Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A tour de force.� �Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A Newbery Honor Book
A Coretta Scott King Honor Book
A Printz Honor Book

A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021)
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature
Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award

An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction
Parents� Choice Gold Award Winner
An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017
A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017
A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017


An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother.

A cannon. A strap.
A piece. A biscuit.
A burner. A heater.
A chopper. A gat.
A hammer
A tool
for RULE

Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he?

As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator?

Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES.

And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator.

Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.]]>
321 Jason Reynolds 1481438271 Vaibhav 4 poetry 4.33 2017 Long Way Down
author: Jason Reynolds
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2019/07/02
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: poetry
review:

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The Palace of Illusions 6260221
Married to five royal husbands who have been cheated out of their father's kingdom, Panchaali aids their quest to reclaim their birthright, remaining at their side through years of exile and a terrible civil war. But she cannot deny her complicated friendship with the enigmatic Krishna—or her secret attraction to the mysterious man who is her husbands' most dangerous enemy—as she is caught up in the ever-manipulating hands of fate.]]>
472 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni 0307472493 Vaibhav 5 women-author 4.21 2008 The Palace of Illusions
author: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2019/01/09
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: women-author
review:

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The Female of the Species 30297552 Speak with the relentless pacing and alternating perspectives of Gone Girl. A stunning, unforgettable page-turner.

Alex Craft knows how to kill someone. And she doesn’t feel bad about it.

Three years ago, when her older sister, Anna, was murdered and the killer walked free, Alex uncaged the language she knows best—the language of violence. While her own crime goes unpunished, Alex knows she can’t be trusted among other people. Not with Jack, the star athlete who wants to really know her but still feels guilty over the role he played the night Anna’s body was discovered. And not with Peekay, the preacher’s kid with a defiant streak who befriends Alex while they volunteer at an animal shelter. Not anyone.

As their senior year unfolds, Alex’s darker nature breaks out, setting these three teens on a collision course that will change their lives forever.]]>
348 Mindy McGinnis 0062320912 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.18 2016 The Female of the Species
author: Mindy McGinnis
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: to-read
review:

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Blue Horses: Poems 23439993
Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.



At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.]]>
96 Mary Oliver 0698170040 Vaibhav 5 4.31 2014 Blue Horses: Poems
author: Mary Oliver
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/28
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: favorites, women-author, poetry
review:

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The Lowland 19027527 WINNER 2015 � DSC Prize for South Asian LiteratureShortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker PrizeTwo brothers bound by tragedy; a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past; a country torn by the Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times bestselling author gives us a powerful new novel--set in both India and America--that explores the price of idealism, and a love that can last long past death. Growing up in Calcutta, born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead of them. It is the 1960s, andUdayan--charismatic and impulsive--finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother's political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America. But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family's home, he comes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behind--including those seared in the heart of his brother's wife.Suspenseful, sweeping, piercingly intimate, The Lowland expands the range of one of our most dazzling storytellers, seamlessly interweaving the historical and the personal across generations and geographies. This masterly novel of fate and will, exile and return, is a tour de force and an instant classic.]]> 354 Jhumpa Lahiri 0345807723 Vaibhav 0 to-read, indian-author-tbr 4.14 2013 The Lowland
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: to-read, indian-author-tbr
review:

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<![CDATA[The Astonishing Color of After]]> 35915084
Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.

Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.]]>
480 Emily X.R. Pan 0316464007 Vaibhav 3 women-author 3.5 stars 4.12 2018 The Astonishing Color of After
author: Emily X.R. Pan
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2020/04/29
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: women-author
review:
3.5 stars
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The Flamethrowers 18720335 Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers just made it from the National Book Award longlist to the shortlist of five finalists. Her first novel, Telex from Cuba, was also nominated for a National Book Award and reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. The Flamethrowers, even more ambitious and brilliant, is the riveting story of a young artist and the worlds she encounters in New York and Rome in the mid-1970s—by turns underground, elite, and dangerous.

The year is 1975 and Reno—so-called because of the place of her birth—has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in the art world—artists have colonized a deserted and industrial SoHo, are staging actions in the East Village, and are blurring the line between life and art. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, she begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the semi-estranged scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro’s family home in Italy, Reno falls in with members of the radical movement that overtook Italy in the seventies. Betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow.

The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. At its center is Kushner’s brilliantly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination.]]>
416 Rachel Kushner 1439154171 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.57 2013 The Flamethrowers
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: to-read
review:

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Freshwater 36263655 Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born “with one foot on the other side.� Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities.

Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled baby and a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents, Saul and Saachi, successfully prayed her into existence, but as she grows into a volatile and splintered child, it becomes clear that something went terribly awry. When Ada comes of age and moves to America for college, the group of selves within her grows in power and agency. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these alters—now protective, now hedonistic—move into control, Ada’s life spirals in a dark and dangerous direction.

Narrated by the selves within Ada, and based in the author’s realities, Freshwater explores the metaphysics of identity and mental health, plunging the reader into the mystery of being and self. Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice.]]>
240 Akwaeke Emezi 0802165567 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.02 2018 Freshwater
author: Akwaeke Emezi
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought]]> 24586706 An intimate look at the power of intrusive thoughts, how our brains can turn against us, and living with obsessive compulsive disorder

Have you ever had a strange urge to jump from a tall building or steer your car into oncoming traffic? You are not alone. In this captivating fusion of science, history, and personal memoir, David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind, and how they drive millions of us toward obsession and compulsion.
Adam, an editor at Nature and an accomplished science writer, has suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn't Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. What might lead an Ethiopian schoolgirl to eat a wall of her house, piece by piece, or a pair of brothers to die beneath an avalanche of household junk that they had compulsively hoarded? At what point does a harmless idea, a snowflake in a clear summer sky, become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts? Drawing on the latest research on the brain, as well as historical accounts of patients and their treatments, this is a book that will challenge the way you think about what is normal and what is mental illness.
Told with fierce clarity, humor, and urgent lyricism, this extraordinary book is both the haunting story of a personal nightmare and a fascinating doorway into the darkest corners of our minds.

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292 David Adam 0374710511 Vaibhav 5 non-fiction, favorites 3.79 2014 The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought
author: David Adam
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2019/11/10
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: non-fiction, favorites
review:

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Human Acts 30238842
An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of a historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.]]>
213 Han Kang Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.25 2014 Human Acts
author: Han Kang
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: to-read
review:

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An American Marriage 38385716
This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control.An American Marriageis a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward--with hope and pain--into the future.]]>
314 Tayari Jones 1443456969 Vaibhav 3 women-author
Whether to recommend this book or not, well I haven't formed an opinion on that, not yet. Winner of Women's Prize for Fiction 'An America Marriage by Tayari Jones' is book about choices. What should a women do when her husband has been incarcerated and she doesn't feel like his wife anymore? What should a childhood friend do about his feelings for the girl he literally grew up with? What should a man do after realising his wife is not his anymore?

There can be multiple answers to these questions and what author chose as the right answers has made this book, but I am still confused about some things and astounded by others.

A Woman Author writing a women centric story but still I find the woman in question helpless. Celestial, the lead female protagonist of this book is a helpless woman throughout, her life turns and twirls according to decisions taken by the men she loves. It's not unrealistic but it's not what I expected.

This book stands nowhere near to the last year's winner of Women's Prize For Fiction viz Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie.

I didn't find this book as overwhelming as the hype that surrounds it.]]>
3.97 2018 An American Marriage
author: Tayari Jones
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2019/09/17
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: women-author
review:
Ever read a book you can't agree with? An American Marriage is one such book for me. I am not saying what this book has to show or say isn't true, it's just I don't agree with this truth.

Whether to recommend this book or not, well I haven't formed an opinion on that, not yet. Winner of Women's Prize for Fiction 'An America Marriage by Tayari Jones' is book about choices. What should a women do when her husband has been incarcerated and she doesn't feel like his wife anymore? What should a childhood friend do about his feelings for the girl he literally grew up with? What should a man do after realising his wife is not his anymore?

There can be multiple answers to these questions and what author chose as the right answers has made this book, but I am still confused about some things and astounded by others.

A Woman Author writing a women centric story but still I find the woman in question helpless. Celestial, the lead female protagonist of this book is a helpless woman throughout, her life turns and twirls according to decisions taken by the men she loves. It's not unrealistic but it's not what I expected.

This book stands nowhere near to the last year's winner of Women's Prize For Fiction viz Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie.

I didn't find this book as overwhelming as the hype that surrounds it.
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<![CDATA[If on a Winter's Night a Traveler]]> 18624269 "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel...Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." —from If On A Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino's stunning classic imagines a novel capable of endless possibilities in an intricately crafted, spellbinding story about writing and reading.

If on aWinter's Night a Traveleris a feat of striking ingenuity and intelligence, exploring how our reading choices can shape and transform our lives. Originally published in 1979, Italo Calvino's singular novel crafted a postmodern narrative like never seen before—offering not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together, the stories form a labyrinth of literature known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers pursue the story lines that intrigue them and try to read each other. Deeply profound and surprisingly romantic, this classic is a beautiful meditation on the transformative power of reading and the ways we make meaning in our lives.

"Calvino is a wizard...There is no halting [this book's] metamorphoses." —New York Times Review of Books]]>
278 Italo Calvino 0544133404 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.89 1979 If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
author: Italo Calvino
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: to-read
review:

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Behind Her Eyes 31285838 Only two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

It’s said that the only people who really know what goes on in a marriage are the couple themselves. But what if even they don’t know the truth?

David and Adele seem like the ideal pair. He’s a successful psychiatrist, she is his picture-perfect wife who adores him. But why is he so controlling? And why is she keeping things hidden?

Louise, David’s new secretary, is intrigued. But as Louise gets closer to each of them, instead of finding answers she uncovers more puzzling questions. The only thing that is crystal clear is that something in this marriage is very, very wrong. But Louise could never have guessed how wrong things really are and just how far someone might go to hide it.

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384 Sarah Pinborough 0008131988 Vaibhav 5 3.82 2017 Behind Her Eyes
author: Sarah Pinborough
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2019/12/03
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: favorites, women-author, queer-rep
review:

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Girls Burn Brighter 36129373 When Poornima first meets Savitha, she feels something she thought she lost for good when her mother died: hope. Poornima's father hires Savitha to work one of their sari looms, and the two girls are quickly drawn to one another. Savitha is even more impoverished than Poornima, but she is full of passion and energy. She shows Poornima how to find beauty in a bolt of indigo cloth, a bowl of yogurt rice and bananas, the warmth of friendship. Suddenly their Indian village doesn't feel quite so claustrophobic, and Poornima begins to imagine a life beyond the arranged marriage her father is desperate to lock down for her. But when a devastating act of cruelty drives Savitha away, Poornima leaves behind everything she has ever known to find her friend again. Her journey takes her into the darkest corners of India's underworld, on a harrowing cross-continental journey, and eventually to an apartment complex in Seattle. Alternating between the girls� perspectives as they face relentless obstacles, Girls Burn Brighter introduces two heroines who never lose the hope that burns within them.

In breathtaking prose, Shobha Rao tackles the most urgent issues facing women today: domestic abuse, human trafficking, immigration, and feminism. At once a propulsive page-turner and a heart-wrenching meditation on friendship, Rao's debut novel is a literary tour de force.]]>
320 Shobha Rao 1250074266 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.87 2018 Girls Burn Brighter
author: Shobha Rao
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

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All the Crooked Saints 34629699 Here is a thing everyone wants: A miracle.

Here is a thing everyone fears:
What it takes to get one.

Any visitor to Bicho Raro, Colorado is likely to find a landscape of dark saints, forbidden love, scientific dreams, miracle-mad owls, estranged affections, one or two orphans, and a sky full of watchful desert stars.

At the heart of this place you will find the Soria family, who all have the ability to perform unusual miracles. And at the heart of this family are three cousins longing to change its future: Beatriz, the girl without feelings, who wants only to be free to examine her thoughts; Daniel, the Saint of Bicho Raro, who performs miracles for everyone but himself; and Joaquin, who spends his nights running a renegade radio station under the name Diablo Diablo.

They are all looking for a miracle. But the miracles of Bicho Raro are never quite what you expect.]]>
320 Maggie Stiefvater 0545930820 Vaibhav 4 women-author 3.98 2017 All the Crooked Saints
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2019/09/23
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: women-author
review:

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Fever Dream 32934836
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.

Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.]]>
192 Samanta Schweblin 0399184619 Vaibhav 4 4.5 stars 3.55 2014 Fever Dream
author: Samanta Schweblin
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2020/05/05
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: women-author, translated-books
review:
4.5 stars
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Coming to Life on South High 57223595 245 Lee Patton 1635559073 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.14 Coming to Life on South High
author: Lee Patton
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

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Swing Time 30308970 An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty

Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.

Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.

But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey—the same twists, the same shakes—and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.]]>
464 Zadie Smith 0399564314 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.67 2016 Swing Time
author: Zadie Smith
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

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Shame 11163750 321 Salman Rushdie 0307786641 Vaibhav 0 to-read, indian-author-tbr 4.07 1983 Shame
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read, indian-author-tbr
review:

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<![CDATA[Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement]]> 44446140 442 Albert Woodfox 1443458368 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.36 2019 Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement
author: Albert Woodfox
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

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Petals of Blood 22444186 Petals of Blood is on the surface a suspenseful investigation of a spectacular triple murder in upcountry Kenya. Yet as the intertwined stories of the four suspects unfold, a devastating picture emerges of a modern third-world nation whose frustrated people feel their leaders have failed them time after time. First published in 1977, this novel was so explosive that its author was imprisoned without charges by the Kenyan government. His incarceration was so shocking that newspapers around the world called attention to the case, and protests were raised by human-rights groups, scholars, and writers, including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Harold Pinter, and Margaret Drabble.





First time in Penguin Classics




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432 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 1101662468 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.92 1977 Petals of Blood
author: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read
review:

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Fates and Furies 25656499
At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed. With stunning revelations and multiple threads, and in prose that is vibrantly alive and original, Groff delivers a deeply satisfying novel about love, art, creativity, and power that is unlike anything that has come before it. Profound, surprising, propulsive, and emotionally riveting, it stirs both the mind and the heart.]]>
368 Lauren Groff 0698405129 Vaibhav 0 to-read, read-soon 3.79 2015 Fates and Furies
author: Lauren Groff
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read, read-soon
review:

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The Pessimists 57411118
Welcome to small town Connecticut, a place whose inhabitants seem to have it all � the status, the homes, the money, and the ennui. There’s Tripp and Virginia, beloved hosts whom the community idolizes, whose basement hides among other things a secret stash of guns and a drastic plan to survive the end times. There’s Gunter and Rachel, recent transplants who left New York City to raise their children, only to feel both imprisoned by the banality of suburbia. And Richard and Margot, community veterans whose extramarital affairs and battles with mental health are disguised by their enviably polished veneers and perfect children. At the center of it all is the Petra School, the most coveted of all the private schools in the state, a supposed utopia of mindfulness and creativity, with a history as murky and suspect as our character’s inner worlds.

With deep wit and delicious incisiveness, in The Pessimists, Bethany Ball peels back the veneer of upper class white suburbia to expose the destructive consequences of unchecked privilege and moral apathy in a world that is rapidly evolving without them. This is a superbly drawn portrait of a community, and its couples, torn apart by unmet desires, duplicity, hypocrisy, and dangerous levels of discontent.]]>
304 Bethany Ball 0802158897 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.46 2021 The Pessimists
author: Bethany Ball
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: to-read
review:

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We Are the Ants 25857011 Kirkus Reviews) of The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley comes a brand-new novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving.

Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.

Only he isn’t sure he wants to.

After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year.

Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.

But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate push the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world—and his pain—be destroyed forever.]]>
465 Shaun David Hutchinson 1481449656 Vaibhav 4 favorites, queer-rep 4.08 2016 We Are the Ants
author: Shaun David Hutchinson
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/18
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: favorites, queer-rep
review:

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The Line of Beauty 9245555 From Alan Hollinghurst, the acclaimed author of The Sparsholt Affair, The Line of Beauty is a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy.

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.

As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black man who works as a clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.]]>
524 Alan Hollinghurst 159691808X Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.85 2004 The Line of Beauty
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming]]> 43373984
An “epoch-defining book� (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring� (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earthis both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.

The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.]]>
386 David Wallace-Wells 052557672X Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.15 2019 The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
author: David Wallace-Wells
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: to-read
review:

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Alice Knott 50935234 From the ingenious mind of a language a wildly inventive novel about art, surveillance, our age of viral violence—and one woman's psychic survival

A troubled, reclusive heiress, Alice Knott lives alone, haunted by memories of her deceased parents and mysterious, near-identical brother. Much of her fortune has been spent on a world-class collection of artwork, which she stores in a vault in her lonely, cavernous house. One day, she awakens to find several of her most prized artworks destroyed, the act of vandalism captured in a viral video that soon triggers a rash of copycat incidents. As more videos follow, and an astonishing legacy of international art hangs in the balance, Alice finds that she has become the chief suspect in an international conspiracy—even as her psyche becomes a shadowed landscape of childhood demons and cognitive disorder.

Hallucinatory, unsettling, almost physically immersive, Alice Knott is a mind-bending rabbit hole of a a virtuoso exploration of the meaning of art, the corporatization of culture, and the lasting afterlife of trauma, as well a deeply humane portrait of a woman whose struggles feel both fantastically apocalyptic and dangerously, universally real.]]>
314 Blake Butler 0525535233 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.45 2020 Alice Knott
author: Blake Butler
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[The Hand on the Wall (Truly Devious, #3)]]> 45449555 New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson delivers the witty and pulse-pounding conclusion to the Truly Devious series as Stevie Bell solves the mystery that has haunted Ellingham Academy for over 75 years.

Ellingham Academy must be cursed. Three people are now dead. One, a victim of eithera prank gone wrong or a murder. Another, dead by misadventure. And now, an accident in Burlington has claimed another life. All three in the wrong place at the wrong time. All at the exact moment of Stevie’s greatest triumph . . . She knows who Truly Devious is. She’s solved it. The greatest case of the century.

At least, she thinks she has. With this latest tragedy, it’s hard to concentrate on the past. Not only has someone died in town, but David disappeared of his own free will and is up to something. Stevie is sure that somehow—somehow—all these things connect. The three deaths in the present. The deaths in the past. The missing Alice Ellingham and the missing David Eastman. Somewhere in this place of riddles and puzzles there must be answers.

Then another accident occurs as a massive storm heads toward VermontandEllingham Academy is evacuated. Obviously, it’s time for Stevie to do something stupid. It’s time to stay on the mountain and face the storm—and a murderer.

In the tantalizing finale to the Truly Devious trilogy, New York Times bestselling authorMaureen Johnson expertly tangles her dual narrative threads and ignites an explosive end for all who’ve walked through Ellingham Academy.]]>
369 Maureen Johnson 0062338137 Vaibhav 5 4.21 2020 The Hand on the Wall (Truly Devious, #3)
author: Maureen Johnson
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: women-author, favorites, queer-rep
review:

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A Place Called No Homeland 35714462 100 Kai Cheng Thom 1551526808 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.37 2017 A Place Called No Homeland
author: Kai Cheng Thom
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: to-read
review:

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On Photography 19378189 Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, Susan Sontag's On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as "a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs." It begins with the famous "In Plato's Cave"essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching "Brief Anthology of Quotations."]]> 242 Susan Sontag 1429957115 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.17 1973 On Photography
author: Susan Sontag
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55223004 Alternate cover edition of ASIN B08GJVLGGX.

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 Vaibhav 5 4.31 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/22
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: non-fiction, favorites, to-re-read
review:
There's a whole lot to say but as of now, I will just say, DON'T MISS THIS ONE.
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<![CDATA[Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict]]> 210843272 In this fascinating, insightful and uniquely moving book, Elizabeth Day embarks on a journey to find out. Friendaholic unpacks the significance and evolution of friendship from the ancient wisdom of Cicero to the modern curse of ghosting. How and why do we make friends? Is friendship an antidote to loneliness? How should we deal with a frenemy? And is it ok to end a friendship that has gone awry?
Friendaholic examines what makes a ‘good� friend and asks us what kind of friend we want to be � to each other but also to ourselves]]>
448 Elizabeth Day 0008374937 Vaibhav 4 3.79 Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict
author: Elizabeth Day
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.79
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves:
review:
Made me think a lot about my friends and friendship, to the extent that everyone who has talked to me this past week had to endure me ranting about this book. It was a brilliant read and I will be thinking about this one for a long time.
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<![CDATA[Husband Material (London Calling, #2)]]> 59236649 Wanted:
One (very real) husband
Nowhere near perfect but desperately trying his best

In BOYFRIEND MATERIAL, Luc and Oliver met, pretended to fall in love, fell in love for real, dealt with heartbreak and disappointment and family and friends…and somehow figured out a way to make it work. Now it seems like everyone around them is getting married, and Luc’s feeling the social pressure to propose. But it’ll take more than four weddings, a funeral, and a bowl full of special curry to get these two from I don’t know what I’m doing to I do.

Good thing Oliver is such perfect HUSBAND MATERIAL.

This Summer 2022, you’re invited to the event(s) of the season.]]>
424 Alexis Hall 1728250927 Vaibhav 4 favorites, queer-rep 3.57 2022 Husband Material (London Calling, #2)
author: Alexis Hall
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/19
date added: 2024/08/19
shelves: favorites, queer-rep
review:

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<![CDATA[Boyfriend Material (London Calling, #1)]]> 50225678 425 Alexis Hall 1728206146 Vaibhav 5 favorites, queer-rep 3.98 2020 Boyfriend Material (London Calling, #1)
author: Alexis Hall
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: favorites, queer-rep
review:

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<![CDATA[The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)]]> 39893545
For her own safety they say. She must move past this obsession with crime. Now that Stevie’s away from the school of topiaries and secret tunnels, and her strange and endearing friends, she begins to feel disconnected from the rest of the world. At least she won’t have to see David anymore. David, who she kissed. David, who lied to her about his identity—son of despised politician Edward King. Then King himself arrives at her house to offer a deal: He will bring Stevie back to Ellingham immediately. In return, she must play nice with David. King is in the midst of a campaign and can’t afford his son stirring up trouble. If Stevie’s at school, David will stay put.

The tantalizing riddles behind the Ellingham murders are still waiting to be unraveled, and Stevie knows she’s so close. But the path to the truth has more twists and turns than she can imagine—and moving forward involves hurting someone she cares for. In New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson’s second novel of the Truly Devious series, nothing is free, and someone will pay for the truth with their life.]]>
369 Maureen Johnson 0062338080 Vaibhav 4 4.12 2019 The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)
author: Maureen Johnson
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/12
date added: 2024/08/12
shelves: women-author, favorites, queer-rep
review:

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<![CDATA[Truly, Devious (Truly Devious, #1)]]> 29589074
Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.� It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history.

True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novelist, the actor, the artist, and the jokester. But something strange is happening. Truly Devious makes a surprise return, and death revisits Ellingham Academy. The past has crawled out of its grave. Someone has gotten away with murder.

The two interwoven mysteries of this first book in the Truly Devious series dovetail brilliantly, and Stevie Bell will continue her relentless quest for the murderers in books two and three.

New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson weaves a delicate tale of murder and mystery in the first book of a striking new series, perfect for fans of Agatha Christie and E. Lockhart.]]>
416 Maureen Johnson Vaibhav 4 3.89 2018 Truly, Devious (Truly Devious, #1)
author: Maureen Johnson
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: women-author, favorites, queer-rep
review:

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Death at Morning House 199793628 From the bestselling author of the Truly Devious books, Maureen Johnson, comes a new stand-alone YA about a teen who uncovers a mystery while working as a tour guide on an island and must solve it before history repeats itself.

The fire wasn’t Marlowe Wexler’s fault. Dates should be hot, but not hot enough to warrant literal firefighters. Akilah, the girl Marlowe has been in love with for years, will never go out with her again. No one dates an accidental arsonist.

With her house-sitting career up in flames, it seems the universe owes Marlowe a new summer job, and that’s how she ends up at Morning House, a mansion built on an island in the 1920s and abandoned shortly thereafter. It’s easy enough, giving tours. Low risk of fire. High chance of getting bored talking about stained glass and nut cutlets and Prohibition.

Oh, and the deaths. Did anyone mention the deaths?]]>
384 Maureen Johnson 0063255952 Vaibhav 4 women-author, queer-rep 3.71 2024 Death at Morning House
author: Maureen Johnson
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/10
shelves: women-author, queer-rep
review:

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The Last Day 204478558 With science fiction tropes recalling Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and more recently Olga Ravn's The Employees, philosophical reflections in the vein of Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground, and its postmodern form, The Last Day is a testament to the depth and creativity of Welsh literature. Its translation into English is long overdue.]]> 136 Owain Owain 1914595807 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.00 1976 The Last Day
author: Owain Owain
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

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A Little Life 25334922 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER � A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship� (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST � MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST � WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE �

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.]]>
720 Hanya Yanagihara 1447294823 Vaibhav 5
Some books rob you of words, they leave you so short of syllables that you are unable to articulate how you feel about them. They leave you so dumbstruck and devastated that for months you are in a shock where your tongue couldn't speak about them, your pens can't write about them but your brain keeps thinking about them relentlessly as if in a limbo.

A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara was one such book for me.

Before saying anything more about the book I would like to mention that this book should instead be titled TRIGGER WARNING, as it is full of triggers. Please assume as many as you can.

Now back to the book, I read this book a month ago after Gabby @gabbyreads recommended it in one of her Youtube videos. It's a huge book, a tome really. I decided to give it a go. I couldn't put it down but I had to stop time and again while reading it to take a breath, to absorb things that were happening, to calm the chaos this book had ensued within me.

It is in no way an easy read, it is not for everybody. It's the story of Jude and his three friends trying to get somewhere substantial with their careers. Jude, a mysterious friend to Malcom, JB and Willem, has a past which he keeps running away from, a past which never stops haunting him.

It's said that whatever we grow up to be is a reflection of our childhood, this book justifies this statement.

Jude, in whatever he does, however he treats his body, his soul, his skin, his life...... is not for you to judge.

It's a big book but every word is worth it. Do read this book, please let Jude tell his story to you. I wish everyone reads it atleast once in their life.

This book has changed so much in me that I still sometimes get surprised at the extent which it has affected me.

Hanya Yanagihara @hanyayanagihara has done a wonderful job and I am really grateful for this book. It's very close to my heart. 5/5 �

Hope you all like it too.

I hope I did justice to the book, though this book is really difficult to explain.]]>
4.28 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2019/08/09
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: women-author, favorites, queer-rep, to-re-read, physical-shelf
review:
“It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not.� ―Hanya Yanagihara,A Little Life

Some books rob you of words, they leave you so short of syllables that you are unable to articulate how you feel about them. They leave you so dumbstruck and devastated that for months you are in a shock where your tongue couldn't speak about them, your pens can't write about them but your brain keeps thinking about them relentlessly as if in a limbo.

A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara was one such book for me.

Before saying anything more about the book I would like to mention that this book should instead be titled TRIGGER WARNING, as it is full of triggers. Please assume as many as you can.

Now back to the book, I read this book a month ago after Gabby @gabbyreads recommended it in one of her Youtube videos. It's a huge book, a tome really. I decided to give it a go. I couldn't put it down but I had to stop time and again while reading it to take a breath, to absorb things that were happening, to calm the chaos this book had ensued within me.

It is in no way an easy read, it is not for everybody. It's the story of Jude and his three friends trying to get somewhere substantial with their careers. Jude, a mysterious friend to Malcom, JB and Willem, has a past which he keeps running away from, a past which never stops haunting him.

It's said that whatever we grow up to be is a reflection of our childhood, this book justifies this statement.

Jude, in whatever he does, however he treats his body, his soul, his skin, his life...... is not for you to judge.

It's a big book but every word is worth it. Do read this book, please let Jude tell his story to you. I wish everyone reads it atleast once in their life.

This book has changed so much in me that I still sometimes get surprised at the extent which it has affected me.

Hanya Yanagihara @hanyayanagihara has done a wonderful job and I am really grateful for this book. It's very close to my heart. 5/5 �

Hope you all like it too.

I hope I did justice to the book, though this book is really difficult to explain.
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Standing Heavy 61411075 The security guard adores babies. Perhaps because babies do not shoplift.
Babies adore the security guard. Perhaps because he does not drag babies to the sales.

The 1960s - Ferdinand arrives in Paris from Côte d'Ivoire, ready to take on the world and become a big somebody.
The 1990s - It is the Golden Age of immigration, and Ossiri and Kassoum navigate a Paris on the brink of momentous change.
The 2010s - In a Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, the all-seeing eyes of a security guard observes the habits of those who come to worship at this church to consumerism.

Amidst the political bickering of the inhabitants of the Residence for Students from Côte d'Ivoire and the ever-changing landscape of French immigration policy, Ferdinand, Ossiri and Kassoum, two generations of Ivoirians, attempt to make their way as undocumented workers, taking shifts as security at a flour mill.

Sharply satirical, political and poignant, Standing Heavy is a searingly witty deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption, an unprecedented and unforgettable account of everything that passes under a security guard's gaze.

Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

"Inventive and very funny" Guardian
"A compact, humane satire" Financial Times]]>
168 Gauz 1529414431 Vaibhav 0 3.57 2014 Standing Heavy
author: Gauz
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/08
shelves: translated-books, physical-shelf, to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Something Fabulous (Something Fabulous, #1)]]> 58361698 From the acclaimed author of Boyfriend Material comes a delightfully witty romance featuring a reserved duke who’s betrothed to one twin and hopelessly enamoured of the other.

Valentine Layton, the Duke of Malvern, has twin problems: literally.

It was always his father’s hope that Valentine would marry Miss Arabella Tarleton. But, unfortunately, too many novels at an impressionable age have caused her to grow up…romantic. So romantic that a marriage of convenience will not do and after Valentine’s proposal she flees into the night determined never to set eyes on him again.

Arabella’s twin brother, Mr. Bonaventure “Bonny� Tarleton, has also grown up…romantic. And fully expects Valentine to ride out after Arabella and prove to her that he’s not the cold-hearted cad he seems to be.

Despite copious misgivings, Valentine finds himself on a pell-mell chase to Dover with Bonny by his side. Bonny is unreasonable, overdramatic, annoying, and…beautiful? And being with him makes Valentine question everything he thought he knew. About himself. About love. Even about which Tarleton he should be pursuing.]]>
350 Alexis Hall 1542036291 Vaibhav 5 queer-authors, queer-rep 3.51 2022 Something Fabulous (Something Fabulous, #1)
author: Alexis Hall
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/07
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: queer-authors, queer-rep
review:

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<![CDATA[A Bluestocking's Guide to Decadence (Lucky Lovers of London, #3)]]> 198132991
London, 1885

A lesbian in a lavender marriage, Jo Smith cuts a dashing figure in pin-striped trousers, working in her bookshop and keeping polite company. But her hard-earned stability is about to be upended thanks to her husband’s pregnant paramour, who needs medical attention that no reputable doctor will provide.

Enter Dr. Emily Clarke, a tantalizing bluestocking working at a quaint village hospital outside the city. Emily has reservations about getting mixed up in Jo’s scandalous arrangement, but her flustered, heart-racing response to Jo has her agreeing to help despite herself.

There’s a world of difference between Jo’s community of underground clubs and sapphic societies and Emily’s respectable suburbs. Perhaps it’s a gap that even fervent desire can’t bridge.

But for those bold enough to take the risk, who knows what delicious adventures might be in store �

Lucky Lovers of London

Book 1: The Gentleman's Book of Vices
Book 2: A Rulebook for Restless Rogues
Book 3: A Bluestocking's Guide to Decadence]]>
304 Jess Everlee 1335428569 Vaibhav 4 queer-rep, women-author 3.71 2024 A Bluestocking's Guide to Decadence (Lucky Lovers of London, #3)
author: Jess Everlee
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: queer-rep, women-author
review:

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Intermezzo 209311051
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair and possibility—a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]>
442 Sally Rooney 0571365469 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.03 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[A Rulebook for Restless Rogues (Lucky Lovers of London, #2)]]> 61393443
London, 1885

David Forester and Noah Clarke have been best friends since boarding school. All grown up now, clever, eccentric Noah isSavileRow’s most promising young tailor, while former socialite David runs an underground queer club, The Curious Fox.

Nothing makes David happier than to keep the incense lit, the pianist playing and all his people comfortable, happy and safe until they stumble out into the dawn. But when the unscrupulous baron who owns the Fox moves to close it, David’s world comes crashing down.

Noah’s never feared a little high-stakes gambling, but as he risks his own career in hopes of helping David, he realizes two

David has not been honest about how he ended up at The Curious Fox in the first place.

Noah’s feelings for David have become far more than friendly.

What future lies beyond those first furtive kisses? Noah and David can hardly wait to find out…if they can untangle David from his web of deception without losing everything Noah has worked for.]]>
336 Jess Everlee 1335680004 Vaibhav 4 women-author, queer-rep 3.73 2023 A Rulebook for Restless Rogues (Lucky Lovers of London, #2)
author: Jess Everlee
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/05
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves: women-author, queer-rep
review:

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<![CDATA[Proper Scoundrels (Roaring Twenties Magic, #1)]]> 57831165 Don’t miss this spin-off from Allie Therin's acclaimed Magic in Manhattan universe!

Their scandalous pasts have left them wounded and unworthy—and hopelessly perfect together.

London, 1925

Sebastian de Leon is adjusting to life after three years spent enthralled by blood magic. The atrocities he committed under its control still weigh heavily on his conscience, but when he’s asked to investigate a series of mysterious murders, it feels like an opportunity to make amends. Until he realizes the killer’s next likely target is a man who witnessed Sebastian at his worst—the Viscount Fine.

Lord Fine—known as Wesley to his friends, if he had any—is haunted by ghosts of his own after serving as a British army captain during the Great War. Jaded and untrusting, he’s tempted to turn Sebastian in, but there’s something undeniably captivating about the reformed paranormal, and after Sebastian risks his own life to save Wesley’s, they find common ground.

Seeking sanctuary together at Wesley’s country estate in Yorkshire, the unlikely pair begins to unravel a mystery steeped in legend and folklore, the close quarters emboldening them to see past the other’s trauma to the person worth loving beneath. But with growing targets on their backs, they’ll have to move quickly if they want to catch a killer—and discover whether two wounded souls can help each other heal.


Magic in Manhattan
Book 1: Spellbound
Book 2: Starcrossed
Book 3: Wonderstruck

Roaring Twenties Magic
Book 1: Proper Scoundrels
Book 2: Once a Rogue

Liar City
Book 1: Liar City
]]>
309 Allie Therin 0369704819 Vaibhav 4 4.18 2021 Proper Scoundrels (Roaring Twenties Magic, #1)
author: Allie Therin
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[Wonderstruck (Magic in Manhattan, #3)]]> 55475835 Don’t miss the stunning conclusion to Allie Therin’s Magic in Manhattan series!

New York, 1925

Arthur Kenzie is on a mission: to destroy the powerful supernatural relic that threatens Manhattan—and all the nonmagical minds in the world. So far his search has been fruitless. All it has done is keep him from the man he loves. But he’ll do anything to keep Rory safe and free, even if that means leaving him behind.

Psychometric Rory Brodigan knows his uncontrolled magic is a liability, but he’s determined to gain power over it. He can take care of himself—and maybe even Arthur, too, if Arthur will let him. An auction at the Paris world’s fair offers the perfect opportunity to destroy the relic, if a group of power-hungry supernaturals don’t destroy Rory and Arthur first.

As the magical world converges on Paris, Arthur and Rory have to decide who they can trust. Guessing wrong could spell destruction for their bond—and for the world as they know it.]]>
295 Allie Therin 1488055238 Vaibhav 4 queer-rep 4.22 2021 Wonderstruck (Magic in Manhattan, #3)
author: Allie Therin
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/03
date added: 2024/08/02
shelves: queer-rep
review:

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<![CDATA[Starcrossed (Magic in Manhattan, #2)]]> 48998310 When everything they’ve built is threatened, only their bond remains�

New York, 1925

Psychometric Rory Brodigan’s life hasn’t been the same since the day he met Arthur Kenzie. Arthur’s continued quest to contain supernatural relics that pose a threat to the world has captured Rory’s imagination—and his heart. But Arthur’s upper-class upbringing still leaves Rory worried that he’ll never measure up, especially when Arthur’s aristocratic ex arrives in New York.

For Arthur, there’s only Rory. But keeping the man he’s fallen for safe is another matter altogether. When a group of ruthless paranormals throw the city into chaos, the two men’s strained relationship leaves Rory vulnerable to a monster from Arthur’s past.

With dark forces determined to tear them apart, Rory and Arthur will have to draw on every last bit of magic up their sleeves. And in the end, it’s the connection they’ve formed without magic that will be tested like never before.]]>
307 Allie Therin 148805519X Vaibhav 4 4.15 2020 Starcrossed (Magic in Manhattan, #2)
author: Allie Therin
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/02
date added: 2024/08/02
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[Spellbound (Magic in Manhattan, #1)]]> 43620442 To save Manhattan, they’ll have to save each other first�

New York, 1925

Arthur Kenzie’s life’s work is protecting the world from the supernatural relics that could destroy it. When an amulet with the power to control the tides is shipped to New York, he must intercept it before it can be used to devastating effects. This time, in order to succeed, he needs a powerful psychometric…and the only one available has sworn off his abilities altogether.

Rory Brodigan’s gift comes with great risk. To protect himself, he’s become a recluse, redirecting his magic to find counterfeit antiques. But with the city’s fate hanging in the balance, he can’t force himself to say no.

Being with Arthur is dangerous, but Rory’s ever-growing attraction to him begins to make him brave. And as Arthur coaxes him out of seclusion, a magical and emotional bond begins to form. One that proves impossible to break—even when Arthur sacrifices himself to keep Rory safe and Rory must risk everything to save him.]]>
275 Allie Therin 1488055084 Vaibhav 4 queer-rep 3.96 2019 Spellbound (Magic in Manhattan, #1)
author: Allie Therin
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves: queer-rep
review:

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Take Me Apart 48550530 A young archivist’s obsession with her subject’s mysterious death threatens to destroy her fragile grasp on sanity, in a riveting debut novel of psychological suspense

When the famed photographer Miranda Brand died mysteriously at the height of her career, it sent shock waves through Callinas, California. Decades later, old wounds are reopened when her son, Theo, hires the ex-journalist Kate Aitken to create an archive of his mother’s work.

From Miranda’s vast maze of personal effects, Kate pieces together a portrait of a vibrant artist buckling under the pressures of ambition, motherhood, and marriage. As the summer progresses, Kate navigates vicious local rumors and her growing attraction to the enigmatic Theo, all while unearthing the shocking details of Miranda’s private life. But Kate has secrets of her own, and when she stumbles across a diary that may finally resolve the mystery of Miranda’s death, her curiosity starts to spiral into a dangerous obsession.

With breathtaking and haunting imagery, Take Me Apart paints a vivid picture of two magnetic young women, separated by years, but bonded by shared struggles. Sara Sligar draws readers into a web of secrets and lies, alternating between the present and the past and revealing the truth about Miranda’s death through the objects she left behind. A brilliant take on art, illness, and power, from a fresh, seductive new voice in suspense.

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370 Sara Sligar 0374719594 Vaibhav 4 women-author 3.89 2020 Take Me Apart
author: Sara Sligar
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/26
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves: women-author
review:

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An Unrestored Woman 29432093 “What an astonishing collection! Provoking, ferocious, moving, splendid, generous and essential. I seemed to finish the book in a different world than the one in which I began it.�
—Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble and Stranger Things Happen

In her mesmerizing debut, Shobha Rao recounts the untold human costs of one of the largest migrations in history.

1947: the Indian subcontinent is partitioned into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. And with one decree, countless lives are changed forever.

An Unrestored Woman explores the fault lines in this mass displacement of a new mother is trapped on the wrong side of the border; a soldier finds the love of his life but is powerless to act on it; an ambitious servant seduces both master and mistress; a young prostitute quietly, inexorably plots revenge on the madam who holds her hostage. Caught in a world of shifting borders, Rao’s characters have reached their tipping points.

In paired stories that hail from India and Pakistan to the United States, Italy, and England, we witness the ramifications of the violent uprooting of families, the price they pay over generations, and the uncanny relevance these stories have in our world today.]]>
256 Shobha Rao 1250073839 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.02 2016 An Unrestored Woman
author: Shobha Rao
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/25
shelves: to-read
review:

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They Both Die at the End 33797105
Mateo and Rufus are total strangers, but, for different reasons, they’re both looking to make a new friend on their End Day. The good news: There’s an app for that. It’s called the Last Friend, and through it, Rufus and Mateo are about to meet up for one last great adventure—to live a lifetime in a single day.

Adam Silvera reminds us that there’s no life without death and no love without loss in this devastating yet uplifting story about two people whose lives change over the course of one unforgettable day.]]>
389 Adam Silvera 0062457810 Vaibhav 5 queer-rep, favorites 3.93 2017 They Both Die at the End
author: Adam Silvera
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2019/01/05
date added: 2024/07/22
shelves: queer-rep, favorites
review:
This can tear your heart apart. Keep tissues handy.
]]>
Funny Story 194803835 A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé, Peter, told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it... right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned-up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex... right?]]>
400 Emily Henry 0593441281 Vaibhav 4 women-author
Favourite quote - "Flags so red, they veer towards maroon."

I would really love a whirlwind romance about Jules.]]>
4.18 2024 Funny Story
author: Emily Henry
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/22
date added: 2024/07/22
shelves: women-author
review:
4.25 stars. Despite the wonderful combination of Emily Henry & Julia Whelan, this book didn't seem to reach the standard the author has already set for herself. Also there were some very weird and totally avoidable discrepancies. But it was great overall.

Favourite quote - "Flags so red, they veer towards maroon."

I would really love a whirlwind romance about Jules.
]]>
Into a Star 202713977
'Three in the bed. One not yet born, another dead, and I'm alive.'

Puk is 26 years old, preparing for the birth of her second child, when her husband has a heart attack while out running. She leaves their toddler with a friend and dashes to the hospital, where Lasse lies unresponsive in a coma. He dies a few hours later.

Into a Star follows Puk and her young family in the first year after this tragedy, which has shattered the ordinary life she imagined for them. As the days turn to weeks and months, Puk's second son is born, her sister moves in, her relationship with her in-laws fractures and evolves. She reckons daily with her memories of Lasse: how they met and fell in love, their adventures, their dreams for the future. And she navigates the miraculous, brutal, overwhelming days of early parenthood alone.

Into a Star is a luminous meditation on loss and renewal. With remarkable dignity, candour and attention to human detail, Puk Qvortrup invites us into the hardest moments of her life. And she reveals, amid the devastation, a powerful, life-affirming thread of hope.]]>
208 Puk Qvortrup 0241682223 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.59 2019 Into a Star
author: Puk Qvortrup
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: to-read
review:

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The [Fake] Dating Game 197043155 Ready. Set. Faux .

Holden James picked the worst time to have a meltdown. His chance to audition for his favorite game show, Madcap Market , should have been a moment of triumph—a glorious, loving homage to his adored mom, who died six years ago. Instead, he’s destroying the minibar in a grim Los Angeles hotel room…recently dumped, partnerless and sliding into a crushing black hole of anguish.

But the hotel service in abject misery is sublime. It even comes with an unfairly fit and sexy (smart-ass) concierge who arrives at the door with pizza, Monopoly and deliciously distracting forearms.

All Holden knows about Leo Min is that he’s beautiful and unexpectedly sympathetic, and the chemistry between them is beyond . Maybe it’s even enough to convince everyone, including the show’s casting directors, that they’re a real couple. All they’d have to do is crush the competition, win the huge cash prize and all of Holden’s problems—his broken heart, his buried grief, his complete lack of money and direction—will be fixed.

Of course, reality doesn’t quite work out that way. But love is an entirely different game…]]>
288 Timothy Janovsky 1335041559 Vaibhav 3 queer-rep 3.61 2024 The [Fake] Dating Game
author: Timothy Janovsky
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/18
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: queer-rep
review:

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Henry Henry 182108722 Henry Henry is a queer reimagining of Shakespeare's Henriad, transposing the legend of Henry V's wayward youth into 21st-century Britain in the years leading up to the Brexit referendum.

Henry Henry follows Hal Lancaster�22, gay, Catholic—as he spends his first years out of Oxford floating between internships, drinking with his actor friends, struggling through awkward hook-ups, and occasionally going to confession to be absolved of his sins.

When a grouse shooting accident-—funny in retrospect—makes a romance out of Hal's rivalry with fumblingly leftist family friend Harry Percy, Hal finds that he wants, for the first time, to be himself. But his father Henry is an Englishman: he will not let his son escape tradition. To save himself, Hal must reckon not only with grief and shame but with the wounds of his family's past.]]>
336 Allen Bratton 196188402X Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.59 2024 Henry Henry
author: Allen Bratton
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves: to-read
review:

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The Midnight Feast 199743738 Secrets. Lies. Murder. Let the festivities begin...

It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests� healing have been placed in the Seaside Cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule� cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen.

But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. Just outside the Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. And the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. Something’s not right with the guests. There’s been a fire. A body’s been discovered.

THE FOUNDER * THE HUSBAND * THE MYSTERY GUEST * THE KITCHEN HELP

It all began with a secret, fifteen years ago. Now the past has crashed the party. And it’ll end in murder at� The Midnight Feast.]]>
354 Lucy Foley 0063003104 Vaibhav 5 favorites, women-author 3.55 2024 The Midnight Feast
author: Lucy Foley
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: favorites, women-author
review:

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

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

When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.]]>
320 Bryan Washington 0593421094 Vaibhav 0 3.50 2023 Family Meal
author: Bryan Washington
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves: dnfed, queer-rep, queer-authors
review:

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We Could Be Heroes 198563754
Patrick's acting career is on the rise, and the superhero movie he's currently filming is the key to putting him on the map� if the endless reshoots ever stop. Will is a secondhand bookseller and part-time drag queen extraordinaire who’s just trying to live his best life—and maybe find love along the way.

They come from different worlds, but after a chance encounter on a particularly chaotic night out, a curious friendship forms between the two men. At least, that’s what they tell each other it is. Sure, Patrick finds Will captivatingly hilarious, and Will can’t help but keep thinking about who is really behind the perfect mask Patrick shows the rest of the world, but nothing could ever really happen, right? Superheroes don’t date drag queens, after all.

When reality comes crashing into the fantasy world they’ve built together, Will has to make a choice between the man of his dreams and being true to himself. Can Patrick be the hero Will’s been waiting for, or will Will be the one to save Patrick, after all? Uproarious and touching, We Could Be Heroes is an ode to queer joy and a romance that just might save the world.]]>
384 Philip Ellis 0593542495 Vaibhav 5 queer-authors, queer-rep 3.86 2024 We Could Be Heroes
author: Philip Ellis
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/12
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves: queer-authors, queer-rep
review:
Vastly different from most things I have read in m/m romance over the years. Loved reading from the pov of a Drag Queen for a mc. The timeline in the past is interesting too. I wish the author had explored it more, or maybe there's a potential spinoff, there's scope for a good number of them at least.
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It's Kind of a Funny Story 9396843 452 Ned Vizzini 1423141083 Vaibhav 0 to-read 4.03 2006 It's Kind of a Funny Story
author: Ned Vizzini
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/09
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise]]> 212069868
'What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.' � Nigel Slater

‘A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .�

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.

The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.]]>
317 Olivia Laing 1529066670 Vaibhav 5 4.09 2024 The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
author: Olivia Laing
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves: non-fiction, women-author, to-re-read
review:
A beautiful meditation on gardening, loss, patience and much more. As always Laing takes the reader through her life, the main story interspersed with personal and at times vulnerable moments. 4.5 stars
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Pansies (Spires, #4) 205519733
It’s rough, though, going back to South Shields now that they all know he’s a fully paid-up pansy. It’s the last place he’s expecting to pull. But Fen’s gorgeous, with his pink-tipped hair and hipster glasses, full of the sort of courage Alfie’s never had. It should be a one-night thing, but Alfie’s never met anyone like Fen before.

Except he has. At school, when Alfie was everything he was supposed to be, and Fen was the stubborn little gay boy who wouldn’t keep his head down. And now it’s a proper mess: Fen might have slept with Alfie, but he’ll probably never forgive him, and Fen’s got all this other stuff going on anyway, with his mam and her flower shop and the life he left down south.

Alfie just wants to make it right. But how can he, when all they’ve got in common is the nowhere town they both ran away from.]]>
512 Alexis Hall 172825132X Vaibhav 4 queer-authors, queer-rep 4.11 2016 Pansies (Spires, #4)
author: Alexis Hall
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/03
date added: 2024/07/03
shelves: queer-authors, queer-rep
review:

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Digital Fortress 6958113 An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here


National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland: when the most powerful intelligence organization on earth's invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, it calls for its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant and beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage...not by guns or bombs, but by a code so ingeniously complex that if released would cripple U.S. intelligence.

Seville, Spain: the creator of the code, Ensei Tankado, is found dead. And with him has died the secret to an impregnable code-writing formula that threatens to obliterate the post-cold war balance of power. Forever.

From the underground hallways of power to the skyscrapers of Tokyo to the towering cathedrals of Spain, a desperate race unfolds. Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, betrayed on all sides, Susan Fletcher finds herself fighting not only for her country but for her life, and in the end, for the life of the man she loves.]]>
510 Dan Brown 055216125X Vaibhav 4 3.82 1998 Digital Fortress
author: Dan Brown
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2017/12/29
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves:
review:

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For Real (Spires, #3) 197036064 512 Alexis Hall 172825129X Vaibhav 5 queer-authors, queer-rep 4.07 2015 For Real (Spires, #3)
author: Alexis Hall
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/21
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves: queer-authors, queer-rep
review:

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पतझड� [Patjhad] 203749121 -इसी उपन्या� से]]> 240 Manav Kaul 9392820852 Vaibhav 0 currently-reading 4.43 पतझड़ [Patjhad]
author: Manav Kaul
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/17
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding]]> 61921640 A joyful family saga about free will, forgiveness, and how we are all interconnected.


In October 1989, triplet babies are born into chaos in a Swedish hospital. Over two decades later, the siblings are scattered around the world, barely speaking. Sebastian is in London working for a mysterious scientific organisation and falling in love. Clara has travelled to Easter Island to join a doomsday cult. And the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, practising being a stepmother. Then something happens that forces them to reunite. Their mother calls with worrying news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a twenty-five-year secret that will change all their lives …]]>
544 Amanda Svensson 1914484878 Vaibhav 0 currently-reading 2.95 2019 A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding
author: Amanda Svensson
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 2.95
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/02
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Origin (Robert Langdon, #5) 34877435
As the event begins, Langdon and several hundred guests find themselves captivated by an utterly original presentation, which Langdon realizes will be far more controversial than he ever imagined. But the meticulously orchestrated evening suddenly erupts into chaos, and Kirsch's precious discovery teeters on the brink of being lost forever. Reeling and facing an imminent threat, Langdon is forced into a desperate bid to escape Bilbao. With him is Ambra Vidal, the elegant museum director who worked with Kirsch to stage the provocative event. Together they flee to Barcelona on a perilous quest to locate a cryptic password that will unlock Kirsch's secret.

Navigating the dark corridors of hidden history and extreme religion, Langdon and Vidal must evade a tormented enemy whose all-knowing power seems to emanate from Spain's Royal Palace itself . . . and who will stop at nothing to silence Edmond Kirsch. On a trail marked by modern art and enigmatic symbols, Langdon and Vidal uncover clues that ultimately bring them face-to-face with Kirsch's shocking discovery . . . and the breathtaking truth that has long eluded us. Origin is stunningly inventive--Dan Brown's most brilliant and entertaining novel to date]]>
480 Dan Brown 0385542690 Vaibhav 3 . 3.46 2017 Origin (Robert Langdon, #5)
author: Dan Brown
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2019/01/22
date added: 2024/04/24
shelves:
review:
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The Frightened Ones 48984813 **Finalist for the 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction**

A timely and haunting novel from an exciting new voice in international literature, set in present-day Syria

In her therapist's waiting room in Damascus, Suleima meets a strange and reticent man named Naseem, and they soon begin a tense affair. But when Naseem, a writer, flees Syria for Germany, he sends Suleima the unfinished manuscript of his novel. To Suleima's surprise, she and the novel's protagonist are uncannily similar. As she reads, Suleima's past overwhelms her and she has no idea what to trust--Naseem's pages, her own memory, or nothing at all?
Narrated in alternating chapters by Suleima and the mysterious woman portrayed in Naseem's novel, The Frightened Ones is a boundary-blurring, radical examination of the effects of oppression on one's sense of identity, the effects of collective trauma, and a moving window into life inside Assad's Syria.]]>
208 Dima Wannous 0525655131 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.25 2017 The Frightened Ones
author: Dima Wannous
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

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Bird in a Cage 27876537
Trouble is the last thing Albert needs. Traveling back to his childhood home on Christmas Eve to mourn his mother’s death, he finds the loneliness and nostalgia of his Parisian quartier unbearable. Until, that evening, he encounters a beautiful, seemingly innocent woman at a brasserie, and his spirits are lifted.

Still, something about the woman disturbs him. Where is the father of her child? And what are those two red stains on her sleeve? When she invites him back to her apartment, Albert thinks he’s in luck. But a monstrous scene awaits them, and he finds himself lured into the darkness against his better judgment.

Unravelling like a paranoid nightmare, Bird in a Cage melds existentialist drama with thrilling noir to tell the story of a man trapped in a prison of his own making.]]>
123 Frédéric Dard 1782271996 Vaibhav 0 to-read 3.88 1961 Bird in a Cage
author: Frédéric Dard
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[The Tainted, An Irish-Indian Love Story]]> 57476382 0 Cauvery Madhavan 9390477034 Vaibhav 0 to-read 0.0 The Tainted, An Irish-Indian Love Story
author: Cauvery Madhavan
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

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Penance 75498191 One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists 2023

From the author of the cult hit Boy Parts comes a chilling, brilliantly told story of murder among a group of teenage girls—a powerful and disturbing novel as piercing in its portrait of young women as Emma Cline’s The Girls.

On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls.

Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.

But how much of the story is true?

Compulsively readable, provocative, and disturbing, Penance is a cleverly nuanced, unflinching exploration of gender, class, and power that raises troubling questions about the media and our obsession with true crime while bringing to light the depraved side of human nature and our darkest proclivities.]]>
336 Eliza Clark 0063327856 Vaibhav 4 women-author, queer-rep 3.77 2023 Penance
author: Eliza Clark
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/26
date added: 2024/03/26
shelves: women-author, queer-rep
review:

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<![CDATA[A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel (The Doomsday Books #2)]]> 76749981
Major Rufus d'Aumesty has unexpectedly become the Earl of Oxney, master of a remote Norman manor on the edge of the infamous Romney Marsh. There he's beset on all sides, his position contested both by his greedy uncle and by Luke Doomsday, son of a notorious smuggling clan.

The earl and the smuggler should be natural enemies, but cocksure, enragingly competent Luke is a trained secretary and expert schemer--exactly the sort of man Rufus needs by his side. Before long, Luke becomes an unexpected ally...and the lover Rufus had never hoped to find.

But Luke came to Stone Manor with an ulterior motive, one he's desperate to keep hidden even from the lord he can't resist. As the lies accumulate and family secrets threaten to destroy everything they hold dear, master and man find themselves forced to decide whose side they're really on...and what they're willing to do for love.

"Once again KJ Charles has produced an absolute masterpiece!" --Joanna Shupe, USA Today bestselling author for The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen]]>
336 K.J. Charles 1728255880 Vaibhav 4 queer-rep, women-author 4.27 2023 A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel (The Doomsday Books #2)
author: K.J. Charles
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/23
date added: 2024/03/23
shelves: queer-rep, women-author
review:

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<![CDATA[The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen (The Doomsday Books, #1)]]> 57102663 Bridgerton meets Poldark in this sweeping LGBTQIA+ Regency romance from award-winning author KJ Charles

Abandoned by his father as a small child, Sir Gareth Inglis has grown up prickly, cold, and well-used to disappointment. Even so, he longs for a connection, falling headfirst into a passionate anonymous affair that's over almost as quickly as it began. Bitter at the sudden rejection, Gareth has little time to lick his wounds: his father has died, leaving him the family title, a rambling manor on the remote Romney Marsh...and the den of cutthroats and thieves that make its intricate waterways their home.

Joss Doomsday has run the Doomsday smuggling clan since he was a boy. His family is his life...which is why when the all-too-familiar new baronet testifies against Joss's sister for a hanging offense, Joss acts fast, blackmailing Gareth with the secret of their relationship to force him to recant. Their reunion is anything but happy and the path forward everything but smooth, yet after the dust settles, neither can stay away. It's a long road from there—full of danger and mysteries to be solved—yet somehow, along the way, this well-mannered gentleman may at last find true love with the least likely of scoundrels.]]>
331 K.J. Charles 1728255856 Vaibhav 4 queer-rep, women-author 4.08 2023 The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen (The Doomsday Books, #1)
author: K.J. Charles
name: Vaibhav
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/21
date added: 2024/03/21
shelves: queer-rep, women-author
review:

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