Steven's bookshelf: all

Steven's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 30 Apr 2025 16:52:23 -0700 60 Steven's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Americanah 15796700 477 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Steven 5 favorites 4.32 2013

author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Steven
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: favorites
review:
What a chef’s kiss of a book and a chef’s kiss of an ending.
]]> Der Killer: Gesamtausgabe 1 99766429 Der Leser begleitet den Berufsmörder, seine Überlegungen, sein Handeln., lernt ihn kennen, betrachtet in Rückblicken sein Leben, gewöhnt sich an seine Gegenwart, ertappt sich womöglich bei stillen Sympathiebekundungen...]]> 320 Matz 3965820214 Steven 0 to-read 2.92 2008 Der Killer: Gesamtausgabe 1

author: Matz
name: Steven
average rating: 2.92
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Grand Union 43608928 A dazzling collection of short fiction, more than half of which have never been published before, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and Swing Time

Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically-respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. With ten extraordinary new stories complemented by a selection of her most lauded pieces for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta, GRAND UNION explores a wide range of subjects, from first loves to cultural despair, as well as the desire to be the subject of your own experience. In captivating prose, she contends with race, class, relationships, and gender roles in a world that feels increasingly divided.

Nothing is off limits, and everything--when captured by Smith's brilliant gaze--feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced, and utterly original, GRAND UNION highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do.]]> 246 Zadie Smith 0525558993 Steven 0 to-read 3.27 2019

author: Zadie Smith
name: Steven
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> NW 13537891 NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.]]> 296 Zadie Smith 0241144140 Steven 0 to-read 3.49 2012

author: Zadie Smith
name: Steven
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Swing Time 28390369
Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them. Moving from northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time.]]> 453 Zadie Smith 0241144159 Steven 0 to-read 3.55 2016 Swing Time

author: Zadie Smith
name: Steven
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Jungle 41681
When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial edition edited out much of the ethnic flavor of the original, as well as some of the goriest descriptions of the meat-packing industry and much of Sinclair's most pointed social and political commentary.

The text of this new edition is as it appeared in the original uncensored edition of 1905.
It contains the full 36 chapters as originally published, rather than the 31 of the expurgated edition.

A new foreword describes the discovery in the 1980s of the original edition and its subsequent suppression, and a new introduction places the novel in historical context by explaining the pattern of censorship in the shorter commercial edition.]]> 335 Upton Sinclair 1884365302 Steven 5
4.75/5 (first couple chapters were a little hard to get into, but once chapter 3 hits…oof)]]> 3.77 1906 The Jungle

author: Upton Sinclair
name: Steven
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1906
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves:
review:
The “Requiem for a Dream�� of books that influenced actual factory law (as per my APUSH key terms), speaks on animal products, capitalism, sex work, religion, and socialism. The debate amongst the party in the last chapter definitely provides the better argument for the merging of socialism and Christianity that I wish more people would read (even if you suffer the heartbreak of Jurgis to get there).

4.75/5 (first couple chapters were a little hard to get into, but once chapter 3 hits…oof)
]]> The Old Man and the Sea 2165 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

This short novel, already a modern classic, is the superbly told, tragic story of a Cuban fisherman in the Gulf Stream and the giant Marlin he kills and loses—specifically referred to in the citation accompanying the author's Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.]]> 96 Ernest Hemingway 0684830493 Steven 5 favorites 3.81 1952 The Old Man and the Sea

author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Steven
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: favorites
review:
Damn, high school me was definitely a shark. Ten years later, I finally understand why this is Hemingway’s masterpiece of fiction.
]]> Oil! 54847 Oil! Upton Sinclair fashioned a novel out of the oil scandals of the Harding administration, providing in the process a detailed picture of the development of the oil industry in Southern California. Bribery of public officials, class warfare, and international rivalry over oil production are the context for Sinclair's story of a genial independent oil developer and his son, whose sympathy with the oilfield workers and socialist organizers fuels a running debate with his father. Senators, small investors, oil magnates, a Hollywood film star, and a crusading evangelist people the pages of this lively novel.]]> 528 Upton Sinclair 0520207270 Steven 0 to-read 3.74 1926 Oil!

author: Upton Sinclair
name: Steven
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1926
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> How the Irish Became White 305686 248 Noel Ignatiev 0415918251 Steven 0 to-read 3.74 1995

author: Noel Ignatiev
name: Steven
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Souls of Black Folk: The Unabridged Classic (Clydesdale Classics)]]> 220361217 Enduring Liturature Illuminated by Practical Scholarship

A revolutionary collection of essays about the African-American experience at the turn of the twentieth century.

This Enriched Classic Edition includes:

A concise introduction that gives readers important background information

A chronology of the author's life and work

A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context

An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations

Detailed explanatory notes

Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work

Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction

A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience

Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.

Series edited by Cynthia Brantley Johnson

]]> 150 W.E.B. Du Bois Steven 0 to-read 0.0 1903 The Souls of Black Folk: The Unabridged Classic (Clydesdale Classics)

author: W.E.B. Du Bois
name: Steven
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1903
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Crime and Punishment 7144 671 Fyodor Dostoevsky Steven 5 favorites 4.26 1866

author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Steven
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1866
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Animal Farm 7613
The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon.

One night, all the animals at Mr. Jones' Manor Farm assemble in a barn to hear old Major, a pig, describe a dream he had about a world where all animals live free from the tyranny of their human masters. Old Major dies soon after the meeting, but the animals �� inspired by his philosophy of Animalism �� plot a rebellion against Jones.

Two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, prove themselves important figures and planners of this dangerous enterprise. When Jones forgets to feed the animals, the revolution occurs, and Jones and his men are chased off the farm. Manor Farm is renamed Animal Farm, and the Seven Commandments of Animalism are painted on the barn wall...]]> 129 George Orwell Steven 5 favorites 3.90 1945

author: George Orwell
name: Steven
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1945
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves: favorites
review:
I don’t know what gift/curse of foresight Orwell had in the 1940s but damn
]]> The Red Pony 8732 95 John Steinbeck Steven 4 3.49 1933

author: John Steinbeck
name: Steven
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1933
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves:
review:

]]> A Tale of Two Cities 1953 A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author’s novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes—imprisonment, injustice, social anarchy, resurrection, and the renunciation that fosters renewal.]]> 489 Charles Dickens 0141439602 Steven 4 3.86 1859

author: Charles Dickens
name: Steven
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1859
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves:
review:
This isn’t like the Garfield movie at all.
]]> Death of a Salesman 12898 'For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.'

Willy Loman has been a salesman for 34 years. At 60, he is cast aside, his usefulness now exhausted. With no future to dream about he must face the crushing disappointments of his past. He takes one final brave action, but is he heroic at last?, or a self-deluding fool?]]> 144 Arthur Miller 0435233076 Steven 4
4.25/5]]> 3.57 1949 Death of a Salesman

author: Arthur Miller
name: Steven
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1949
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves:
review:
Found out yesterday that John Mulaney did a bit with 11 Willy Lomans and that orange peel speech is going to live in my head rent free.

4.25/5
]]> Stag Dance 215362032 In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones�� imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,�� a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,�� a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.]]> 304 Torrey Peters 0593595645 Steven 0 to-read 4.04 2025

author: Torrey Peters
name: Steven
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Boy Parts 49083140
Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention��

Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.]]> 304 Eliza Clark 1910312649 Steven 4
4/5]]> 3.74 2020 Boy Parts

author: Eliza Clark
name: Steven
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/15
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves:
review:
This book is meant to be read with “American Psycho�� “Nightcrawler�� and “Von Dutch�� in the background, and I will NOT be taking questions as to why.

4/5
]]> The Bee Sting 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

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

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Steven 5 favorites 3.92 2023 The Bee Sting

author: Paul Murray
name: Steven
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: favorites
review:
Between this, Another Country, Demon Copperfield, and Tricks Every Boy Can Do, I think I’ve discovered my new favorite genre of story: domestic dysfunction.
]]> Undermajordomo Minor 25089757
Undermajordomo Minor is an ink-black comedy of manners, an adventure, and a mystery, and a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behaviour, but above all it is a love story. And Lucy must be careful, for love is a violent thing.]]> 352 Patrick deWitt 1770894144 Steven 5 summer-2019, favorites 3.74 2015 Undermajordomo Minor

author: Patrick deWitt
name: Steven
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: summer-2019, favorites
review:

]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Steven 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Intermezzo

author: Sally Rooney
name: Steven
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)]]> 52397
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.]]> 345 Octavia E. Butler 0446675504 Steven 4
“God is change��

This line is often repeated by the narrator/journalist/preacher’s daughter Lauren, and while I disagree with it based on my own literal religious beliefs, I can’t stop thinking about how prevalent it is. Translations of the Bible, descendants of Abraham’s two sons, how xenophobic nationalists weaponize their faith against marginalized communities. Mix it with some of the most prophetic/Simpsonesque writing for 2024 and 2025 (written in 1993) and you’ve got a good read.]]> 4.21 1993 Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)

author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Steven
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves:
review:
4.25/5

“God is change��

This line is often repeated by the narrator/journalist/preacher’s daughter Lauren, and while I disagree with it based on my own literal religious beliefs, I can’t stop thinking about how prevalent it is. Translations of the Bible, descendants of Abraham’s two sons, how xenophobic nationalists weaponize their faith against marginalized communities. Mix it with some of the most prophetic/Simpsonesque writing for 2024 and 2025 (written in 1993) and you’ve got a good read.
]]> The Library at Mount Char 26892110
After all, she was a normal American herself, once.

That was a long time ago, of course—before the time she calls “adoption day,�� when she and a dozen other children found themselves being raised by a man they learned to call Father.

Father could do strange things. He could call light from darkness. Sometimes he raised the dead. And when he was disobeyed, the consequences were terrible.

In the years since Father took her in, Carolyn hasn't gotten out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father's ancient Pelapi customs. They've studied the books in his library and learned some of the secrets behind his equally ancient power.

Sometimes, they've wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God.

Now, Father is missing. And if God truly is dead, the only thing that matters is who will inherit his library—and with it, power over all of creation.

As Carolyn gathers the tools she needs for the battle to come, fierce competitors for this prize align against her.

But Carolyn can win. She's sure of it. What she doesn't realize is that her victory may come at an unacceptable price—because in becoming a God, she's forgotten a great deal about being human.]]> 390 Scott Hawkins 0553418629 Steven 0 to-read 4.06 2015 The Library at Mount Char

author: Scott Hawkins
name: Steven
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Devil All the Time 10108463 The Devil All the Time follows a cast of characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.�� There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.]]> 261 Donald Ray Pollock 038553504X Steven 0 to-read 4.13 2011 The Devil All the Time

author: Donald Ray Pollock
name: Steven
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity]]> 58169 Where do ideas come from?

In Catching the Big Fish, internationally acclaimed filmmaker David Lynch provides a rare window into his methods as an artist, his personal working style, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

Lynch describes the experience of "diving within" and "catching" ideas like fish - and then preparing them for television or movie screens, and other mediums in which he works, such as painting, music, and design. Lynch writes for the first time about his more than three-decade commitment to Transcendental Meditation and the difference it has made in his creative process.

In brief chapters, Lynch explains the development of his ideas - where they came from, how he grasps them, and which ones appeal to him the most. He specifically discusses how he puts his thoughts into action and how he engages with others around him. Finally, he considers the self and the surrounding world - and how the process of "diving within" that has so deeply affected his own work can directly benefit others.

Catching the Big Fish comes as a revelation to the legion of fans who have longed to better understand Lynch's personal vision. And it is equally intriguing to those who wonder how they can nurture their own creativity.]]> 181 David Lynch 1585425400 Steven 4
Also, shoutout Jess for the rec :)]]> 3.78 2006 Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

author: David Lynch
name: Steven
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:
Yeah this man might be the GOAT of artists if not people. RIP.

Also, shoutout Jess for the rec :)
]]> Create Dangerously 36436073 'To create today is to create dangerously'

Camus argues passionately that the artist has a responsibility to challenge, provoke and speak up for those who cannot in this powerful speech, accompanied here by two others.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.]]> 58 Albert Camus 024133912X Steven 4 3.84 1957 Create Dangerously

author: Albert Camus
name: Steven
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1957
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous]]> 41880609 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born �� a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam �� and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.]]> 246 Ocean Vuong 0525562028 Steven 5
I expected this to be an emotionally crushing read, but I didn’t expect it to make me want to listen to 50 Cent as soon as I finished reading it]]> 4.05 2019 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

author: Ocean Vuong
name: Steven
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves:
review:
4.75/5 (could be a perfect score after reading the actual text and not just listening to it to and from work)

I expected this to be an emotionally crushing read, but I didn’t expect it to make me want to listen to 50 Cent as soon as I finished reading it
]]> The Stranger 49552 The Stranger has long been considered a classic of twentieth-century literature. Le Monde ranks it as number one on its "100 Books of the Century" list. Through this story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."]]> 123 Albert Camus Steven 5 4.04 1942 The Stranger

author: Albert Camus
name: Steven
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1942
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves:
review:
4.5/5 this was for antiheroes like Caulfield, Bickle, and a bit of Bateman. Haunting depiction of apathy that works as the nihilistic cousin to My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 36552920
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522115 Steven 4
4.25/5]]> 3.57 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation

author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Steven
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
review:
This joins the same category as Night and Brave New World for “hauntingly beautiful endings that will live in my head rent free forever.��

4.25/5
]]> As I Lay Dying 77013 As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members -- including Addie herself -- as well as others; the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic.

This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.]]> 288 William Faulkner Steven 5 summer-2019, favorites 3.71 1930

author: William Faulkner
name: Steven
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1930
rating: 5
read at: 2019/05/26
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: summer-2019, favorites
review:

]]> Sing, Unburied, Sing 32920226 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781501126062

In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers.

Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.]]> 285 Jesmyn Ward Steven 5 2024-ranked, favorites 4.00 2017

author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Steven
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: 2024-ranked, favorites
review:
Heard this described as Morrison meets Faulkner. Needs to be part of the literaty canon stat if it isn’t already.
]]> Little Fires Everywhere 34273236
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned �� from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren �� an enigmatic artist and single mother �� who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother–daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town �� and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost . . .]]> 338 Celeste Ng 0735224293 Steven 5 2024-ranked, favorites 4.05 2017 Little Fires Everywhere

author: Celeste Ng
name: Steven
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/12
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: 2024-ranked, favorites
review:
One of the easiest 5 stars I think I’ve ever given.
]]> Bone: The Complete Edition 92143 This is a previously-published edition of ISBN 9781888963144.

An American graphic novel first! The complete 1300 page epic from start to finish in one deluxe trade paperback.

Three modern cartoon cousins get lost in a pre-technological valley, spending a year there making new friends and out-running dangerous enemies. After being run out of Boneville, the three Bone cousins, Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone are separated and lost in a vast uncharted desert. One by one they find their way into a deep forested valley filled with wonderful and terrifying creatures. It will be the longest -- but funniest -- year of their lives.]]> 1332 Jeff Smith Steven 5 favorites 4.45 1991 Bone: The Complete Edition

author: Jeff Smith
name: Steven
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Complete Maus 15195
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust�� (The New York Times).

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.]]> 296 Art Spiegelman 0141014083 Steven 5 favorites 4.57 1980 The Complete Maus

author: Art Spiegelman
name: Steven
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Home Fire 33621427
Then Eamonn enters the sisters�� lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to—or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Suddenly, two families�� fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will we make in the name of love?

The suspenseful and heartbreaking story of an immigrant family driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences ]]> 276 Kamila Shamsie 0735217688 Steven 5 2024-ranked, favorites 4.00 2017 Home Fire

author: Kamila Shamsie
name: Steven
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/09
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: 2024-ranked, favorites
review:

]]> To Kill a Mockingbird 2657 "Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man's struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

"To Kill A Mockingbird" became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.]]> 323 Harper Lee 0060935464 Steven 4
3.75/5]]> 4.25 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird

author: Harper Lee
name: Steven
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1960
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves:
review:
On reread, now that so much has happened since my freshman year of high school (both in myself and in the world) I can honestly say that, despite the major (and their are some major) flaws in how some of the attitudes and depictions of events in this book can be construed, nothing has captured being a child and getting hit with a dose of reality quite like the unassuming narration of Scout.

3.75/5
]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Steven 5 2024-ranked, favorites
Update: read this the day before Christmas Eve, this definitely hits better on a gloomy December day.]]> 4.13 2021 Small Things Like These

author: Claire Keegan
name: Steven
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: 2024-ranked, favorites
review:
Short enough for me to reread the actual week of Christmas. Love the story and found the history of what’s being told fascinating, but might not have been in the headspace for slow drama (even at less than 120 pages)

Update: read this the day before Christmas Eve, this definitely hits better on a gloomy December day.
]]> Night 1617 Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must simply never be allowed to happen again.]]> 120 Elie Wiesel 0374500010 Steven 5 favorites 4.38 1956 Night

author: Elie Wiesel
name: Steven
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1956
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: favorites
review:
Hadn’t read since school, but years later and days before teaching it, I still remember the corpse in the mirror.
]]> The Good Lord Bird 16171272 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

From the bestselling author of The Color of Water and Song Yet Sung comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive.

Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857, when the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry’s master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave town—with Brown, who believes he’s a girl.

Over the ensuing months, Henry—whom Brown nicknames Little Onion—conceals his true identity as he struggles to stay alive. Eventually Little Onion finds himself with Brown at the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—one of the great catalysts for the Civil War.

An absorbing mixture of history and imagination, and told with McBride’s meticulous eye for detail and character, The Good Lord Bird is both a rousing adventure and a moving exploration of identity and survival.]]> 417 James McBride 1594486344 Steven 5 2024-ranked, favorites 3.90 2013

author: James McBride
name: Steven
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/17
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: 2024-ranked, favorites
review:
Equal parts funny, tragic, and shocking.
]]> Sula 11346 174 Toni Morrison 0452283868 Steven 5 2024-ranked, favorites 4.05 1973 Sula

author: Toni Morrison
name: Steven
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/04
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: 2024-ranked, favorites
review:
Toni Morrison takes a story of less than 200 pages about two friends in a small town and fills it with so much searing substance that it feels like eating a six-course meal. Definitely one to reread to get even more out of it.
]]> A Visit from the Goon Squad 7331435
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.]]> 274 Jennifer Egan 0307592839 Steven 5 favorites 3.70 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad

author: Jennifer Egan
name: Steven
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/20
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: favorites
review:
Once in awhile I read a book that inspires creativity. This is one of them.
]]> Another Country 38474
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.]]> 448 James Baldwin 0141186372 Steven 5 favorites 4.32 1962 Another Country

author: James Baldwin
name: Steven
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: favorites
review:
When people wonder about the books that fall under the “Great American Novel�� category, this should join the Mount Rushmore of books like Gatsby and East of Eden.
]]> There There 36692478 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525520375.

Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.]]> 294 Tommy Orange Steven 5 favorites 3.98 2018

author: Tommy Orange
name: Steven
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/10
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Sisters Brothers 9850443
With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters - losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life - and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West, and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.]]> 328 Patrick deWitt 0062041266 Steven 5 favorites 3.84 2011 The Sisters Brothers

author: Patrick deWitt
name: Steven
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> East of Eden 4406
Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.]]> 601 John Steinbeck 0142000655 Steven 5 2024-ranked, favorites 4.41 1952

author: John Steinbeck
name: Steven
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/17
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: 2024-ranked, favorites
review:
Jordan Kakish has a goated fav book
]]> Wise Blood 48467 This is an alternate-cover edition for ISBN 9780374530631)

The American short story master Flannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom.

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.

This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.]]> 256 Flannery O'Connor 0374530637 Steven 5 2024-ranked, favorites 3.84 1952 Wise Blood

author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Steven
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/15
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: 2024-ranked, favorites
review:
Finished this on a work day. That’s how you know it’s some good stuff.
]]> Emma 6969 The newest edition is here. Another alternate cover can be found here.

Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen's most captivating and vivid characters. Beautiful, spoilt, vain and irrepressibly witty, Emma organizes the lives of the inhabitants of her sleepy little village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect.]]> 474 Jane Austen 0141439580 Steven 5 favorites 4.05 1815 Emma

author: Jane Austen
name: Steven
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1815
rating: 5
read at: 2020/03/21
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Road 6288
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,�� are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.]]> 241 Cormac McCarthy 0307265439 Steven 5 favorites 3.99 2006 The Road

author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Steven
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: favorites
review:
Considering how hard these past couple weeks have been, this really is a bit of a comfort book for me. It’s also the third time I’ve read it and the third time I’ve shed tears. Hands down my fav McCarthy.
]]> Macbeth 8852
This shocking tragedy - a violent caution to those seeking power for its own sake - is, to this day, one of Shakespeare’s most popular and influential masterpieces.]]> 249 William Shakespeare 0743477103 Steven 5 tutor, favorites 3.90 1623 Macbeth

author: William Shakespeare
name: Steven
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1623
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: tutor, favorites
review:

]]> The Great Gatsby 4671 The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher.

This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author’s own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]> 180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 Steven 5 favorites 3.93 1925 The Great Gatsby

author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Steven
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Moby-Dick or, The Whale 153747 "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."

So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

This edition of Moby-Dick, which reproduces the definitive text of the novel, includes invaluable explanatory notes, along with maps, illustrations, and a glossary of nautical terms.]]> 720 Herman Melville 0142437247 Steven 0 to-read 3.53 1851 Moby-Dick or, The Whale

author: Herman Melville
name: Steven
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1851
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Feral Creatures (Hollow Kingdom, #2)]]> 56222205
In this stunning follow-up to Hollow Kingdom�� and Seattle Times / Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association bestseller�� , the animal kingdom's "favorite apocalyptic hero" is back with a renewed sense of hope for humanity, ready to take on a world ravaged by a viral pandemic (Helen Macdonald).

Once upon an apocalypse, there lived an obscenely handsome American crow named S.T. . . .
��
When the world last checked-in with its favorite Cheeto addict, the planet had been overrun by flesh-hungry beasts, and nature had started re-claiming her territory from humankind. S.T., the intrepid crow, alongside his bloodhound-bestie Dennis, had set about saving pets that had become trapped in their homes after humanity went the way of the dodo.
��
That is, dear reader, until S.T. stumbled upon something so rare—and so precious—that he vowed to do everything in his power to safeguard what could, quite literally, be humanity's last hope for survival. But in a wild world plagued by prejudiced animals, feather-raising environments, new threats so terrifying they make zombies look like baby bunnies, and a horrendous dearth of cheesy snacks, what's a crow to do?
��
Why, wing it on another big-hearted, death-defying adventure, that's what! Joined by a fabulous new cast of animal characters, S.T. faces many new challenges plus his biggest one parenthood.]]> 368 Kira Jane Buxton 1538735245 Steven 0 to-read 4.05 2021 Feral Creatures (Hollow Kingdom, #2)

author: Kira Jane Buxton
name: Steven
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hollow Kingdom (Hollow Kingdom, #1)]]> 42839296 One pet crow fights to save humanity from an apocalypse in this uniquely hilarious debut from a genre-bending literary author.

S.T., a domesticated crow, is a bird of simple pleasures: hanging out with his owner Big Jim, trading insults with Seattle's wild crows (those idiots), and enjoying the finest food humankind has to offer: Cheetos ®.

Then Big Jim's eyeball falls out of his head, and S.T. starts to feel like something isn't quite right. His most tried-and-true remedies--from beak-delivered beer to the slobbering affection of Big Jim's loyal but dim-witted dog, Dennis--fail to cure Big Jim's debilitating malady. S.T. is left with no choice but to abandon his old life and venture out into a wild and frightening new world with his trusty steed Dennis, where he discovers that the neighbors are devouring each other and the local wildlife is abuzz with rumors of dangerous new predators roaming Seattle. Humanity's extinction has seemingly arrived, and the only one determined to save it is a foul-mouthed crow whose knowledge of the world around him comes from his TV-watching education.

Hollow Kingdom is a humorous, big-hearted, and boundlessly beautiful romp through the apocalypse and the world that comes after, where even a cowardly crow can become a hero.]]> 308 Kira Jane Buxton 1538745828 Steven 0 to-read 3.81 2019 Hollow Kingdom (Hollow Kingdom, #1)

author: Kira Jane Buxton
name: Steven
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Madonna in a Fur Coat 27793819 The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.

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

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

'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian]]> 168 Sabahattin Ali 014198127X Steven 0 to-read 4.19 1943 Madonna in a Fur Coat

author: Sabahattin Ali
name: Steven
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Open Water 53414230
At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.]]> 145 Caleb Azumah Nelson 0241448778 Steven 0 to-read 4.03 2021 Open Water

author: Caleb Azumah Nelson
name: Steven
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Luster 51541496
Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.]]> 227 Raven Leilani 0374194327 Steven 0 to-read 3.51 2020 Luster

author: Raven Leilani
name: Steven
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Snow Child 33597976 423 Eowyn Ivey Steven 0 to-read 4.10 2012

author: Eowyn Ivey
name: Steven
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Book of Love 157981682 The Book of Love showcases Kelly Link at the height of her powers, channeling potent magic and attuned to all varieties of love—from friendship to romance to abiding family ties—with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary derring-do. Readers will find joy (and a little terror) and an affirmation that love goes on, even when we cannot.

Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are.

With them in the room is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of the bargain their music teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.]]> 628 Kelly Link 0812996585 Steven 0 to-read 3.45 2024 The Book of Love

author: Kelly Link
name: Steven
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Trust 58210933 An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.]]> 402 Hernan Diaz 0593420314 Steven 3 3.77 2022 Trust

author: Hernan Diaz
name: Steven
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves:
review:
3.25/5 glad I finished this, and felt like I really enjoyed it by the end, but I also understand if readers struggle to get past the first two purposefully repetitive parts.
]]> <![CDATA[The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3)]]> 31817749
The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.

Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe.

For Nassun, her mother's mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.

The remarkable conclusion to the post-apocalyptic and highly acclaimed trilogy that began with the multi-award-nominated The Fifth Season.]]> 416 N.K. Jemisin Steven 0 to-read 4.32 2017 The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3)

author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Steven
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)]]> 26228034 410 N.K. Jemisin Steven 0 to-read 4.27 2016

author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Steven
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> Vineland 59721
An old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, storms into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Soon Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, go into hiding while Vond begins a relationship with Zoyd's ex-wife and uses Prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she had.

Part daytime drama, part political thriller, Vineland is a strange evocation of a twentieth-century America headed for a less than harmonic future.]]> 480 Thomas Pynchon 3499136287 Steven 0 to-read 3.75 1990

author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Steven
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Grief Is the Thing with Feathers]]> 25334576
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described sentimental bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal.

In this extraordinary debut - part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth, Grief is the Thing with Feathers marks the arrival of a thrilling new talent.]]> 114 Max Porter 0571323766 Steven 4 3.85 2015

author: Max Porter
name: Steven
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
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review:

]]> Foster 8143909
Winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize, Foster is now published in a revised and expanded version. Beautiful, sad and eerie, it is a story of astonishing emotional depth, showcasing Claire Keegan's great accomplishment and talent.]]> 89 Claire Keegan 0571255655 Steven 5
Also just realized this was the book that The Quiet Girl is based on]]> 4.32 2010 Foster

author: Claire Keegan
name: Steven
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves:
review:
Absolute gut punch of a 50 pager

Also just realized this was the book that The Quiet Girl is based on
]]> Babel 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 Steven 0 to-read 4.17 2022 Babel

author: R.F. Kuang
name: Steven
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Lessons in Chemistry 58065033 390 Bonnie Garmus Steven 0 to-read 4.23 2022

author: Bonnie Garmus
name: Steven
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> Daisy Jones & The Six 40597810 Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n�� roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.]]> 368 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1524798622 Steven 0 to-read 4.20 2019

author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Steven
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Vanishing Half 51791252
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.]]> 343 Brit Bennett 0525536299 Steven 0 to-read 4.11 2020 The Vanishing Half

author: Brit Bennett
name: Steven
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Remains of the Day 28921 Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN 0571225381 here.

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper.]]> 258 Kazuo Ishiguro Steven 0 to-read 4.14 1989 The Remains of the Day

author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Steven
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 Steven 5 4.46 2022

author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Steven
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction]]> 35721089
Now a Major Motion Picture

What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets. David Sheff traces the first warning signs: the denial, the three a.m. phone calls—is it Nic? the police? the hospital? His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself. But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every treatment that might save his son. And he refused to give up on Nic.]]> 352 David Sheff 1328974715 Steven 0 to-read 4.27 2007 Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

author: David Sheff
name: Steven
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Deadwood 52423 365 Pete Dexter 1400079713 Steven 0 to-read 4.01 1986

author: Pete Dexter
name: Steven
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> David Copperfield 58696 882 Charles Dickens Steven 5
Dickens has always seemed intimidating aside from Christmas Carol (especially his thousand page tomes). I read this before I picked up Demon Copperhead, and I’m glad I did. So many memorable characters that stuck with me more than even Oliver Twist. Dora, Steerforth, those bastards Uriah and the Murdstones, Peggoty, and Traddles. This really falls under the semi-autobiographical epic that I’m starting to eat up, and that opening line stuck with me all throughout my time reading, and in the context of everything that happened (and the context of my own life) I’d love to have it inked on me somewhere.]]> 4.02 1850 David Copperfield

author: Charles Dickens
name: Steven
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1850
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves:
review:
4.5/5

Dickens has always seemed intimidating aside from Christmas Carol (especially his thousand page tomes). I read this before I picked up Demon Copperhead, and I’m glad I did. So many memorable characters that stuck with me more than even Oliver Twist. Dora, Steerforth, those bastards Uriah and the Murdstones, Peggoty, and Traddles. This really falls under the semi-autobiographical epic that I’m starting to eat up, and that opening line stuck with me all throughout my time reading, and in the context of everything that happened (and the context of my own life) I’d love to have it inked on me somewhere.
]]> Let Us Descend 87556695
“‘Let us descend,�� the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’�� Inferno, Dante Alighieri

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.]]> 305 Jesmyn Ward 198210449X Steven 0 to-read 3.68 2023

author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Steven
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> In Cold Blood 168642
As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.]]> 343 Truman Capote 0679745580 Steven 0 to-read 4.08 1966

author: Truman Capote
name: Steven
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

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

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Steven 0 to-read 4.22 2024 Martyr!

author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Steven
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> The Bella Vista: Poems 215537039 The Bella Vista, is inspired by the piano works of Harold Budd on the album La Bella Vista, and childhood memories of her father’s own improvised piano reveries in their LA apartment.��

For twenty years, Emma has pursued music as her primary medium, evoking dreamy abstraction, exploring textural maximalism, and embracing her own vulnerability with a guitar, a piano, and the sound of her voice. With The Bella Vista, she turns to language as the best and perhaps only tool suitable to express, in her words, “the tenderness and brutality of romantic love.�� Written on the road and in the air between tour locations, the chronological, self-referential poems of The Bella Vista follows a relationship from its enthralling genesis through its twisted convulsions and the devastation of its dissolution then, eventually, to a sort of peace. The collection is a concept album, an addiction memoir, a family tree, and a love letter all at once—to music, to mistakes, to womanhood; to cross-country drives and other artists and the long road to finding oneself.]]> 110 Emma Ruth Rundle 1961884321 Steven 0 to-read 3.86 The Bella Vista: Poems

author: Emma Ruth Rundle
name: Steven
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> Wild Houses 128714412 A darkly funny and deeply moving debut novel about crimes of desperation, dreams abandoned, and small-town secrets that won’t stay buried

As Ballina in the west of Ireland prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time dealer Cillian English and County Mayo's fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night, he finds Doll—Cillian's bruised, sullen, teenage brother—in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins, goaded by his dead mother's dog, and struck by spinning lights, Dev is unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy.

Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling that something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night, and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.]]> 272 Colin Barrett 0802160948 Steven 4 3.68 2024 Wild Houses

author: Colin Barrett
name: Steven
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Steven 5
Also, LOVE how this read less like a response to Twain’s writing, but more like a love letter to language and the importance of having a voice.]]> 4.46 2024 James

author: Percival Everett
name: Steven
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/30
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves:
review:
Needs to be in a text set with Twain’s book. Would love to see how different people react to the different changes.

Also, LOVE how this read less like a response to Twain’s writing, but more like a love letter to language and the importance of having a voice.
]]> Make Sure You Die Screaming 211004043 An electrifying debut about a nonbinary corporate burnout embarking on a road trip from Chicago to Arkansas to find their conspiracy-theorist father, who has gone missing—for fans of Detransition Baby and Chain-Gang All-Stars

The newly nameless narrator of Make Sure You Die Screaming has rejected the gender binary, has flamed out with a vengeance at their corporate gig, is most likely brain damaged from a major tussle with their now ex-boyfriend, and is on a bender to end all benders.

A call from their mother with the news that their MAGA-friendly, conspiracy-theorist father has gone missing launches the narrator from Chicago to deep red Arkansas in a stolen car. Along the way, the narrator and their new bestie—a self-proclaimed "garbage goth" with her own emotional baggage (and someone on her tail)—unpack the narrator’s childhood and a recent personal loss that they refuse to face head-on.

An unflinching interrogation of class rage, economic (im)mobility, gender expression, and the rot at the heart of capitalism, Make Sure You Die Screaming is the loud, funny, tragic, suspenseful road trip novel of our times.]]> 224 Zee Carlstrom 1250365678 Steven 0 to-read 3.79 2025

author: Zee Carlstrom
name: Steven
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> Big Chief 214152295 There There meets The Night Watchman in this gripping literary debut about power and corruption, family, and facing the ghosts of the past.

Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack’s reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go—and what they will sacrifice—to win it all.��

But when an accident claims the life of Mitch’s mentor, a power broker in the reservation’s political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation’s descent into violence.��

Thrilling and timely, Big Chief is an unforgettable story about the search for belonging—to an ancestral and spiritual home, to a family, and to a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.]]> 320 Jon Hickey 1668046466 Steven 0 to-read 3.75 2025 Big Chief

author: Jon Hickey
name: Steven
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
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]]> Penitence 211003837 For readers of Ann Patchett and Celeste Ng, Penitence is a poignant exploration of love and forgiveness. It’s a suspenseful, addictive page-turner filled with literary insight that compels readers to consider whether each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.

When a shocking murder occurs in the home of Angie and David Sheehan, their lives are shattered. Desperate to defend their family, they turn to small-town lawyer Martine Dumont for help, but Martine isn’t just legal counsel—she’s also the mother of Angie’s first love, Julian, a now-successful New York City criminal defense attorney. As Julian and Angie confront their shared past and long-buried guilt from a tragic accident years ago, they must navigate their own culpability and the unresolved feelings between them.

Spanning decades, from the ski slopes of rural Colorado to the streets of post-9/11 New York City and back again, Kristin Koval’s debut novel Penitence is an examination of the complexities of familial loyalty, the journey of redemption, and the profound experience of true forgiveness.]]> 320 Kristin Koval 1250342996 Steven 0 to-read 3.68 2025

author: Kristin Koval
name: Steven
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)]]> 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

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

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

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 387 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 Steven 0 to-read 4.62 2025 Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)

Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)

author: Suzanne Collins
name: Steven
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
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]]> The Buffalo Hunter Hunter 214565614 A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.]]> 448 Stephen Graham Jones 1668075083 Steven 0 to-read 4.23 2025 The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Steven
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
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]]> Death of the Author 214329001 The future of storytelling is here.

Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.

In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.

What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.]]> 448 Nnedi Okorafor 0063391155 Steven 0 to-read 4.04 2025 Death of the Author

author: Nnedi Okorafor
name: Steven
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> All the Water in the World 211003759 In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most �� love and work, community and knowledge �� will survive.]]> 304 Eiren Caffall 1250353521 Steven 0 to-read 3.56 2025 All the Water in the World

author: Eiren Caffall
name: Steven
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
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]]> Katabasis 210223811 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

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

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 400 R.F. Kuang Steven 0 to-read 4.03 2025 Katabasis

author: R.F. Kuang
name: Steven
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil]]> 215020997 ALL first edition copies will be signed by the author! Signed copies available while supplies last.

From V. E. Schwab, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: a new genre-defying novel about immortality and hunger.

This is a story about hunger.
1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada.
A young girl grows up wild and wily—her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice. She vows to have no regrets.

This is a story about love.
1827. London.
A young woman lives an idyllic but cloistered life on her family’s estate, until a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped off to London. Charlotte’s tender heart and seemingly impossible wishes are swept away by an invitation from a beautiful widow—but the price of freedom is higher than she could have imagined.

This is a story about rage.
2019. Boston.
College was supposed to be her chance to be someone new. That’s why Alice moved halfway across the world, leaving her old life behind. But after an out-of-character one-night stand leaves her questioning her past, her present, and her future, Alice throws herself into the hunt for answers . . . and revenge.

This is a story about life��
how it ends, and how it starts.

USA Today, 15 Most Anticipated of 2025
BookBub, Most Anticipated of 2025 (and Reader’s Pick)
Readers Digest, 20 Most Anticipated Books This Year
Paste Magazine, Most Anticipated Fantasy Books of 2025
BookRiot, Most Anticipated Books of 2025
Men's Health, 25 Best & Most Anticipated Books of 2025
The Nerd Daily, SFF to Devour in 2025
ŷ��, Readers' Most Anticipated Books of 2025]]> 560 Victoria E. Schwab 1035064642 Steven 0 to-read 4.39 2025 Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Steven
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
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]]> Atmosphere 220817728 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s Space Shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.]]> 352 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0593158717 Steven 0 to-read 4.45 2025 Atmosphere

author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Steven
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
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]]> The Emperor of Gladness 219848315 Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

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

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing �� formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness �� are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 416 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Steven 0 to-read 4.35 2025 The Emperor of Gladness

author: Ocean Vuong
name: Steven
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> Dream Count 219521090 A publishing event ten years in the making��a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists��the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until �� betrayed and brokenhearted �� she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America �� but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 059380273X Steven 0 to-read 3.93 2025 Dream Count

author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Steven
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> Wandering Stars 174147294
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

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

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.]]> 315 Tommy Orange 0593318250 Steven 5
That being said, I do have a family history of addiction, and from what I know from stories of how one side of my family was brought up, some of it has stemmed from trauma.

While Tommy Orange’s novel, There There, was a powerful overview of the generational trauma (whether it be abuse or addiction) in many native lives in Oakland, his sequel deals more personally with the impact of addiction by more closely observing the Red Feather/Bear Shield families. Love how Orange tackles the humanity of addicts, the different causes of addiction, and the identity of people trying to find themselves, whether it’s coping with their vices or learning how to move on from them. Would highly recommend There There if you haven’t already, and while I’d say I like it might be sliiiiiiiightly better than the sequel, Wandering Stars really hit me in the feels.]]> 3.83 2024

author: Tommy Orange
name: Steven
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves:
review:
Okay so…this will be a longer one. I have no history with being native (even if my parents have claimed I’m like 1/64th Abalone or some other obscure fraction). I have no generational systemic oppression and trauma seeing how I’m white as the new fallen snow.

That being said, I do have a family history of addiction, and from what I know from stories of how one side of my family was brought up, some of it has stemmed from trauma.

While Tommy Orange’s novel, There There, was a powerful overview of the generational trauma (whether it be abuse or addiction) in many native lives in Oakland, his sequel deals more personally with the impact of addiction by more closely observing the Red Feather/Bear Shield families. Love how Orange tackles the humanity of addicts, the different causes of addiction, and the identity of people trying to find themselves, whether it’s coping with their vices or learning how to move on from them. Would highly recommend There There if you haven’t already, and while I’d say I like it might be sliiiiiiiightly better than the sequel, Wandering Stars really hit me in the feels.
]]> Bullshit Jobs: A Theory 34466958 From bestselling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences.

Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.�� It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.

There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.

Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.]]> 335 David Graeber 150114331X Steven 0 to-read 4.03 2018 Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

author: David Graeber
name: Steven
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> The North Water 25666046 1859. A man joins a whaling ship bound for the Arctic Circle. Having left the British Army with his reputation in tatters, Patrick Sumner has little option but to accept the position of ship's surgeon on this ill-fated voyage. But when, deep into the journey, a cabin boy is discovered brutally killed, Sumner finds himself forced to act. Soon he will face an evil even greater than he had encountered at the siege of Delhi, in the shape of Henry Drax: harpooner, murderer, monster . . .]]> 255 Ian McGuire 1627795944 Steven 4 Dammit I want a pet bear 3.93 2016 The North Water

author: Ian McGuire
name: Steven
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves:
review:
Dammit I want a pet bear
]]> Severance 36348525
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]> 291 Ling Ma 0374261598 Steven 0 to-read 3.90 2018

author: Ling Ma
name: Steven
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> Our Evenings 209891406 From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.

Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.

Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

This is “one of our most gifted writers�� (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.]]> 496 Alan Hollinghurst 0593243064 Steven 0 to-read 3.92 2024 Our Evenings

author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Steven
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> The Outsiders 231804 The Outsiders is about two weeks in the life of a 14-year-old boy. The novel tells the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his struggles with right and wrong in a society in which he believes that he is an outsider. According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, even willing to rumble against a gang of socs for the sake of his fellow greasers--until one terrible night when his friend Johnny kills a soc. The murder gets under Ponyboy's skin, causing his bifurcated world to crumble and teaching him that pain feels the same whether a soc or a greaser.

Librarian note: This record is for one of the three editions published with different covers and with ISBN 0-140-38572-X / 978-0-14-038572-4. The records are for the 1988 cover (this record), the 1995 cover, and the 2008 cover which is also the current in-print cover.]]> 208 S.E. Hinton 0670532576 Steven 5
9/10]]> 4.13 1967 The Outsiders

author: S.E. Hinton
name: Steven
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves:
review:
Damn the ending was chef’s kiss

9/10
]]> <![CDATA[Illuminae (The Illuminae Files, #1)]]> 23395680
The year is 2575, and two rival mega-corporations are at war over a planet that’s little more than a speck at the edge of the universe. Now with enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra �� who are barely even talking to each other—are forced to evacuate with a hostile warship in hot pursuit.

But their problems are just getting started. A plague has broken out and is mutating with terrifying results; the fleet’s AI may actually be their enemy; and nobody in charge will say what’s really going on. As Kady hacks into a web of data to find the truth, it’s clear the only person who can help her is the ex-boyfriend she swore she’d never speak to again.

Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents �� including emails, maps, files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more �� Illuminae is the first book in a heart-stopping trilogy about lives interrupted, the price of truth, and the courage of everyday heroes.]]> 608 Amie Kaufman 0553499114 Steven 0 to-read 4.23 2015 Illuminae (The Illuminae Files, #1)

author: Amie Kaufman
name: Steven
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> The Nickel Boys 42270835 Author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.

Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.

The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead Steven 5 Did not expect that 4.25 2019 The Nickel Boys

author: Colson Whitehead
name: Steven
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
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Did not expect that
]]> The Secret History 70897
Truly deserving of the accolade Modern Classic, Donna Tartt's cult bestseller The Secret History is a remarkable achievement - both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.]]> 629 Donna Tartt 0140167773 Steven 0 to-read 4.25 1992

author: Donna Tartt
name: Steven
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia]]> 60784843 The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything.

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies--vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of European empire.

In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar, producing what would eventually become a doctoral thesis on the island's magic, slavery, and politics. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group made up of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber's final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research, and the culmination of ideas that he explored in his classic, bestselling works Debt and The Dawn of Everything (written with the archeologist David Wengrow).

Graeber explores how the proto-democratic practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. He illuminates the non-European origins of what we consider to be "Western" thought, and endeavors to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future.]]> 208 David Graeber 0374610193 Steven 0 to-read 3.32 2023 Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia

author: David Graeber
name: Steven
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
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]]>