Tony's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 08 Apr 2025 08:48:26 -0700 60 Tony's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Man in the Iron Mask (Trilogie des Mousquetaires #3.3)]]> 441751 D'Artagnan, once invincible, meet their destinies.]]> 656 Alexandre Dumas 0192838423 Tony 3 3.87 The Man in the Iron Mask (Trilogie des Mousquetaires #3.3)
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Tony
average rating: 3.87
book published:
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/08
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]]> <![CDATA[When the Women Come Out to Dance]]> 531818
In this first collection of short pieces, including two novella-length works, since his western anthology Tonto Woman, Leonard demonstrates the superb characterization, dead-on dialogue, vivid atmosphere, and driving plotting that have made him a household name.

Sparks
Hanging out at the Buena Vista
Chickasaw Charlie Hoke
When the women come out to dance
Fire in the hole
Karen makes out
Hurrah to Capt. Early
The Tonto woman
Tenkiller]]> 228 Elmore Leonard 0060083972 Tony 3 3.77 2001 When the Women Come Out to Dance
author: Elmore Leonard
name: Tony
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2008/07/01
date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> Starship Troopers 573824 224 Robert A. Heinlein 0450005739 Tony 4 4.00 1959 Starship Troopers
author: Robert A. Heinlein
name: Tony
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2000/01/01
date added: 2025/02/02
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This is still the only Heinlein book I have managed to finish...that has to say something...not sure what though....oh yeah...the fascism comes through plenty heavy...
]]> <![CDATA[Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox]]> 958318
How did the most precious color blue travel all the way from remote lapis mines in Afghanistan to Michelangelo’s brush? What is the connection between brown paint and ancient Egyptian mummies? Why did Robin Hood wear Lincoln green? In Color, Finlay explores the physical materials that color our world, such as precious minerals and insect blood, as well as the social and political meanings that color has carried through time.

Roman emperors used to wear togas dyed with a purple color that was made from an odorous Lebanese shellfish–which probably meant their scent preceded them. In the eighteenth century, black dye was called logwood and grew along the Spanish Main. Some of the first indigo plantations were started in America, amazingly enough, by a seventeen-year-old girl named Eliza. And the popular van Gogh painting White Roses at Washington’s National Gallery had to be renamed after a researcher discovered that the flowers were originally done in a pink paint that had faded nearly a century ago. Color is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotes–painted all the more dazzling by Finlay’s engaging style.

Embark upon a thrilling adventure with this intrepid journalist as she travels on a donkey along ancient silk trade routes; with the Phoenicians sailing the Mediterranean in search of a special purple shell that garners wealth, sustenance, and prestige; with modern Chilean farmers breeding and bleeding insects for their viscous red blood. The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright.]]> 0 Victoria Finlay 0340826320 Tony 3 3.94 2003 Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox
author: Victoria Finlay
name: Tony
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)]]> 4223
As Langdon and gifted French cryptologist Sophie Neveu sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci—clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.

Even more startling, the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion—a secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci—and he guarded a breathtaking historical secret. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle—while avoiding the faceless adversary who shadows their every move—the explosive, ancient truth will be lost forever.]]> 752 Dan Brown 0739326740 Tony 2 3.64 2003 The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)
author: Dan Brown
name: Tony
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> Wool - Holston (Wool, #1) 12287209
Or you'll get what you wish for.]]> 56 Hugh Howey Tony 4 4.14 2012 Wool - Holston (Wool, #1)
author: Hugh Howey
name: Tony
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2018/06/23
date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation. Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990-2000]]> 452158 223 Cherian George 981306546X Tony 0 to-read 4.08 2000 Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation. Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990-2000
author: Cherian George
name: Tony
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Discover your inner economist : use incentives to fall in love, survive your next meeting, and motivate your dentist]]> 11566704
Readers will also gain less selfish insights into how to be a good partner, neighbor and even citizen of the world. For instance, what is the best way to give to charity? The chapter title “How to Save the World—More Christmas Presents Won’t Help� makes a point that is every bit as personal as it is global.

Incentives are at the core of an economic approach to the world, but they don’t just come in cash. In fact, money can be a disincentive. Cowen shows why, for example, it doesn’t work to pay your kids to do the dishes. Other kinds of incentives—like making sure family members know they will be admired if they respect you—can work. Another non-monetary incentive? Try having everyone stand up in your next meeting if you don’t want anyone to drone on. Deeply felt incentives like pride in one’s work or a passing smile from a loved one, can be the most powerful of all, even while they operate alongside more mundane rewards such as money and free food.

Discover Your Inner Economist is an introduction to the science of economics that shows it to be built on notions that are already within all of us. While the implications of those ideas lead to Cowen’s often counterintuitive advice, their wisdom is presented in ordinary examples taken from home life, work life, and even vacation life� How do you get a good guide in a Moroccan bazaar?]]> 258 Tyler Cowen 1440631085 Tony 3 3.61 2007 Discover your inner economist : use incentives to fall in love, survive your next meeting, and motivate your dentist
author: Tyler Cowen
name: Tony
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2010/10/01
date added: 2024/09/23
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]]> Blindsight (Firefall, #1) 48484 Two months since the stars fell...

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune’s orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever’s out there isn’t talking to us. It’s talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won’t be needed, and a fainter hope she’ll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called “vampire,� recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist � an informational topologist with half his mind gone � as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find.

But you’d give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them…]]> 384 Peter Watts 0765312182 Tony 4 4.01 2006 Blindsight (Firefall, #1)
author: Peter Watts
name: Tony
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
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Craziest Sci fi I have read in a while. Some great planetary level body horror
]]> <![CDATA[The Queen of Spades and Other Stories]]> 97381 The Queen of Spades has long been acknowledged as one of the world's greatest short stories, in which Pushkin explores the nature of obsession. The Tales of Belkin are witty parodies of sentimentalism, while Peter the Great's Blackamoor is an early experiment with recreating the past. The Captain's Daughter is a novel-length masterpiece which combines historical fiction in the manner of Sir Walter Scott with the devices of the Russian fairy-tale. The Introduction provides close readings of the stories and places them in their European literary context.]]> 336 Alexander Pushkin 0192839543 Tony 3 4.16 1841 The Queen of Spades and Other Stories
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Tony
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1841
rating: 3
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> The Future 123163147 The bestselling, award-winning author ofĚýThe Power deliversĚýa dazzling tour de forceĚýwhereĚýa handful of friendsĚýplotĚýa daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it.

When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?

Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what's going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future?

Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.]]> 432 Naomi Alderman 166802568X Tony 4 3.82 2023 The Future
author: Naomi Alderman
name: Tony
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> The Chinese Groove 58978261
Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised branch of the Zheng family in Yunnan Province and living in the shadow of his widowed father’s grief, dreams of bigger things. Buoyed by an exuberant heart and his cousin Deng’s tall tales about the United States, Shelley heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome by the awesome powers of the "Chinese groove," a belief in the unspoken bonds between countrymen that transcend time and borders.

Upon arrival, Shelley is dismayed to find that his "rich uncle" is in fact his unemployed second cousin once removed and that the grand guest room he’d envisioned is but a crappy sofa. The indefinite stay he’d planned for? That has a firm two-week expiration date. Even worse, the loving family he hoped would embrace him is in shambles, shattered by a senseless tragedy that has cleaved the family in two. They want nothing to do with this youthful bounder who’s barged into their lives. Ever the optimist, Shelley concocts a plan to resuscitate his American dream by insinuating himself into the family. And, who knows, maybe he’ll even manage to bring them back together in the process.]]> 304 Kathryn Ma 1640095667 Tony 3 3.89 2023 The Chinese Groove
author: Kathryn Ma
name: Tony
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Form and Emptiness]]> 57004637 A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being

After the tragic death of his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house--a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.

At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where "things happen." He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.

And he meets his very own Book--a talking thing--who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.

With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.]]> 548 Ruth Ozeki 0399563644 Tony 3 4.01 2021 The Book of Form and Emptiness
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Tony
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness]]> 171681821
A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.� —Shannon Carlin, ,i>TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood� began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood� in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood� has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems� that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.]]> 400 Jonathan Haidt 0593655036 Tony 4 4.36 2024 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
author: Jonathan Haidt
name: Tony
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> The Art of Racing in the Rain 3153910
Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing, isn't simply about going fast. On the eve of his death, Enzo takes stock of his life, recalling all that he and his family have been through.

A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope, The Art of Racing in the Rain is a beautifully crafted and captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life ... as only a dog could tell it.]]> 336 Garth Stein 1554681723 Tony 3 4.22 2008 The Art of Racing in the Rain
author: Garth Stein
name: Tony
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1) 32617610
It's been thirty years since the apocalypse and fifteen years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI--One World Intelligence--the shared consciousness of millions of robots, uploaded into one huge mainframe brain. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality--their personality--for the sake of a greater, stronger, higher power. These intrepid resisters are outcasts; solo machines wandering among various underground outposts who have formed into an unruly civilization of rogue AIs in the wasteland that was once our world.

One of these resisters is Brittle, a scavenger robot trying to keep a deteriorating mind and body functional in a world that has lost all meaning. Although unable to experience emotions like a human, Brittle is haunted by the terrible crimes the robot population perpetrated on humanity. As Brittle roams the Sea of Rust, a large swath of territory that was once the Midwest, the loner robot slowly comes to terms with horrifyingly raw and vivid memories--and nearly unbearable guilt.

Sea of Rust is both a harsh story of survival and an optimistic adventure. A vividly imagined portrayal of ultimate destruction and desperate tenacity, it boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, yet where a humanlike AI strives to find purpose among the ruins.]]> 365 C. Robert Cargill 1473212782 Tony 4 3.97 2017 Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)
author: C. Robert Cargill
name: Tony
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
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]]> Annie Bot 156023123
She’s learning, too.

Doug says he loves that Annie’s artificial intelligence makes her seem more like a real woman, but the more human Annie becomes, the less perfectly she behaves. As Annie's relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder whether Doug truly desires what he says he does. In such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?]]> 231 Sierra Greer 0063312697 Tony 4 3.81 2024 Annie Bot
author: Sierra Greer
name: Tony
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/16
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This is the book Machines Like Me wanted to be. Soooo creepy and I bet prescient.
]]> <![CDATA[Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1, Book 1)]]> 45277 (back cover)]]> 456 Neal Stephenson 0060833165 Tony 3 finished 4.15 2003 Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1, Book 1)
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Tony
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2007/03/01
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves: finished
review:
Weird read....just has to be waded through...but worth it
]]> The Firm 38508 496 John Grisham Tony 3 3.64 1991 The Firm
author: John Grisham
name: Tony
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/04/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout]]> 197773418 Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, a groundbreaking philosophy for pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload.

Our current definition of “productivity� is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices?

Long before the arrival of pinging inboxes and clogged schedules, history’s most creative and impactful philosophers, scientists, artists, and writers mastered the art of producing valuable work with staying power. In this timely and provocative book, Cal Newport harnesses the wisdom of these traditional knowledge workers to radically transform our modern jobs. Drawing from deep research on the habits and mindsets of a varied cast of storied thinkers—from Galileo and Isaac Newton, to Jane Austen and Georgia O’Keefe—Newport lays out the key principles of “slow productivity,� a more sustainable alternative to the aimless overwhelm that defines our current moment. Combining cultural criticism with systematic pragmatism, Newport deconstructs the absurdities inherent in standard notions of productivity, and then provides step-by-step advice for workers to replace them with a slower, more humane alternative.

From the aggressive rethinking of workload management, to introducing seasonal variation, to shifting your performance toward long-term quality, Slow Productivity provides a roadmap for escaping overload and arriving instead at a more timeless approach to pursuing meaningful accomplishment. The world of work is due for a new revolution. Slow productivity is exactly what we need.]]> 244 Cal Newport 0593544854 Tony 4 3.65 2024 Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
author: Cal Newport
name: Tony
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class]]> 176444107 The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, The Other Wes Moore, and Someone Has Led This Child to Believe, Rob Henderson vividly recounts growing up in foster care, enlisting in the US Air Force, attending elite universities, and pioneering the concept of “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the less fortunate.

Rob Henderson was born to a drug-addicted mother and a father he never met, ultimately shuttling between ten different foster homes in California. When he was adopted into a loving family, he hoped that life would finally be stable and safe. Divorce, tragedy, poverty, and violence marked his adolescent and teen years, propelling Henderson to join the military upon completing high school.

An unflinching portrait of shattered families, desperation, and determination, Troubled recounts Henderson’s expectation-defying young life and juxtaposes his story with those of his friends who wound up incarcerated or killed. He retreads the steps and missteps he took to escape the drama and disorder of his youth. As he navigates the peaks and valleys of social class, Henderson finds that he remains on the outside looking in. His greatest achievements—a military career, an undergraduate education from Yale, a PhD from Cambridge—feel like hollow measures of success. He argues that stability at home is more important than external accomplishments, and he illustrates the ways the most privileged among us benefit from a set of social standards that actively harm the most vulnerable.]]> 336 Rob Henderson 1982168536 Tony 4 4.10 2024 Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
author: Rob Henderson
name: Tony
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
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]]> <![CDATA[The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life]]> 18811353 Ěý
As bestselling author and social historian Charles Murray explains, at senior levels of an organization there are curmudgeons everywhere, judging your every move. Yet it is their good opinion you need to win if you hope to get ahead.
Ěý
Among the curmudgeon’s day-to-day tips for the
Ěý
� Excise the word “like� from your spoken English
� Don’t suck up
� Stop “reaching out� and “sharing�
� Rid yourself of piercings, tattoos, and weird hair colors
� Make strong language count
Ěý
His larger career advice
Ěý
� What to do if you have a bad boss
� Coming to grips with the difference between being nice and being good
� How to write when you don’t know what to say
� Being judgmental (it’s good, and you don’t have a choice anyway)

And on the great topics of life, the curmudgeon urges us to leave home no matter what, get real jobs (not internships), put ourselves in scary situations, and watch Groundhog Day repeatedly (he’ll explain).
Ěý
Witty, wise, and pulling no punches, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead is an indispensable sourcebook for living an adult life.]]> 144 Charles Murray 0804141444 Tony 3 3.71 2014 The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life
author: Charles Murray
name: Tony
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Commonwell (The Last of the Martians Book 1)]]> 136286563 292 Stephen E. Meyer 1667895605 Tony 3 3.96 2023 Commonwell (The Last of the Martians Book 1)
author: Stephen E. Meyer
name: Tony
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
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]]> The Maniac 75665931 From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times� Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.]]> 368 BenjamĂ­n Labatut 0593654471 Tony 4 4.33 2023 The Maniac
author: BenjamĂ­n Labatut
name: Tony
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
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]]> <![CDATA[The Chosen (Reuven Malther, #1)]]> 187181 304 Chaim Potok 0449213447 Tony 4 4.06 1966 The Chosen (Reuven Malther, #1)
author: Chaim Potok
name: Tony
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
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]]> Jane Eyre 10210 Alternate editions can be found here and here.

A gothic masterpiece of tempestuous passions and dark secrets, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is edited with an introduction and notes by Stevie Davis in Penguin Classics.

Charlotte Brontë tells the story of orphaned Jane Eyre, who grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, enduring loneliness and cruelty. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds employment as a governess to the young ward of Byronic, brooding Mr Rochester. As her feelings for Rochester develop, Jane gradually uncovers Thornfield Hall's terrible secret, forcing her to make a choice. Should she stay with Rochester and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions - even if it means leaving the man she loves? A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre dazzled readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom.]]> 532 Charlotte Brontë 0142437204 Tony 2 4.14 1847 Jane Eyre
author: Charlotte Brontë
name: Tony
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1847
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
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I don't think I was the target audience.....
]]> The Memory Police 37004370
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.]]> 274 YĹŤko Ogawa 1101870605 Tony 3 This book's ending..... 3.72 1994 The Memory Police
author: YĹŤko Ogawa
name: Tony
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:
This book's ending.....
]]> <![CDATA[A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat, #3)]]> 11298 353 Haruki Murakami 037571894X Tony 3 3.96 1982 A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat, #3)
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Tony
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1982
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)]]> 65211701 Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse.

Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back.

Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize.

But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast.

Yeah, this plan is... not going to work.]]> 245 Martha Wells 1250826977 Tony 2 4.19 2023 System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)
author: Martha Wells
name: Tony
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:
I loved murderbot, but I didn't finish this one....
]]> <![CDATA[Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop]]> 133938826 should feel successful—but all she feels is drained. Haunted by an abandoned dream, she takes a leap of faith and leaves her old life behind. Quitting her job and divorcing her husband, Yeongju moves to a quiet residential neighborhood outside the city and opens the Hyunam-dong Bookshop.

The transition isn’t easy. For months, all Yeongju can do is cry. But as the long hours in the shop stretch on, she begins to reflect on what makes a good bookseller and a meaningful store. She throws herself into reading voraciously, hosting author events, and crafting her own philosophy on bookselling. Gradually, Yeongju finds her footing in her new surroundings.

Surrounded by friends, writers, and the books that bind them, Yeongju begins to write a new chapter in her life. The Hyunam-dong Bookshop evolves into a warm, welcoming haven for lost souls—a place to rest, heal, and remember that it’s never too late to scrap the plot and start over.]]> 307 Hwang Bo-Reum Tony 4 3.94 2022 Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop
author: Hwang Bo-Reum
name: Tony
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/13
shelves:
review:
Korean society sounds hard, according to this book.
]]> <![CDATA[The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War, #2)]]> 41118857
With no other options, Rin joins forces with the powerful Dragon Warlord, who has a plan to conquer Nikan, unseat the Empress, and create a new Republic. Rin throws herself into his war. After all, making war is all she knows how to do.

But the Empress is a more powerful foe than she appears, and the Dragon Warlord’s motivations are not as democratic as they seem. The more Rin learns, the more she fears her love for Nikan will drive her away from every ally and lead her to rely more and more on the Phoenix’s deadly power. Because there is nothing she won’t sacrifice for her country and her vengeance.

The sequel to R.F. Kuang’s acclaimed debut THE POPPY WAR, THE DRAGON REPUBLIC combines the history of 20th-century China with a gripping world of gods and monsters, to devastating effect.]]> 658 R.F. Kuang Tony 2 I gave up, was bored. 4.36 2019 The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War, #2)
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Tony
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves:
review:
I gave up, was bored.
]]> <![CDATA[The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)]]> 35068705
When Rin aced the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies—it was a shock to everyone: to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who believed they’d finally be able to marry her off and further their criminal enterprise; and to Rin herself, who realized she was finally free of the servitude and despair that had made up her daily existence. That she got into Sinegard—the most elite military school in Nikan—was even more surprising.

But surprises aren’t always good.

Because being a dark-skinned peasant girl from the south is not an easy thing at Sinegard. Targeted from the outset by rival classmates for her color, poverty, and gender, Rin discovers she possesses a lethal, unearthly power—an aptitude for the nearly-mythical art of shamanism. Exploring the depths of her gift with the help of a seemingly insane teacher and psychoactive substances, Rin learns that gods long thought dead are very much alive—and that mastering control over those powers could mean more than just surviving school.

For while the Nikara Empire is at peace, the Federation of Mugen still lurks across a narrow sea. The militarily advanced Federation occupied Nikan for decades after the First Poppy War, and only barely lost the continent in the Second. And while most of the people are complacent to go about their lives, a few are aware that a Third Poppy War is just a spark away . . .

Rin’s shamanic powers may be the only way to save her people. But as she finds out more about the god that has chosen her, the vengeful Phoenix, she fears that winning the war may cost her humanity . . . and that it may already be too late.]]> 545 R.F. Kuang 0062662597 Tony 4 4.16 2018 The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Tony
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves:
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Loved this book, such a fun world build.
]]> <![CDATA[Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)]]> 26114545
The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labeling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.

And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life...]]> 432 Ada Palmer 0765378000 Tony 2 3.81 2016 Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)
author: Ada Palmer
name: Tony
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves:
review:
Man, I drifted off on this book and couldn't finish. I listened to a podcast by her and so wish I could have fallen in love with this story....but in the end, I got bored and stopped.
]]> Erasure 355862 We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto.

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk -- or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh -- is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.]]> 280 Percival Everett 0786888156 Tony 4 4.17 2001 Erasure
author: Percival Everett
name: Tony
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves:
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Man I loved this book. It still reads as incredibly timely today, 20 years after it was written. I can't wait to see the movie. I wish it hadn't ended when it did. I was so ready for 'what happened the next day' Sequel please!!!!!
]]> Where the Crawdads Sing 36809135
But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life's lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world—until the unthinkable happens.

In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

The story asks how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.]]> 384 Delia Owens 0735219117 Tony 4 4.35 2018 Where the Crawdads Sing
author: Delia Owens
name: Tony
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2024/01/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)]]> 8935689
Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.]]> 467 Iain M. Banks 1857231384 Tony 2 3.86 1987 Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)
author: Iain M. Banks
name: Tony
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1987
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves:
review:
Couldn't finish. Interesting idea, but for knows how there are ten of these books.....
]]> <![CDATA[Sea of Poppies (Ibis Trilogy, #1)]]> 1330324 513 Amitav Ghosh 071956896X Tony 4 3.97 2008 Sea of Poppies (Ibis Trilogy, #1)
author: Amitav Ghosh
name: Tony
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves:
review:

]]> The Shipping News 7354
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why E. Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
(back cover)]]> 337 Annie Proulx 0743225422 Tony 3 3.88 1993 The Shipping News
author: Annie Proulx
name: Tony
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2012/07/01
date added: 2023/10/31
shelves:
review:

]]> The Color Purple 52892857 Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.

â€Áč±đ˛ą»ĺľ±˛Ô˛µ The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, Black women’s literature as world literature. In writing us into the world—bravely, unapologetically, and honestly—Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay.â€� —Tayari Jones

�The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art.� —Kiese Laymon]]> 287 Alice Walker 0143135694 Tony 4 4.40 1982 The Color Purple
author: Alice Walker
name: Tony
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
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]]> <![CDATA[The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian]]> 693208
Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

With a foreward by Markus Zusak & interviews with Sherman Alexie and Ellen Forney
]]> 230 Sherman Alexie 0316013684 Tony 3 read for work 4.05 2007 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
author: Sherman Alexie
name: Tony
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
review:
read for work
]]> How To Raise An Adult 26009699 "For parents who want to foster hearty self-reliance instead of hollow self-esteem, How to Raise an Adult is the right book at the right time." -Daniel H. Pink, author of the New York Times bestsellers Drive and A Whole New Mind



A provocative manifesto that exposes the harms of helicopter parenting and sets forth an alternate philosophy for raising preteens and teens to self-sufficient young adulthood


In How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims draws on research, on conversations with admissions officers, educators, and employers, and on her own insights as a mother and as a student dean to highlight the ways in which overparenting harms children, their stressed-out parents, and society at large. While empathizing with the parental hopes and, especially, fears that lead to overhelping, Lythcott-Haims offers practical alternative strategies that underline the importance of allowing children to make their own mistakes and develop the resilience, resourcefulness, and inner determination necessary for success.


Relevant to parents of toddlers as well as of twentysomethings-and of special value to parents of teens-this book is a rallying cry for those who wish to ensure that the next generation can take charge of their own lives with competence and confidence.

]]> 370 Julie Lythcott-Haims 1509818340 Tony 4 3.97 2015 How To Raise An Adult
author: Julie Lythcott-Haims
name: Tony
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
review:
if only I had an adult to raise
]]> <![CDATA[Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World]]> 41795733
Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you'll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world's top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.

David Epstein examined the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields--especially those that are complex and unpredictable--generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They're also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't see.

Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.]]> 339 David Epstein 0735214484 Tony 4 4.12 2019 Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
author: David Epstein
name: Tony
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Tony 3 3.84 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Tony
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
review:
pretty good. Too much time writing about reacting to twitter. ugh, what a way to live.
]]> Negative Space 52028992 364 B.R. Yeager 1733569456 Tony 3 to-read incredibly grim. 3.71 2020 Negative Space
author: B.R. Yeager
name: Tony
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves: to-read
review:
incredibly grim.
]]> As I Descended 28218948 “Something wicked this way comes.�

Maria Lyon and Lily Boiten are their school’s ultimate power couple—even if no one knows it but them.

Only one thing stands between them and their perfect future: campus superstar Delilah Dufrey.

Golden child Delilah is a legend at the exclusive Acheron Academy, and the presumptive winner of the distinguished Cawdor Kingsley Prize. She runs the school, and if she chose, she could blow up Maria and Lily’s whole world with a pointed look, or a carefully placed word.

But what Delilah doesn’t know is that Lily and Maria are willing to do anything—absolutely anything—to make their dreams come true. And the first step is unseating Delilah for the Kingsley Prize. The full scholarship, awarded to Maria, will lock in her attendance at Stanford―and four more years in a shared dorm room with Lily.

Maria and Lily will stop at nothing to ensure their victory—including harnessing the dark power long rumored to be present on the former plantation that houses their school.

But when feuds turn to fatalities, and madness begins to blur the distinction between what’s real and what is imagined, the girls must decide where they draw the line.]]> 370 Robin Talley 0062409239 Tony 3 read it for work 3.48 2016 As I Descended
author: Robin Talley
name: Tony
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
review:
read it for work
]]> The Covenant of Water 180357146 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 715 Abraham Verghese 0802162177 Tony 3 4.34 2023 The Covenant of Water
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Tony
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
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I felt I had read this book before. I finished it only because it was for boy club. Big old meh
]]> All-Night Pharmacy 58349243
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction
Finalist for the California Book Awards
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Novel

Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in this fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace.

On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions—nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears.

Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator’s spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics.

With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past.]]> 304 Ruth Madievsky Tony 2 3.48 2023 All-Night Pharmacy
author: Ruth Madievsky
name: Tony
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
review:
I stopped 70% through. I stopped caring about the characters.
]]> <![CDATA[The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War]]> 56668328 An exploration of how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war

AĚýNew York Times Book Review Editorsâ€� Choice

In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
Ěý
Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,â€� asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal? Ěý
Ěý
In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?�
Ěý
Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.]]> 256 Malcolm Gladwell 0316296619 Tony 4 3.98 2021 The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
author: Malcolm Gladwell
name: Tony
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves:
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there is no such thing as bad Gladwell
]]> <![CDATA[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]> 17125 The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury

This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.]]> 182 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Tony 4 3.98 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Tony
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/08/01
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]]> The Terraformers 60784471
Centuries later, Destry's protege, Misha, is building a planetwide transit system when his worldview is turned upside-down by Sulfur, a brilliant engineer from the volcano city. Together, they uncover a dark secret about the real estate company that's buying up huge swaths of the planet―a secret that could destroy the lives of everyone who isn't Homo sapiens. Working with a team of robots, naked mole rats, and a very angry cyborg cow, they quietly sow seeds of subversion. But when they're threatened with violent diaspora, Misha and Sulfur's very unusual child faces a stark choice: deploy a planet-altering weapon, or watch their people lose everything they've built on Sask-E.]]> 338 Annalee Newitz 1250228018 Tony 4 3.26 2023 The Terraformers
author: Annalee Newitz
name: Tony
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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]]> <![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 Tony 3 4.05 2019 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Tony
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Shift (Silo, #2) 17306293 579 Hugh Howey Tony 4 4.12 2013 Shift (Silo, #2)
author: Hugh Howey
name: Tony
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Living a Life That Matters: Resolving the Conflict between Conscience and Success]]> 51688
For decades now, from the pulpit and through his writing, Harold Kushner has been helping people navigate the rough patches of life: loss, guilt, crises of faith. Now, in this compelling new work, he ad-dresses an equally important issue: our craving for significance, the need to know that our lives and our choices mean something.
We sometimes do great things, and sometimes terrible things, to reassure ourselves that we matter to the world. We sometimes confuse fame, power, and wealth with true achievement. But finally we need to think of ourselves as good people, and we are troubled when we compromise our integrity in the pursuit of what we think of as success.

Harold Kushner tells us that the path to a truly successful and significant life is through friendship, through family, and through acts of generosity and self-sacrifice. He describes how, in affecting the life
of even one person in a positive way, we make a difference in the world, and prove that we do in fact matter.
Persuasive and sympathetic, anecdotal and commonsensical, Living a Life That Matters inspires and uplifts.]]> 176 Harold S. Kushner 0375410635 Tony 4 4.07 2001 Living a Life That Matters: Resolving the Conflict between Conscience and Success
author: Harold S. Kushner
name: Tony
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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]]> The Night Circus 9361589
But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.

Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.]]> 506 Erin Morgenstern Tony 3 4.00 2011 The Night Circus
author: Erin Morgenstern
name: Tony
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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]]> <![CDATA[When Bad Things Happen to Good People]]> 46676
When Harold Kushner’s three-year-old son was diagnosed with a degenerative disease that meant the boy would only live until his early teens, he was faced with one of life’s most difficult questions: Why, God? Years later, Rabbi Kushner wrote this straightforward, elegant contemplation of the doubts and fears that arise when tragedy strikes. In these pages, Kushner shares his wisdom as a rabbi, a parent, a reader, and a human being. Often imitated but never superseded,Ěý When Bad Things Happen to Good Peopl eĚýis a classic that offers clear thinking and consolation in times of sorrow.]]> 176 Harold S. Kushner 1400034728 Tony 5 wonderful 4.00 1981 When Bad Things Happen to Good People
author: Harold S. Kushner
name: Tony
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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wonderful
]]> <![CDATA[Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China]]> 2635587

China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls , Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.

As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.

A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.]]> 420 Leslie T. Chang 0385520174 Tony 4 3.92 2008 Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
author: Leslie T. Chang
name: Tony
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers]]> 60521189
The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway.

Tomorrow’s People ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way � portents for still larger migrations ahead � which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change � remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production � which have made all these epochal developments possible.

Tomorrow’s People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.]]> 304 Paul Morland 1529045991 Tony 3 3.85 2022 Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers
author: Paul Morland
name: Tony
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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]]> <![CDATA[A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)]]> 50548197
A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) � until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets.

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

El is uniquely prepared for the school’s dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.]]> 320 Naomi Novik 0593128486 Tony 4 3.93 2020 A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)
author: Naomi Novik
name: Tony
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance, #3)]]> 55858638 New York Times bestselling trilogy that began with A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate.

The one thing you never talk about while you're in the Scholomance is what you'll do when you get out. Not even the richest enclaver would tempt fate that way. But it's all we dream about, the hideously slim chance we'll survive to make it out the gates and improbably find ourselves with a life ahead of us, a life outside the Scholomance halls.

And now the impossible dream has come true. I'm out, we're all out--and I didn't even have to turn into a monstrous dark witch to make it happen. So much for my great-grandmother's prophecy of doom and destruction. I didn't kill enclavers, I saved them. Me, and Orion, and our allies. Our graduation plan worked to perfection: we saved everyone and made the world safe for all wizards and brought peace and harmony to all the enclaves of the world.

Ha, only joking! Actually it's gone all wrong. Someone else has picked up the project of destroying enclaves in my stead, and probably everyone we saved is about to get killed in the brewing enclave war on the horizon. And the first thing I've got to do now, having miraculously got out of the Scholomance, is turn straight around and find a way back in.]]> 407 Naomi Novik 0593158369 Tony 3 4.08 2022 The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance, #3)
author: Naomi Novik
name: Tony
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)]]> 55559887 A budding dark sorceress determined not to use her formidable powers uncovers yet more secrets about the workings of her world in the stunning sequel to A Deadly Education, the start of Naomi Novik’s groundbreaking crossover series.

At the Scholomance, El, Orion, and the other students are faced with their final year—and the looming specter of graduation, a deadly ritual that leaves few students alive in its wake. El is determined that her chosen group will survive, but it is a prospect that is looking harder by the day as the savagery of the school ramps up. Until El realizes that sometimes winning the game means throwing out all the rules . . .]]> 388 Naomi Novik 0593128869 Tony 4 4.21 2021 The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)
author: Naomi Novik
name: Tony
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)]]> 60850767
Earth failed. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, Heorest Holt, carried its precious human cargo to a potential new paradise. Generations later, this fragile colony has managed to survive, eking out a hardy existence. Yet life is tough, and much technological knowledge has been lost.

Then strangers appear. They possess unparalleled knowledge and thrilling technology � and they've arrived from another world to help humanity’s colonies. But not all is as it seems, and the price of the strangers' help may be the colony itself.

Children of Memory by Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky is a far-reaching space opera spanning generations, species and galaxies.]]> 486 Adrian Tchaikovsky 1529087201 Tony 4 3.97 2022 Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Tony
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)]]> 40376072
Long ago, Earth's terraforming program sent ships out to build new homes for humanity among the stars and made an unexpected discovery: a planet with life. But the scientists were unaware that the alien ecosystem was more developed than the primitive life forms originally discovered.

Now, thousands of years later, the Portiids and their humans have sent an exploration vessel following fragmentary radio signals. They discover a system in crisis, warring factions trying to recover from an apocalyptic catastrophe arising from what the early terraformers awoke all those years before.]]> 597 Adrian Tchaikovsky Tony 4 4.02 2019 Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Tony
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2019
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)]]> 25499718
WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age—a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.

Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?]]> 608 Adrian Tchaikovsky 1447273281 Tony 5 awes sci fi, so original! 4.29 2015 Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Tony
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/23
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awes sci fi, so original!
]]> Carrie Soto Is Back 60435878 Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular.

By the time Carrie retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed twenty Slam titles. And if you ask her, she is entitled to every one. She sacrificed nearly everything to become the best, with her father as her coach.

But six years after her retirement, Carrie finds herself sitting in the stands of the 1994 US Open, watching her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning, British player named Nicki Chan.

At thirty-seven years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement and be coached by her father for one last year in an attempt to reclaim her record. Even if the sports media says that they never liked the 'Battle-Axe' anyway. Even if her body doesn't move as fast as it did. And even if it means swallowing her pride to train with a man she once almost opened her heart to: Bowe Huntley. Like her, he has something to prove before he gives up the game forever.

In spite of it all: Carrie Soto is back, for one epic final season. In this riveting and unforgettable novel, Taylor Jenkins Reid tells a story about the cost of greatness and a legendary athlete attempting a comeback.]]> 384 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0593158687 Tony 3 it was fine. Book club book. 4.19 2022 Carrie Soto Is Back
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Tony
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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it was fine. Book club book.
]]> <![CDATA[The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment]]> 770478
Burrough's writings, some published before and others after his death, were numerous, but The Rare-Jewel of Christian Contentment is one of the most valuable of them all. Its author was much concerned to promote (1) peace among believers of various persuasions (2) peace and contentment in the hearts of individual believers during what he describes as sad and sinking times . The Rare Jewel concentrates upon this second aim. It is marked by sanity, clarity, aptness of illustration, and warmth of appeal to the heart. 'There is an ark that you may come into, and no men in the world may live such comfortable, cheerful and contented lives as the saints of God'. Burroughs presses his lesson home with all the fervour and cogency of a true and faithful minister of God.]]> 232 Jeremiah Burroughs 0851510914 Tony 3 4.33 1648 The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment
author: Jeremiah Burroughs
name: Tony
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1648
rating: 3
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I read this with my brother, very peaceful
]]> Eleanor & Park 15745753 "So did Jerry Lee Lewis," Eleanor answers.
"I'm not kidding," he says.
"You should be," she says, "we're 16."
"What about Romeo and Juliet?"
"Shallow, confused, then dead."
"I love you," Park says.
"Wherefore art thou," Eleanor answers.
"I'm not kidding," he says.
"You should be."

Set over one school year in 1986, Eleanor & Park is the story of two star-crossed misfits—smart enough to know first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.]]> 328 Rainbow Rowell 1250012570 Tony 3 3.92 2012 Eleanor & Park
author: Rainbow Rowell
name: Tony
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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I read this with students....meh
]]> <![CDATA[A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020]]> 57190774 Ěý
If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leap­ing to his death. There’s a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs.
Ěý
These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harm­less laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can’t by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.]]> 576 David Sedaris 0316558796 Tony 4 awesome 4.17 2021 A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020
author: David Sedaris
name: Tony
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2021
rating: 4
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awesome
]]> Happy-Go-Lucky 58989873 Ěý
But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.
Ěý
As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter.
Ěý
In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.]]> 272 David Sedaris 0316392456 Tony 4 hilarious! 4.15 2022 Happy-Go-Lucky
author: David Sedaris
name: Tony
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2022
rating: 4
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hilarious!
]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Tony 3 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Tony
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century]]> 24886729 Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs argues that before 1900, history seemed to make sense. We can understand innovations like electricity, agriculture and democracy. The twentieth century, in contrast, gave us relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics, climate change and postmodernism.

In order to understand such a disorienting barrage of unfamiliar and knotty ideas, Higgs shows us, we need to shift the framework of our interpretation and view these concepts within the context of a new kind of historical narrative. Instead of looking at it as another step forward in a stable path, we need to look at the twentieth century as a chaotic seismic shift, upending all linear narratives.

Higgs invites us along as he journeys across a century “about which we know too much� in order to grant us a new perspective on it. He brings a refreshingly non-academic, eclectic and infectiously energetic approach to his subjects as well as a unique ability to explain how complex ideas connect and intersect—whether he’s discussing Einstein’s theories of relativity, the Beat poets' interest in Eastern thought or the bright spots and pitfalls of the American Dream.]]> 356 John Higgs 1593766262 Tony 2 didn't finish, meh. 4.24 2015 Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century
author: John Higgs
name: Tony
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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didn't finish, meh.
]]> <![CDATA[Louisiana Long Shot (Miss Fortune Mystery, #1)]]> 24971908 250 Jana Deleon Tony 3 3.98 2012 Louisiana Long Shot (Miss Fortune Mystery, #1)
author: Jana Deleon
name: Tony
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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]]> The Immortal King Rao 58999177
In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy—literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts.

With climate change raging, Athena has come to believe that saving the planet and its Shareholders will require a radical act of communion—and so she sets out to tell the truth to the world’s Shareholders, in entrancing sensory detail, about King’s childhood on a South Indian coconut plantation; his migration to the U.S. to study engineering in a world transformed by globalization; his marriage to the ambitious artist with whom he changed the world; and, ultimately, his invention, under self-exile, of the most ambitious creation of his life—Athena herself.

The Immortal King Rao, written by a former Wall Street Journal technology reporter, is a resonant debut novel obliterating the boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historic and the dystopian, confronting how we arrived at the age of technological capitalism and where our actions might take us next.]]> 384 Vauhini Vara 0393541754 Tony 4 3.62 2022 The Immortal King Rao
author: Vauhini Vara
name: Tony
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Steel World (Undying Mercenaries, #1)]]> 18600590
The Galactics arrived with their battle fleet in 2052. Rather than being exterminated under a barrage of hell-burners, Earth joined their vast Empire. Swearing allegiance to our distant alien overlords wasn’t the only requirement for survival. We also had to have something of value to trade, something that neighboring planets would pay their hard-earned credits to buy. As most of the local worlds were too civilized to have a proper army, the only valuable service Earth could provide came in the form of soldiers…someone had to do their dirty work for them, their fighting and dying.

I, James McGill, was born in 2099 on the fringe of the galaxy. When Hegemony Financial denied my loan applications, I was kicked out of the university and I turned to the stars. My first campaign involved the invasion of a mineral-rich planet called Cancri-9, better known as Steel World. The attack didn’t go well, and now Earth has entered a grim struggle for survival.

Humanity’s mercenary legions go to war in STEEL WORLD, bestselling author B. V. Larson’s latest science fiction novel.]]> 338 B.V. Larson Tony 3 so dumb its.....dumb, but fun 4.02 2013 Steel World (Undying Mercenaries, #1)
author: B.V. Larson
name: Tony
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2013
rating: 3
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date added: 2022/12/24
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so dumb its.....dumb, but fun
]]> 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 Tony 3 started great, ended meh 4.17 2022 Babel
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Tony
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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started great, ended meh
]]> Lessons in Chemistry 58065033 390 Bonnie Garmus Tony 3 4.23 2022 Lessons in Chemistry
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: Tony
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less]]> 40392296 Many professionals work as much as 70 hours a week, leaving little time for rest, exercise, family, and friends. Work is invading their personal life.

The common understanding of productivity has failed these professionals. Most think productivity is just about getting more done at a faster speed. But it's not.

Productivity is about getting the right things done.

New York Times Bestselling author, Michael Hyatt, has created a total productivity system that's much more than endless box checking. Proven by over 25,000 professionals, this system helps overwhelmed leaders achieve what matters most so they can succeed at both work and life.

In his latest book, Free to Focus , you'll discover how to ...

In Free to Focus , you'll learn the 3-step system to achieve more while doing less.]]> 256 Michael Hyatt 0801075262 Tony 3 4.07 2019 Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less
author: Michael Hyatt
name: Tony
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
shelves:
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]]> Stillness Is the Key 43582733 In The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author Ryan Holiday made ancient wisdom wildly popular with a new generation of leaders in sports, politics, and technology. In his new book, Stillness Is the Key, Holiday draws on timeless Stoic and Buddhist philosophy to show why slowing down is the secret weapon for those charging ahead.

All great leaders, thinkers, artists, athletes, and visionaries share one indelible quality. It enables them to conquer their tempers. To avoid distraction and discover great insights. To achieve happiness and do the right thing. Ryan Holiday calls it stillness--to be steady while the world spins around you.

In this book, he outlines a path for achieving this ancient, but urgently necessary way of living. Drawing on a wide range of history's greatest thinkers, from Confucius to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius to Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stuart Mill to Nietzsche, he argues that stillness is not mere inactivity, but the doorway to self-mastery, discipline, and focus.

Holiday also examines figures who exemplified the power of stillness: baseball player Sadaharu Oh, whose study of Zen made him the greatest home run hitter of all time; Winston Churchill, who in balancing his busy public life with time spent laying bricks and painting at his Chartwell estate managed to save the world from annihilation in the process; Fred Rogers, who taught generations of children to see what was invisible to the eye; Anne Frank, whose journaling and love of nature guided her through unimaginable adversity.

More than ever, people are overwhelmed. They face obstacles and egos and competition. Stillness Is the Key offers a simple but inspiring antidote to the stress of 24/7 news and social media. The stillness that we all seek is the path to meaning, contentment, and excellence in a world that needs more of it than ever.]]> 288 Ryan Holiday 0525538585 Tony 4 4.19 2019 Stillness Is the Key
author: Ryan Holiday
name: Tony
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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]]> Dance Dance Dance 23687785 This is an alternate cover edition of ISBN 13: 9780099448761

High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old dropout with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem. Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and out comes Dance Dance Dance.]]> 393 Haruki Murakami Tony 2 4.06 1988 Dance Dance Dance
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Tony
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1988
rating: 2
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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I love Murakami, but I stopped half way through
]]> Razorblade Tears 54860585 A Black father. A white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance.

Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid.

The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah’s white husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss.

Derek’s father Buddy Lee was almost as ashamed of Derek for being gay as Derek was ashamed his father was a criminal. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy.

Ike and Buddy Lee, two ex-cons with little else in common other than a criminal past and a love for their dead sons, band together in their desperate desire for revenge. In their quest to do better for their sons in death than they did in life, hardened men Ike and Buddy Lee will confront their own prejudices about their sons and each other, as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250252708]]> 336 S.A. Cosby Tony 3 4.08 2021 Razorblade Tears
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Tony
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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]]> UNSUB (UNSUB, #1) 32811580
Caitlin Hendrix has been a Narcotics detective for six months when the killer at the heart of all her childhood nightmares reemerges: the Prophet. An UNSUB—what the FBI calls an unknown subject—the Prophet terrorized the Bay Area in the 1990s and nearly destroyed her father, the lead investigator on the case.

The Prophet’s cryptic messages and mind games drove Detective Mack Hendrix to the brink of madness, and Mack’s failure to solve the series of ritualized murders—eleven seemingly unconnected victims left with the ancient sign for Mercury etched into their flesh—was the final nail in the coffin for a once promising career.

Twenty years later, two bodies are found bearing the haunting signature of the Prophet. Caitlin Hendrix has never escaped the shadow of her father’s failure to protect their city. But now the ruthless madman is killing again and has set his sights on her, threatening to undermine the fragile barrier she rigidly maintains for her own protection, between relentless pursuit and dangerous obsession.

Determined to decipher his twisted messages and stop the carnage, Caitlin ignores her father’s warnings as she draws closer to the killer with each new gruesome murder. Is it a copycat, or can this really be the same Prophet who haunted her childhood? Will Caitlin avoid repeating her father’s mistakes and redeem her family name, or will chasing the Prophet drag her and everyone she loves into the depths of the abyss?]]> 367 Meg Gardiner 1101985526 Tony 3 4.02 2017 UNSUB (UNSUB, #1)
author: Meg Gardiner
name: Tony
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/01
date added: 2022/12/24
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]]> <![CDATA[The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century]]> 59852733
The sexual revolution has liberated us to enjoy a heady mixture of erotic freedom and personal autonomy.

Right? Wrong, argues Louise Perry in her provocative new book.

Although it would be neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back to a world of pre-60s sexual mores, she argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hypersexualised culture represent more loss than gain.

The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn - where anything goes and only consent matters - are a tiny minority of high-status men, not the women forced to accommodate the excesses of male lust.

While dispensing sage advice to the generations paying the price for these excesses, she makes a passionate case for a new sexual culture built around dignity, virtue and restraint. This countercultural polemic from one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary feminism should be read by all men and women uneasy about the mindless orthodoxies of our ultraliberal era.]]> 200 Louise Perry 1509549994 Tony 4 4.23 2022 The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century
author: Louise Perry
name: Tony
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 4
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]]> Man on Fire (Creasy, #1) 333103 Then something happens, something so devastating that Creasy is consumed by a single-minded rage for revenge. And at a stroke he is transformed into the terrifying killing machine he was trained to be...]]> 320 A.J. Quinnell 0752863983 Tony 4 oh hell ya! It was awesome! 4.23 1980 Man on Fire (Creasy, #1)
author: A.J. Quinnell
name: Tony
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1980
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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oh hell ya! It was awesome!
]]> <![CDATA[The Dark Corners of the Night (UNSUB, #3)]]> 38726283 I am the legion of the night �

He appears in the darkness like a ghost, made of shadows and fear—the Midnight Man. He comes for the parents but leaves the children alive, tiny witnesses to unspeakable horror. The bedroom communities of Los Angeles are gripped with dread, and the attacks are escalating.

Still reeling from her best friend’s close call in a bombing six months ago, FBI behavioral analyst Caitlin Hendrix has come to Los Angeles to assist in the Midnight Man investigation and do what she does best—hunt a serial killer. Her work is what keeps her going, but something about this UNSUB—unknown subject—doesn’t sit right. She soon realizes that this case will test not only her skills but also her dedication, for within the heart of a killer lives a secret that mirrors Caitlin’s own past. Hesitancy is not an option, but will she be able to do what must be done if the time comes?]]> 341 Meg Gardiner 1982627514 Tony 3 4.11 2020 The Dark Corners of the Night (UNSUB, #3)
author: Meg Gardiner
name: Tony
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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This book is fun and silly but has some 'evil guy is magically' competent vibes which may not be your thing
]]> <![CDATA[Into the Black Nowhere (UNSUB, #2)]]> 35157879
In Southern Texas, on Saturday nights, women are disappearing. One vanishes from a movie theater. Another, from her car at a stoplight. A mother is ripped from her home while checking on her baby. Rookie FBI Agent Caitlin Hendrix, newly assigned to the FBI's elite Behavioral Analysis Unit, fears that a serial killer is roaming the dark roads outside Austin.

Caitlin's unit discovers the first victim's body in the woods, laid out in a bloodstained white baby-doll nightgown. A second victim in a white nightie lies deeper in the forest's darkness. Around the bodies, Polaroid photos are stuck in the earth like headstones, picturing other women with their wrists slashed. The women in the woods are not the killer's first victims, nor are they likely to be his last.

To track the UNSUB, Caitlin must get inside his mind; he is a confident, meticulous killer, capable of charming his victims until their guard is down, snatching them in plain sight. He then plays out a twisted fantasy - turning them into dolls for him to possess, control, and ultimately destroy.

Caitlin's profile leads the FBI to focus on one man: a charismatic, successful professional who easily gains people's trust. But can they apprehend him before it's too late?

As Saturday night approaches, Caitlin and the FBI enter a desperate game of cat and mouse, racing to capture the cunning predator before he claims his next victim.]]> 355 Meg Gardiner 1101985550 Tony 3 4.11 2018 Into the Black Nowhere (UNSUB, #2)
author: Meg Gardiner
name: Tony
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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]]> On the Beach 38180 On the Beach is a remarkably convincing portrait of how ordinary people might face the most unimaginable nightmare.]]> 296 Nevil Shute Tony 3 3.95 1957 On the Beach
author: Nevil Shute
name: Tony
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1957
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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I couldn't finish. It wasn't bad at all, just too vividly depressing
]]> White Noise 28251250
White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback

Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition]]> 320 Don DeLillo 0143129554 Tony 2 3.88 1985 White Noise
author: Don DeLillo
name: Tony
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1985
rating: 2
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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So much professor naval gazing. I quit early, bad and boring
]]> <![CDATA[Killers of a Certain Age (Killers of a Certain Age, #1)]]> 60149532 Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that's their secret weapon.

They've spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can't just retire - it's kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller.

Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills.

When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they've been marked for death.

Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They're about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman--and a killer--of a certain age.]]> 368 Deanna Raybourn 0593200683 Tony 2 3.82 2022 Killers of a Certain Age (Killers of a Certain Age, #1)
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Tony
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/24
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It's bad, I quit early, just say no
]]> How to Stop Time 45152372 "She smiled a soft, troubled smile and I felt the whole world slipping away, and I wanted to slip with it, to go wherever she was going... I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words."

Tom Hazard has just moved back to London, his old home, to settle down and become a high school history teacher. And on his first day at school, he meets a captivating French teacher at his school who seems fascinated by him. But Tom has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. Tom has lived history--performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life.

Unfortunately for Tom, the Albatross Society, the secretive group which protects people like Tom, has one rule: Never fall in love. As painful memories of his past and the erratic behavior of the Society's watchful leader threaten to derail his new life and romance, the one thing he can't have just happens to be the one thing that might save him. Tom will have to decide once and for all whether to remain stuck in the past, or finally begin living in the present.

How to Stop Time tells a love story across the ages--and for the ages--about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live. It is a bighearted, wildly original novel about losing and finding yourself, the inevitability of change, and how with enough time to learn, we just might find happiness.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch.]]> 339 Matt Haig 0525522891 Tony 3 3.78 2018 How to Stop Time
author: Matt Haig
name: Tony
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2022/08/27
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]]> The Lost Shtetl 50496905 A remarkable debut novel—written with the fearless imagination of Michael Chabon and the piercing humor of Gary Shteyngart—about a small Jewish village in the Polish forest that is so secluded no one knows it exists . . . until now.

What if there was a town that history missed?For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, its residents enjoyed remarkable peace. It missed out on cars, and electricity, and the internet, and indoor plumbing. But when a marriage dispute spins out of control, the whole town comes crashing into the twenty-first century.

Pesha Lindauer, who has just suffered an ugly, acrimonious divorce, suddenly disappears. A day later, her husband goes after her, setting off a panic among the town elders. They send a woefully unprepared outcast named Yankel Lewinkopf out into the wider world to alert the Polish authorities.

ĚýVenturing beyond the remote safety of Kreskol, Yankel is confronted by the beauty and the ravages of the modern-day outside world â€� and his reception is met with a confusing mix of disbelief, condescension, and unexpected kindness. When the truth eventually surfaces, his story and the existence of Kreskol make headlines nationwide.Ěý

Returning Yankel to Kreskol, the Polish government plans to reintegrate the town that time forgot. Yet in doing so, the devious origins of its disappearance come to the light. And what has become of the mystery of Pesha and her former husband? Divided between those embracing change and those clinging to its old world ways, the people of Kreskol will have to find a way to come together . . .Ěý or risk their village disappearing for good.]]> 416 Max Gross 0062991124 Tony 4 3.80 2020 The Lost Shtetl
author: Max Gross
name: Tony
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2020
rating: 4
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]]> The Abstinence Teacher 347143
That was all Ruth had said. Even now, when she’d had months to come to terms with the fallout from this remark, she still marveled at the power of those four words, which she’d uttered without premeditation and without any sense of treading on forbidden ground. (p. 11)

Thanks to an off-hand remark made during a class discussion of oral sex, sex-ed teacher Ruth Ramsey finds herself a target of the Christian evangelicals who are increasingly influencing the schoolboard of suburban Stonewood Heights. Forced to attend remedial sessions with a smug “Virginity Consultant,� Ruth is isolated and alone, caught in the polarized red-versus-blue landscape of present-day American suburbia. It’s like “living in a horror movie,� she thinks, � The Invasion of the Body Snatchers , or something. You never knew who they were going to get to next.� Divorced and sharing custody of her daughters with her ex, and sometimes attempting a futile date, Ruth spends many a lonely weekend wondering how her bleak existence came to be.

Then one morning at her daughter’s soccer game, Ruth meets Tim Mason, a cute forty-something volunteer coach. Ruth feels an instant attraction to Tim, but when he draws the girls together for a spontaneous prayer circle after the game, she angrily yanks her daughter away from the proceedings, placing herself once again in the sights of the evangelicals.

But Ruth has another unexpected she can’t seem to get a handle on Tim, her supposed adversary, who keeps appearing at her front door. A recovering addict whose bottoming-out cost him his home and his marriage, Tim found his way to the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth through the intervention of Pastor Dennis, the charismatic preacher who put Tim’s shattered life back together in an approximation of happiness. Thanks to Pastor Dennis, Tim is now married to Carrie, a fellow Tabernacler who is attractive and attentive, if robotic. He plays guitar at the weekly prayer sessions in a sanitized reenactment of his days in a Grateful Dead cover band. He holds a respectable if unfulfilling job as a loan officer, well aware of the irony of the post for a man with his history. He is grateful for the help he has received from his church community and Pastor Dennis. But he can’t shake the yearning for something more, and a nagging attraction to that troublesome sex-ed teacher....

With The Abstinence Teacher , Tom Perrotta wades into the murky waters of contemporary American suburbia, fully deploying his proven gift for describing the panic lurking beneath its seemingly placid surface. Already widely known to book and movie audiences for his scathing satire mixed with remarkable compassion in works including Election and Little Children (both adapted for film, Little Children garnering Perrotta an Oscar nomination), this novel once again proves, as declared by the Los Angeles Times , “Perrotta’s balance of humor and pathos has no equal.”]]> 368 Tom Perrotta 0307356361 Tony 3 3.25 2007 The Abstinence Teacher
author: Tom Perrotta
name: Tony
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2007
rating: 3
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]]> The Fire Next Time 464260 The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,� written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,� The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 106 James Baldwin 067974472X Tony 3 4.55 1963 The Fire Next Time
author: James Baldwin
name: Tony
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1963
rating: 3
read at: 2022/08/27
date added: 2022/08/27
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His justified anger comes across powerfully.
]]> The Every (The Circle, #2) 57792078 From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Circle comes an exciting new follow-up. When the world's largest search engine/social media company, the Circle, merges with the planet's dominant ecommerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous--and, oddly enough, most beloved--monopoly ever known: the Every.

Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire at the Every. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Makazian, they look for the Every's weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free?

Studded with unforgettable characters, outrageous outfits, and lacerating set-pieces, this companion to The Circle blends absurdity and terror, satire and suspense, while keeping the reader in apprehensive excitement about the fate of the company--and the human animal.]]> 580 Dave Eggers 0593315340 Tony 3 3.66 2021 The Every (The Circle, #2)
author: Dave Eggers
name: Tony
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/01
date added: 2022/08/10
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]]> Play It As It Lays 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 Tony 4 3.94 1970 Play It As It Lays
author: Joan Didion
name: Tony
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/08/10
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This book strangely reminded me of Madam Bovary. It just feels like such a different world...
]]> <![CDATA[Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World]]> 53328332 The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to its primary cause: capitalism. Our economic system is based on perpetual expansion, which is devastating the living world. There is only one solution that will lead to meaningful and immediate change: degrowth.

If we want to have a shot at surviving the Anthropocene, we need to restore the balance. We need to change how we see the world and our place within it, shifting from a philosophy of domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with our planet’s ecology. We need to evolve beyond the dusty dogmas of capitalism to a new system that’s fit for the twenty-first century.

But what about jobs? What about health? What about progress? This book tackles these questions and offers an inspiring vision for what a post-capitalist economy could look like. An economy that’s more just, more caring, and more fun. An economy that enables human flourishing while reversing ecological breakdown. By taking less, we can become more.]]> 336 Jason Hickel 1786091216 Tony 3 4.52 2020 Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
author: Jason Hickel
name: Tony
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/08/10
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]]> Flight Behavior 13438524 Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.

Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.

Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.]]> 436 Barbara Kingsolver 0062124269 Tony 3 3.79 2012 Flight Behavior
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Tony
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/08/10
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I live the way this book talks about class in America, but I would love to talk about it with others who don't share my perspectives.
]]> The Final Girl Support Group 55829194 In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standingĚýwhen the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives…but what happens after?

Like his bestselling novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix’s latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. FromĚýchainĚýsaws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films—movies like The TexasĚýChainsaw Massacre, AĚýNightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.]]> 352 Grady Hendrix 059320123X Tony 3 3.50 2021 The Final Girl Support Group
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Tony
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/08/10
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Fun. In less than 5 years it will be on Netflix
]]> <![CDATA[The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)]]> 68021 362 Ursula K. Le Guin 0060509066 Tony 4 4.33 2002 The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (Hainish Cycle, #9)
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Tony
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/11
date added: 2022/08/10
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This book is awesome. Each of the 60 or so page short stories allow you to dip into one of the alternative gender/sex relationships that Le Guin wrote so interestingly about.
]]> <![CDATA[The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery]]> 57341765
“A powerful memoir about our fragile hopes in the face of chronic illness.”—Kate Bowler, bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason
Ěý
In the summer of 2015, Ross Douthat was moving his family, with two young daughters and a pregnant wife, from Washington, D.C., to a sprawling farmhouse in a picturesque Connecticut town when he acquired a mysterious and devastating sickness. It left him sleepless, crippled, wracked with pain--a shell of himself. After months of seeing doctors and descending deeper into a physical inferno, he discovered that he had a disease which according to CDC definitions does not actually exist: the chronic form of Lyme disease, a hotly contested condition that devastates the lives of tens of thousands of people but has no official recognition--and no medically approved cure.

From a rural dream house that now felt like a prison, Douthat's search for help takes him off the map of official medicine, into territory where cranks and conspiracies abound and patients are forced to take control of their own treatment and experiment on themselves. Slowly, against his instincts and assumptions, he realizes that many of the cranks and weirdos are right, that many supposed "hypochondriacs" are victims of an indifferent medical establishment, and that all kinds of unexpected experiences and revelations lurk beneath the surface of normal existence, in the places underneath.

TheĚýDeep Places is a story about what happens when you are terribly sick and realize that even the doctors who are willing to treat you can only do so much. Along the way, Douthat describes his struggle back toward health with wit and candor, portraying sickness as the most terrible of gifts. It teaches you to appreciate the grace of ordinary life by taking that life away from you. It reveals the deep strangeness of the world, the possibility that the reasonable people might be wrong, and the necessity of figuring out things for yourself. And it proves, day by dreadful day, that you are stronger than you ever imagined, and that even in the depths there is always hope.]]> 224 Ross Douthat 0593237366 Tony 4 3.95 2021 The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery
author: Ross Douthat
name: Tony
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/11
date added: 2022/08/10
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This book is trying its best to open up what endless vistas of chronic pain look like. It is doing a good job. I have long been grateful that I am able to still vigorously work out 5 times a week, this book makes me even more grateful. Also, just consistently be there for people who are chronically ill.
]]> <![CDATA[Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business]]> 74034 184 Neil Postman 014303653X Tony 4 4.15 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
author: Neil Postman
name: Tony
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/11
date added: 2022/08/10
shelves:
review:
This book is good but I think most people would now safely are that TV is worse, intellectually, for a culture as the medium through which to make cogent arguments, and social media is worse still. One wonders what could come after....
]]> <![CDATA[All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)]]> 469571 302 Cormac McCarthy 0679744398 Tony 4 4.04 1992 All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Tony
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/11
date added: 2022/08/10
shelves:
review:
When I compare myself to the characters in this book I do not consider myself very tough, many or competent.
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