Maria's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 25 Dec 2023 07:04:44 -0800 60 Maria's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Paris 15786792 809 Edward Rutherfurd 0385535309 Maria 3 3.98 2013 Paris
author: Edward Rutherfurd
name: Maria
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2015/05/15
date added: 2023/12/25
shelves:
review:

]]> The Bat (Harry Hole, #1) 17345209 369 Jo Nesbø 034580709X Maria 3 3.43 1997 The Bat (Harry Hole, #1)
author: Jo Nesbø
name: Maria
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2022/09/16
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know®]]> 26198856 208 Serhy Yekelchyk 0190237309 Maria 0 to-read 4.07 2015 The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know®
author: Serhy Yekelchyk
name: Maria
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President]]> 10335318
But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what hap­pened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in tur­moil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his con­dition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet.

Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive, The Destiny of the Republic will stand alongside The Devil in the White City and The Professor and the Madman as a classic of narrative history.]]> 339 Candice Millard 0385526261 Maria 0 to-read 4.19 2011 Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
author: Candice Millard
name: Maria
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles]]> 3047 304 Thomas Sowell 0465081428 Maria 0 currently-reading 4.31 1986 A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
author: Thomas Sowell
name: Maria
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/08/22
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Benjamin Franklin 1558473 864 Carl van Doren 0140152601 Maria 0 currently-reading 4.18 1938 Benjamin Franklin
author: Carl van Doren
name: Maria
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/04/30
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Cuban Affair 34466751
INCLUDES AN EXTENDED INTERVIEW WITH NELSON DEMILLE AND SCOTT BRICK!

From the legendary #1 New York Times bestselling author of Plum Island and Night Fall, Nelson DeMille’s blistering new novel features an exciting new character—US Army combat veteran Daniel “Mac� MacCormick, now a charter boat captain, who is about to set sail on his most dangerous cruise.

Daniel Graham MacCormick—Mac for short—seems to have a pretty good life. At age thirty-five he’s living in Key West, owner of a forty-two-foot charter fishing boat, The Maine. Mac served five years in the Army as an infantry officer with two tours in Afghanistan. He returned with the Silver Star, two Purple Hearts, scars that don’t tan, and a boat with a big bank loan. Truth be told, Mac’s finances are more than a little shaky.

One day, Mac is sitting in the famous Green Parrot Bar in Key West, contemplating his life, and waiting for Carlos, a hotshot Miami lawyer heavily involved with anti-Castro groups. Carlos wants to hire Mac and The Maine for a ten-day fishing tournament to Cuba at the standard rate, but Mac suspects there is more to this and turns it down. The price then goes up to two million dollars, and Mac agrees to hear the deal, and meet Carlos’s clients—a beautiful Cuban-American woman named Sara Ortega, and a mysterious older Cuban exile, Eduardo Valazquez.

What Mac learns is that there is sixty million American dollars hidden in Cuba by Sara’s grandfather when he fled Castro’s revolution. With the “Cuban Thaw� underway between Havana and Washington, Carlos, Eduardo, and Sara know it’s only a matter of time before someone finds the stash—by accident or on purpose. And Mac knows if he accepts this job, he’ll walk away rich…or not at all.

Brilliantly written, with his signature humor, fascinating authenticity from his research trip to Cuba, and heart-pounding pace, Nelson DeMille is a true master of the genre.]]> 0 Nelson DeMille 1508241333 Maria 5 3.59 2017 The Cuban Affair
author: Nelson DeMille
name: Maria
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/04/28
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]]> My 15 Grandmothers 16253645 164 Genie Milgrom 1478297077 Maria 4 3.71 2012 My 15 Grandmothers
author: Genie Milgrom
name: Maria
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/04/16
shelves:
review:

]]> The Reckoning 38389488
Pete Banning was Clanton, Mississippi's favorite son--a decorated World War II hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed his pastor and friend, the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the murder weren't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's only statement about it--to the sheriff, to his lawyers, to the judge, to the jury, and to his family--was: "I have nothing to say."

Pete was not afraid of death and was willing to take his motive to the grave.

John Grisham takes us on an incredible journey, from the Jim Crow South to the jungles of the Philippines during World War II; from an insane asylum filled with secrets to the Clanton courtroom where Pete's defense attorney tries desperately to save him. Reminiscent of the finest tradition of Southern Gothic storytelling, 'The Reckoning' would not be complete without Grisham's signature layers of legal suspense, and he delivers on every page.]]> 420 John Grisham Maria 1 3.61 2018 The Reckoning
author: John Grisham
name: Maria
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2019/03/04
date added: 2019/03/04
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review:
Avoid this book like the plague. I absolutely love John Grisham’s books. I eat them up; however this 420 pages of drawn out and boring. So boring that when I started the second part of the book I gave up and went straight to the last 10 pages of the book. I never do that. Ever.
]]> Educated 35133922
Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.]]> 352 Tara Westover 0399590501 Maria 0 currently-reading 4.46 2018 Educated
author: Tara Westover
name: Maria
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/02/25
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> The Silent Patient 40097951
Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.

Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him....

The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive.]]> 336 Alex Michaelides 1250301696 Maria 4 4.18 2019 The Silent Patient
author: Alex Michaelides
name: Maria
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/02/25
shelves:
review:
Hmmm...Thought I was wasting my time because I had already figured out the ending. Not a clue, the last 15 pages were worth choosing this book to read.
]]> <![CDATA[The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)]]> 25242224 The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance.

The Story of the Lost Child is the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women � the brilliant, bookish Elena, and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults, with husbands, lovers, aging parents, and children. Their friendship has been the gravitational center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up � a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final novel she has returned to Naples, drawn back as if responding to the city's obscure magnetism. Lila, on the other hand, could never free herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect the neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.]]> 473 Elena Ferrante 1609452860 Maria 5 4.47 2014 The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Maria
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/02/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)]]> 23156040 418 Elena Ferrante Maria 5 4.38 2013 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Maria
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/02/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)]]> 17465515 My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker's James Wood described as "large, captivating, amiably peopled ... a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal," Ferrante proves herself to be one of Italy's most accomplished storytellers. She writes vividly about a specific neighborhood of Naples from the late-1950s through to the current day and about two remarkable young women who are very much the products of that place and time. Yet in doing so she has created a world in which readers will recognize themselves and has drawn a marvelously nuanced portrait of friendship.

In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, the acclaimed author of The Days of Abandonment, gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging.]]> 471 Elena Ferrante Maria 5 4.47 2012 The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Maria
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/02/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Maria 5 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Maria
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2019/02/18
date added: 2019/02/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left]]> 35092275
But in fact, this audacious lie is a complete inversion of the truth. Yes, there is a fascist threat in America—but that threat is from the Left and the Democratic Party. The Democratic left has an ideology virtually identical with fascism and routinely borrows tactics of intimidation and political terror from the Nazi Brownshirts.

To cover up their insidious fascist agenda, Democrats loudly accuse President Trump and other Republicans of being Nazis—an obvious lie, considering the GOP has been fighting the Democrats over slavery, genocide, racism and fascism from the beginning.

Now, finally, Dinesh D'Souza explodes the Left's big lie. He expertly exonerates President Trump and his supporters, then uncovers the Democratic Left's long, cozy relationship with Nazism: how the racist and genocidal acts of early Democrats inspired Adolf Hitler's campaign of death; how fascist philosophers influenced the great 20th century lions of the American Left; and how today's anti-free speech, anti-capitalist, anti-religious liberty, pro-violence Democratic Party is a frightening simulacrum of the Nazi Party.

Hitler coined the term "the big lie" to describe a lie that "the great masses of the people" will fall for precisely because of how bold and monstrous the lie is. In The Big Lie, D'Souza shows that the Democratic Left's orchestrated campaign to paint President Trump and conservatives as Nazis to cover up its own fascism is, in fact, the biggest lie of all.]]> 256 Dinesh D'Souza Maria 4 4.11 2017 The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left
author: Dinesh D'Souza
name: Maria
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2017/12/04
date added: 2017/12/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]]> 29496076 Ěý
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

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

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

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward Native Americans that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly riveting, but also emotionally devastating.]]> 359 David Grann 0385534256 Maria 0 currently-reading 4.12 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: Maria
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/12/04
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[A Climate of Fear (Commissaire Adamsberg #10)]]> 31575790 From the #1 bestselling French author and four-time winner of the Crime Writers� Association’s International Dagger Award
Ěý
A woman is found murdered in her bathtub, and the murder has been made to look like a suicide. But a strange symbol found at the crime scene leads the local police to call Commissaire Adamsberg and his team.
Ěý
When the symbol is found near the body of a second disguised suicide, a pattern begins to emerge: both victims were part of a disastrous expedition to Iceland over ten years ago where a group of tourists found themselves trapped on a deserted island for two weeks, surrounded by a thick, impenetrable fog rumored to be summoned by an ancient local demon. Two of them didn’t make it back alive. But how are the deaths linked to the secretive Association for the Study of the Writings of Maximilien Robespierre? And what does the mysterious symbol signify?


From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 415 Fred Vargas 1101992239 Maria 3 3.98 2015 A Climate of Fear (Commissaire Adamsberg #10)
author: Fred Vargas
name: Maria
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2017/10/17
date added: 2017/10/17
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]]> A Spool of Blue Thread 22501028 From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author--now in the fiftieth year of her remarkable career--a brilliantly observed, joyful and wrenching, funny and true new novel that reveals, as only she can, the very nature of a family's life.
ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family--their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog--is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them, and the fate of the house so lovingly built by Red's father. Brimming with the luminous insight, humor, and compassion that are Anne Tyler's hallmarks, this capacious novel takes us across three generations of the Whitshanks, their shared stories and long-held secrets, all the unguarded and richly lived moments that combine to define who and what they are as a family.]]> 358 Anne Tyler 0385683421 Maria 3 3.39 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread
author: Anne Tyler
name: Maria
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2017/09/14
date added: 2017/09/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Camino Island (Camino Island, #1)]]> 34121119 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER � “A delightfully lighthearted caper ... [a] fast-moving, entertaining tale.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A gang of thieves stage a daring heist from a secure vault deep below Princeton University’s Firestone Library. Their loot is priceless, but Princeton has insured it for twenty-five million dollars.

Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. He makes his real money, though, as a prominent dealer in rare books. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in the black market of stolen books and manuscripts.

Mercer Mann is a young novelist with a severe case of writer’s block who has recently been laid off from her teaching position. She is approached by an elegant, mysterious woman working for an even more mysterious company. A generous offer of money convinces Mercer to go undercover and infiltrate Bruce Cable’s circle of literary friends, ideally getting close enough to him to learn his secrets.

But eventually Mercer learns far too much, and there’s trouble in paradise as only John Grisham can deliver it.]]> 290 John Grisham 0385543026 Maria 4 3.69 2017 Camino Island (Camino Island, #1)
author: John Grisham
name: Maria
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2017/08/14
date added: 2017/08/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People]]> 25666062 From the bestselling author of What's the Matter With Kansas, a scathing look at the standard-bearers of liberal politics -- a book that asks: what's the matter with Democrats?

It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course.

But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.

With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America.]]> 320 Thomas Frank 1627795391 Maria 4 4.17 2016 Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People
author: Thomas Frank
name: Maria
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/07/30
date added: 2017/07/30
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]]> Do Not Become Alarmed 33155774
When Liv and Nora decide to take their families on a holiday cruise, everyone is thrilled. The ship's comforts and possibilities seem infinite. The children - two eleven-year-olds, an eight-year-old, and a six-year-old—love the nonstop buffet and the independence they have at the Kids' Club. But when they all go ashore in beautiful Central America, a series of minor misfortunes leads the families farther and farther from the ship's safety. One minute the children are there, and the next they're gone.

What follows is a riveting, revealing story told from the perspectives of the adults and the children, as the once-happy parents - now turning on one another and blaming themselves - try to recover their children and their lives.

Celebrated for her ability to write vivid, spare, moving fiction, Maile Meloy shows how quickly the life we count on can fall away, and how a crisis changes everyone's priorities. The fast-paced, gripping plot of Do Not Become Alarmed carries with it an insightful, provocative examination of privilege, race, guilt, envy, the dilemmas of modern parenthood, and the challenge of living up to our own expectations.]]> 352 Maile Meloy 0735216525 Maria 0 to-read 3.40 2017 Do Not Become Alarmed
author: Maile Meloy
name: Maria
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/07/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> It Ends with Us 31355608 Length: 11 hours and 11 minutes

Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most.

Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up—she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.

Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating� rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.

As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan—her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.]]> 11 Colleen Hoover Maria 0 to-read 3.84 2016 It Ends with Us
author: Colleen Hoover
name: Maria
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/07/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> Beartown (Beartown, #1) 33413128
People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.]]> 432 Fredrik Backman Maria 0 to-read 4.27 2016 Beartown (Beartown, #1)
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Maria
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/07/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation]]> 178637 "Delightful and discerning . . . In this evocative study a remarkable woman, creator of the â€first lady' role, comes vividly to life."â€�The New York Times

When the roar of the Revolution had finally died down, a new generation of politicians was summoned to the Potomac to assemble the nation's capital. Into that unsteady atmosphere—which would soon enough erupt into another conflict with Britain—Dolley Madison arrived, alongside her husband, James. Within a few years, she had mastered both the social and political intricacies of the city, and by her death in 1849 was the most celebrated person in Washington. And yet, to most Americans, she's best known for saving a portrait from the burning White House.

Why did her contemporaries so admire a lady so little known today? In A Perfect Union, acclaimed historian Catherine Allgor reveals how Dolley manipulated the contstraints of her gender to construct an American democratic ruling style and to achieve her husband's political goals. By emphasizing cooperation over coercion—building bridges instead of bunkers—she left us with not only an important story about our past but a model for a modern form of politics.]]> 512 Catherine Allgor 0805083006 Maria 4 3.70 2006 A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation
author: Catherine Allgor
name: Maria
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2017/07/03
date added: 2017/07/03
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]]> <![CDATA[The Able McLaughlins (The McLaughlins, #1)]]> 542883 268 Margaret Wilson 0877972885 Maria 3 3.61 1923 The Able McLaughlins (The McLaughlins, #1)
author: Margaret Wilson
name: Maria
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1923
rating: 3
read at: 2017/07/03
date added: 2017/07/03
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer]]> 7170627 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here and here.

The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography� of cancer - from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.�

The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease.

Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.]]> 571 Siddhartha Mukherjee Maria 4 4.32 2010 The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
name: Maria
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2017/05/08
date added: 2017/05/08
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]]> Lincoln in the Bardo 29906980 Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other—for no one but Saunders could conceive it.

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home." Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy's body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction's ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical and invented—to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?]]> 368 George Saunders 0812995341 Maria 5 3.75 2017 Lincoln in the Bardo
author: George Saunders
name: Maria
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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date added: 2017/05/08
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]]> Fahrenheit 451 17470674
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.

The classic dystopian novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization’s enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.

Bradbury’s powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which, decades on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.

--back cover]]> 227 Ray Bradbury 0007491565 Maria 4 4.01 1953 Fahrenheit 451
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Maria
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2017/04/29
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review:
Intellectual holocaust in a dystopian world with some hope toward the end. Fast read, would have given it 5 stars had we been given some background on Millie and Beatty. That was a tiny gaping hole in the flowery story telling but brilliant nonetheless.
]]> <![CDATA[Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams]]> 25894084 512 Louisa Thomas 1594204632 Maria 4 3.93 2016 Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams
author: Louisa Thomas
name: Maria
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/03/31
date added: 2017/03/31
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]]> The Perfect Girl 27999751
Tonight Zoe is giving a recital that Maria has been planning for months. It needs to be the performance of Zoe’s life. But instead, by the end of the evening, Maria is dead.

In the aftermath, everyone—police, family, Zoe’s former solicitor, and Zoe herself—tries to piece together what happened. But as Zoe knows all too well, the truth is rarely straightforward, and the closer we are to someone, the less we may see.]]> 448 Gilly Macmillan 0349406405 Maria 0 to-read 3.62 2016 The Perfect Girl
author: Gilly Macmillan
name: Maria
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2017/03/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> Everything, Everything 18692431
But then one day, a moving truck arrives. New next door neighbors. I look out the window, and I see him. He’s tall, lean and wearing all black—black t-shirt, black jeans, black sneakers and a black knit cap that covers his hair completely. He catches me looking and stares at me. I stare right back. His name is Olly. I want to learn everything about him, and I do. I learn that he is funny and fierce. I learn that his eyes are Atlantic Ocean-blue and that his vice is stealing silverware. I learn that when I talk to him, my whole world opens up, and I feel myself starting to change—starting to want things. To want out of my bubble. To want everything, everything the world has to offer.

Maybe we can’t predict the future, but we can predict some things. For example, I am certainly going to fall in love with Olly. It’s almost certainly going to be a disaster.]]> 312 Nicola Yoon 0553496646 Maria 0 to-read 3.96 2015 Everything, Everything
author: Nicola Yoon
name: Maria
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2017/02/15
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]]> Bleak House 31242
“Jarndyce and Jarndyce� is an infamous lawsuit that has been in process for generations. Nobody can remember exactly how the case started but many different individuals have found their fortunes caught up in it. Esther Summerson watches as her friends and neighbours are consumed by their hopes and disappointments with the proceedings. But while the intricate puzzles of the lawsuit are being debated by lawyers, other more dramatic mysteries are unfolding that involve heartbreak, lost children, blackmail and murder.

The fog and cold that permeate Bleak House mirror a Victorian England mired in spiritual insolvency. Dickens brought all his passion, brilliance, and narrative verve to this huge novel of lives entangled in a multi-generational lawsuit—and through it, he achieved, at age 41, a stature almost Shakespearean.]]> 1017 Charles Dickens 0143037617 Maria 5 4.01 1853 Bleak House
author: Charles Dickens
name: Maria
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1853
rating: 5
read at: 2017/01/16
date added: 2017/01/17
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And here I thought that A Tale of Two Cities was his best.
]]> <![CDATA[The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London]]> 15778729 544 Judith Flanders 1848877951 Maria 3 3.98 2012 The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London
author: Judith Flanders
name: Maria
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2017/01/09
date added: 2017/01/09
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]]> Nutshell 29752912 Nutshell is a classic story of murder and deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master.

To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.]]> 199 Ian McEwan 1911214330 Maria 4 3.71 2016 Nutshell
author: Ian McEwan
name: Maria
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2016/11/15
date added: 2016/11/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why]]> 29358401
She’s Britney Spears shaving her head, Whitney Houston saying, “crack is whack,� and Amy Winehouse, dying in front of millions. But the trainwreck is also as old (and as meaningful) as feminism itself.

From Mary Wollstonecraft—who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—to Charlotte Brontë, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians alike, and when women are pushing harder than ever against the boundaries of what it means to “behave.�

Where did these women come from? What are their crimes? And what does it mean for the rest of us? For an age when any form of self-expression can be the one that ends you, Sady Doyle’s book is as fierce and intelligent as it is funny and compassionate—an essential, timely, feminist anatomy of the female trainwreck.]]> 297 Sady Doyle 1612195636 Maria 5 4.10 2016 Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why
author: Sady Doyle
name: Maria
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2016/10/26
date added: 2016/10/26
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]]> Longbourn 17380041 Ěý
If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them.
Ěý
In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household. But there is just as much romance, heartbreak, and intrigue downstairs at Longbourn as there is upstairs. When a mysterious new footman arrives, the orderly realm of the servants� hall threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, upended.

Jo Baker dares to take us beyond the drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s classic—into the often overlooked domain of the stern housekeeper and the starry-eyed kitchen maid, into the gritty daily particulars faced by the lower classes in Regency England during the Napoleonic Wars—and, in doing so, creates a vivid, fascinating, fully realized world that is wholly her own.Ěý]]> 332 Jo Baker 0385351232 Maria 2 3.63 2013 Longbourn
author: Jo Baker
name: Maria
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2016/10/16
date added: 2016/10/16
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]]> Before the Fall 26245850
Was it by chance that so many influential people perished? Or was something more sinister at work? A storm of media attention brings Scott fame that quickly morphs into notoriety and accusations, and he scrambles to salvage truth from the wreckage. Amid trauma and chaos, the fragile relationship between Scott and the young boy grows and glows at the heart of this stunning novel, raising questions of fate, morality, and the inextricable ties that bind us together.]]> 391 Noah Hawley 1455561789 Maria 4 3.69 2016 Before the Fall
author: Noah Hawley
name: Maria
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2016/10/16
date added: 2016/10/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy]]> 13588421 The Patriarch, the celebrated historian David Nasaw tells the full story of Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder of the twentieth century's most famous political dynasty. Nasaw—the only biographer granted unrestricted access to the Joseph P. Kennedy papers in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library—tracks Kennedy's astonishing passage from East Boston outsider to supreme Washington insider. Kennedy's seemingly limitless ambition drove his career to the pinnacles of success as a banker, World War I shipyard manager, Hollywood studio head, broker, Wall Street operator, New Deal presidential adviser, and founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His astounding fall from grace into ignominy did not come until the years leading up to and following America's entry into the Second World War, when the antiwar position he took as the first Irish American ambassador to London made him the subject of White House ire and popular distaste.

The Patriarch is a story not only of one of the twentieth century's wealthiest and most powerful Americans, but also of the family he raised and the children who completed the journey he had begun. Of the many roles Kennedy held, that of father was most dear to him. The tragedies that befell his family marked his final years with unspeakable suffering.

The Patriarch looks beyond the popularly held portrait of Kennedy to answer the many questions about his life, times, and legacy that have continued to haunt the historical record. Was Joseph P. Kennedy an appeaser and isolationist, an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer, a stock swindler, a bootlegger, and a colleague of mobsters? What was the nature of his relationship with his wife, Rose? Why did he have his daughter Rosemary lobotomized? Why did he oppose the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, and American assistance to the French in Vietnam? What was his relationship to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI? Did he push his second son into politics and then buy his elections for him?

In this pioneering biography, Nasaw draws on never-before-published materials from archives on three continents and interviews with Kennedy family members and friends to tell the life story of a man who participated in the major events of his times: the booms and busts, the Depression and the New Deal, two world wars and a cold war, and the birth of the New Frontier. In studying Kennedy's life, we relive with him the history of the American Century.
Ěý

2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
New York Times Ten Best Books of 2012
]]> 868 David Nasaw 1594203768 Maria 3 4.06 2012 The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
author: David Nasaw
name: Maria
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2016/08/30
date added: 2016/08/30
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]]> Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered 18775443
A genius immortalized her. A French king paid a fortune for her. An emperor coveted her. Every year more than 9 million visitors trek to view her portrait in the Louvre.Yet while everyone recognizes her smile, hardly anyone knows her story. Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, a blend of biography, history, and memoir, truly is a book of discovery—about the world’s most recognized face, most revered artist, and most praised and parodied painting. Who was she, this ordinary woman who rose to such extraordinary fame? Why did the most renowned painter of her time choose her as his model? What became of her? And why does her smile enchant us still?

Lisa Gherardini (1479-1542) was a quintessential woman of her times, caught in a whirl of political upheavals, family dramas, and public scandals. Her life spanned the most tumultuous chapters in the history of Florence—and of the greatest artistic outpouring the world has ever seen. Her story creates an extraordinary tapestry of Renaissance Florence, with larger-than-legend figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli.

Dianne Hales, author of La Bella Lingua, became obsessed with finding the real Mona Lisa on repeated trips to Florence. In Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, she takes readers with her to meet Lisa’s descendants; uncover her family’s long and colorful history; and explore the neighborhoods where she lived as a girl, a wife, and a mother. In the process, we can participate in Lisa’s daily rituals; understand her personal relationships; and see, hear, smell, and taste “her� Florence. Hales brings to life a time poised between the medieval and the modern, a vibrant city bursting into fullest bloom, and a culture that redefined the possibilities of man—and of woman.]]> 336 Dianne Hales 1451658966 Maria 4 3.53 2014 Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered
author: Dianne Hales
name: Maria
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2016/08/15
date added: 2016/08/15
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]]> Little Failure 17857652
Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union, the curious, diminutive, asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearning—for food, for acceptance, for words—desires that would follow him into adulthood. At five, Igor decided to become a writer, and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page he produced. He wroteĚýLenin and His Magical Goose,Ěýhis first novel.

In the late 1970s, world events changed Igor’s life. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange tankers of grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to America—a country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way, Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States from the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.

Shteyngart’s loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a “conscientious toiler� on Wall Street, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka—Little Failure—which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly.

As a result, Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a writer, at being a boyfriend, and, most important, at being a worthwhile human being.

Swinging between a Soviet home life and American aspirations, Shteyngart found himself living in two contradictory worlds, all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonald’s hamburger.

Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart’s prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world.]]> 368 Gary Shteyngart 0679643753 Maria 4 3.65 2014 Little Failure
author: Gary Shteyngart
name: Maria
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/05/01
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]]> Alert (Michael Bennett, #8) 24396884 "This is not a test"—every New Yorker's worst nightmare is about to become a reality.

New Yorkers aren't easily intimidated, but someone is doing their best to scare them, badly: why? After two inexplicable high-tech attacks, the city that never sleeps is on edge. Detective Michael Bennett, along with his old pal, the FBI's Emily Parker, have to catch the shadowy criminals who claim responsibility—but they're as good at concealing their identities as they are at wreaking havoc.

In the wake of a shocking assassination, Bennett begins to suspect that these mysterious events are just the prelude to the biggest threat of all. Soon he's racing against the clock, and against the most destructive enemy he's faced yet, to save his beloved city—before everyone's worst nightmare becomes a reality.

]]> 368 James Patterson 0316407038 Maria 1 3.89 2015 Alert (Michael Bennett, #8)
author: James Patterson
name: Maria
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2016/04/24
date added: 2016/04/24
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]]> Brooklyn (Eilis Lacey, #1) 4954833 Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm TĂłibĂ­n's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.]]> 262 Colm TĂłibĂ­n 1439138311 Maria 3 3.71 2009 Brooklyn (Eilis Lacey, #1)
author: Colm TĂłibĂ­n
name: Maria
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2009
rating: 3
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date added: 2016/04/24
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]]> The Book of Salt 2719
Toklas and Stein hold court in their literary salon, for which the devoted yet acerbic Binh serves as chef, and as a keen observer of his "Mesdames" and their distinguished guests. But when the enigmatic literary ladies decide to journey back to America, Binh is faced with a monumental choice: will he, the self-imposed "exile," accompany them to yet another new country, return to his native Vietnam, or make Paris his home?]]> 261 Monique Truong 0618446885 Maria 1 3.52 2003 The Book of Salt
author: Monique Truong
name: Maria
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2003
rating: 1
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date added: 2016/04/24
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]]> The Discreet Hero 25276265

Felicito Yanaque has raised himself from poverty to ownership of a trucking business. His two sons work for him. He receives a threatening letter demanding protection money. The police don't take him seriously, Felicito refuses to pay up and gets sucked into a nightmare. He becomes a reluctant public hero. Then his mistress is kidnapped, and matters become seriously complicated. And he finds that his troubles have begun very close to home.

His fate is interwoven with the story of Rigoberto, a wealthy Lima insurance executive. His boss and old friend, Ismael, suddenly announces that he is marrying his housekeeper, a chola from Piura, to the consternation of his twin sons, a pair of brutal wasters. Ismael escapes to Europe with his new bride, leaving Rigoberto to face the twins' threats, and their claims that he connived with a scheming woman to rob an old man of his fortune. Rigoberto is hounded by the press and TV. Meanwhile, his only son is having visions of a mysterious stranger who may or may not be the devil...

]]> 337 Mario Vargas Llosa 0571310737 Maria 0 3.74 2013 The Discreet Hero
author: Mario Vargas Llosa
name: Maria
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2015/04/11
date added: 2016/04/05
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]]> The Japanese Lover 25152052
Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to come to terms with her own troubled past, meets the elderly woman and her grandson, Seth, at San Francisco's charmingly eccentric Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma, eventually learning about Ichimei and this extraordinary secret passion that has endured for nearly seventy years.]]> 322 Isabel Allende 1501116975 Maria 4 3.79 2015 The Japanese Lover
author: Isabel Allende
name: Maria
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2016/03/05
date added: 2016/03/05
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Was getting ready to give it 3.5 stars but rounded it up to 4 because I couldn't put it down. Thought of it more as a thriller than a love story; who was Alma, who was Irina, really? Easy reading, ending wrapped in a nice big bow, not all questions answered.
]]> <![CDATA[Rogue Lawyer (Rogue Lawyer, #1)]]> 25387351 344 John Grisham 0385539436 Maria 4 3.67 2015 Rogue Lawyer (Rogue Lawyer, #1)
author: John Grisham
name: Maria
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2016/02/27
date added: 2016/02/27
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]]> <![CDATA[The Accidental Empress (Sisi, #1)]]> 22609307 The Traitor’s Wife, with the little-known and tumultuous love story of “Sisi� the Austro-Hungarian Empress and captivating wife of Emperor Franz Joseph.

The year is 1853, and the Habsburgs are Europe’s most powerful ruling family. With his empire stretching from Austria to Russia, from Germany to Italy, Emperor Franz Joseph is young, rich, and ready to marry.

Fifteen-year-old Elisabeth, “Sisi,� Duchess of Bavaria, travels to the Habsburg Court with her older sister, who is betrothed to the young emperor. But shortly after her arrival at court, Sisi finds herself in an unexpected dilemma: she has inadvertently fallen for and won the heart of her sister’s groom. Franz Joseph reneges on his earlier proposal and declares his intention to marry Sisi instead.

Thrust onto the throne of Europe’s most treacherous imperial court, Sisi upsets political and familial loyalties in her quest to win, and keep, the love of her emperor, her people, and of the world.

With Pataki’s rich period detail and cast of complex, bewitching characters, The Accidental Empress offers a captivating glimpse into one of history’s most intriguing royal families, shedding new light on the glittering Hapsburg Empire and its most mesmerizing, most beloved “Fairy Queen.”]]> 495 Allison Pataki 1476790221 Maria 2 3.86 2015 The Accidental Empress (Sisi, #1)
author: Allison Pataki
name: Maria
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2015
rating: 2
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date added: 2016/02/19
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]]> A Strangeness in My Mind 24997390 A Strangeness In My Mind is a novel Orhan Pamuk has worked on for six years. It is the story of boza seller Mevlut, the woman to whom he wrote three years' worth of love letters, and their life in Istanbul.

In the four decades between 1969 and 2012, Mevlut works a number of different jobs on the streets of Istanbul, from selling yoghurt and cooked rice, to guarding a car park. He observes many different kinds of people thronging the streets, he watches most of the city get demolished and re-built, and he sees migrants from Anatolia making a fortune; at the same time, he witnesses all of the transformative moments, political clashes, and military coups that shape the country. He always wonders what it is that separates him from everyone else - the source of that strangeness in his mind. But he never stops selling boza during winter evenings and trying to understand who his beloved really is.

What matters more in love: what we wish for, or what our fate has in store? Do our choices dictate whether we will be happy or not, or are these things determined by forces beyond our control?

A Strangeness In My Mind tries to answer these questions while portraying the tensions between urban life and family life, and the fury and helplessness of women inside their homes.]]> 624 Orhan Pamuk 0571275974 Maria 4 4.15 2014 A Strangeness in My Mind
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: Maria
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/02/13
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]]> From Amigos to Friends 1357500 Pelayo Garcia 1558852077 Maria 1 3.67 1997 From Amigos to Friends
author: Pelayo Garcia
name: Maria
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1997
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2016/01/31
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]]> The Silent Wife 16171291
Todd Gilbert and Jodie Brett are in a bad place in their relationship. They've been together for twenty-eight years, and with no children to worry about there has been little to disrupt their affluent Chicago lifestyle. But there has also been little to hold it together, and beneath the surface lie ever-widening cracks. HE is a committed cheater. SHE lives and breathes denial. HE exists in dual worlds. SHE likes to settle scores. HE decides to play for keeps. SHE has nothing left to lose. When it becomes clear that their precarious world could disintegrate at any moment, Jodie knows she stands to lose everything. It's only now she will discover just how much she's truly capable of...]]> 326 A.S.A. Harrison 0143123238 Maria 5 3.24 2013 The Silent Wife
author: A.S.A. Harrison
name: Maria
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/01/30
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]]> The Girl on the Train 22557272
An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.]]> 336 Paula Hawkins 1594633665 Maria 2 3.97 2015 The Girl on the Train
author: Paula Hawkins
name: Maria
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2016/01/27
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]]> Primates of Park Avenue 23492673
After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place. She understood the other mothers' snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded them to establish dominance in their troop. And so she analyzed tribal migration patterns, display rituals, physical adornment, mutilation, mating practices, extra-pair copulation, and more. Her conclusions are smart, thought-provoking, and hilariously unexpected.

Every city has its Upper East Side, and in Wednesday's memoir, readers everywhere will recognize the strange cultural codes of powerful social hierarchies and the compelling desire to climb them. They will also see that Upper East Side mothers want the same things for their children that all mothers want: safety, happiness, and success;and not even sky-high penthouses and chauffeured SUVs can protect this ecologically released tribe from the universal experiences of anxiety and loss. When Wednesday's life turns upside down, she learns how deep the bonds of female friendship really are.

Intelligent, funny, and heartfelt, Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world: the exotic, fascinating, and strangely familiar culture of privileged Manhattan motherhood.]]> 248 Wednesday Martin 1476762627 Maria 4 3.13 2015 Primates of Park Avenue
author: Wednesday Martin
name: Maria
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2016/01/10
date added: 2016/01/10
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]]> The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty 23590710 Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers comes a tensely drawn, spellbinding literary thriller that gets to the heart of what defines us as human beings—the singular identity we create for ourselves in the world and the myriad alternative identities that lie just below the surface.

In Vendela Vida’s taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. Almost immediately, while checking into her hotel, she is robbed, her passport and all identification stolen. The crime is investigated by the police, but the woman feels there is a strange complicity between the hotel staff and the authorities—she knows she’ll never see her possessions again.

Stripped of her identity, she feels both burdened by the crime and liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone at all. Then, a chance encounter with a film crew provides an intriguing opportunity: A producer sizes her up and asks, would she be willing to be the body-double for a movie star filming in the city? And so begins a strange journey in which she’ll become a stand-in—both on-set and off—for a reclusive celebrity who can no longer circulate freely in society while gradually moving further away from the person she was when she arrived in Morocco.

Infused with vibrant, lush detail and enveloped in an intoxicating atmosphere—while barely pausing to catch its breath�The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty is a riveting, entrancing novel that explores freedom, power and the mutability of identity.]]> 224 Vendela Vida 144340974X Maria 5 3.44 2015 The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty
author: Vendela Vida
name: Maria
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2016/01/10
date added: 2016/01/10
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty]]> 18296129
Demanding and enigmatic, patriarch Conrad Hilton's visionary ideas and unyielding will established the model for the modern luxury hotel industry. But outside the boardroom, Conrad struggled with emotional detachment, failed marriages, and conflicted Catholicism. Then there were his Playboy Nicky Hilton's tragic alcoholism and marriage to Elizabeth Taylor was the stuff of tabloid legend. Barron Hilton, on the other hand, deftly handled his father's legacy, carrying the Hilton brand triumphantly into the new millennium.

Eric, raised apart from his older brothers, accepted his supporting role in the Hilton dynasty with calm and quiet-a stark contrast to the boys' much younger half-sister Francesca, whose battle for recognition led her into courtrooms and conflict. The cast of supporting players includes the inimitable Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was married to Conrad briefly and remained a thorn in his side for decades, and a host of other Hollywood and business luminaries with whom the Hiltons crossed paths and swords over the years.]]> 560 J. Randy Taraborrelli 1455516694 Maria 3 3.76 2014 The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty
author: J. Randy Taraborrelli
name: Maria
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2016/01/02
date added: 2016/01/02
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]]> Fourth of July Creek 18651980
After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral eleven-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face to face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah. With courage and caution, Pete slowly earns a measure of trust from this paranoid survivalist itching for a final conflict that will signal the coming End Times.

But as Pete's own family spins out of control, Benjamin's activities spark the full-blown interest of the F.B.I., putting Pete at the center of a massive manhunt from which no one will emerge unscathed.]]> 466 Smith Henderson 0062286447 Maria 5 3.81 2014 Fourth of July Creek
author: Smith Henderson
name: Maria
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2015/12/26
date added: 2015/12/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth]]> 17568801 No god but God comes a fascinating, provocative, and meticulously researched biography that challenges long-held assumptions about the man we know as Jesus of Nazareth.

Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher and miracle worker walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.� The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal.

Within decades after his shameful death, his followers would call him God.

Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first-century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor. Scores of Jewish prophets, preachers, and would-be messiahs wandered through the Holy Land, bearing messages from God. This was the age of zealotry—a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews. And few figures better exemplified this principle than the charismatic Galilean who defied both the imperial authorities and their allies in the Jewish religious hierarchy.

Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Aslan describes a man full of conviction and passion, yet rife with contradiction; a man of peace who exhorted his followers to arm themselves with swords; an exorcist and faith healer who urged his disciples to keep his identity a secret; and ultimately the seditious “King of the Jews� whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his brief lifetime. Aslan explores the reasons why the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary. And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself, the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity.

Zealot yields a fresh perspective on one of the greatest stories ever told even as it affirms the radical and transformative nature of Jesus of Nazareth’s life and mission. The result is a thought-provoking, elegantly written biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel: a singularly brilliant portrait of a man, a time, and the birth of a religion.]]> 296 Reza Aslan 140006922X Maria 3 Interesting narrative 3.83 2013 Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
author: Reza Aslan
name: Maria
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2015/12/20
date added: 2015/12/20
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Interesting narrative
]]> The Paris Architect 17456328
Written by an expert whose knowledge imbues every page, this story becomes more gripping with every life the architect tries to save.
]]> 371 Charles Belfoure 1402284314 Maria 3 4.00 2013 The Paris Architect
author: Charles Belfoure
name: Maria
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2015/12/16
date added: 2015/12/16
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]]> The Truth According to Us 22551743
At the Romeyn house, twelve-year-old Willa is desperate to learn everything in her quest to acquire her favorite virtues of ferocity and devotion—a search that leads her into a thicket of mysteries, including the questionable business that occupies her charismatic father and the reason her adored aunt Jottie remains unmarried. Layla’s arrival strikes a match to the family veneer, bringing to light buried secrets that will tell a new tale about the Romeyns. As Willa peels back the layers of her family’s past, and Layla delves deeper into town legend, everyone involved is transformed—and their personal histories completely rewritten.]]> 486 Annie Barrows 0385342942 Maria 3 3.71 2015 The Truth According to Us
author: Annie Barrows
name: Maria
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2015/12/04
date added: 2015/12/04
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]]> The Twin 2857990
After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. â€A double bed and a duvetâ€�, advises Ada, who lives next door, with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm?

The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies. Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, The Twin is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one’s own hands. It chronicles a way of life which has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet riven with a kind of romantic longing.]]> 256 Gerbrand Bakker 1846551374 Maria 0 to-read 3.83 2006 The Twin
author: Gerbrand Bakker
name: Maria
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/11/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Memory Painter 22836956
Bryan Pierce is an internationally famous artist whose paintings have dazzled the world. But there's a secret to his success: Every canvas is inspired by an unusually vivid dream. When Bryan awakes, he possesses extraordinary new skills...like the ability to speak obscure languages and an inexplicable genius for chess. All his life, he has wondered if his dreams are recollections, if he is re-experiencing other people's lives.

Linz Jacobs is a brilliant neurogeneticist, absorbed in decoding the genes that help the brain make memories, until she is confronted with an exact rendering of a recurring nightmare at one of Bryan's shows. She tracks down the elusive artist, and their meeting triggers Bryan's most powerful dream yet: visions of a team of scientists who, on the verge of discovering a cure for Alzheimer's, died in a lab explosion decades ago.

As Bryan becomes obsessed with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the scientists' deaths, his dreams begin to reveal what happened at the lab, as well as a deeper mystery that may lead all the way to ancient Egypt. Together, Bryan and Linz start to discern a pattern. But a deadly enemy watches their every move, and he will stop at nothing to ensure that the past stays buried.]]> 332 Gwendolyn Womack 125005303X Maria 1 3.87 2015 The Memory Painter
author: Gwendolyn Womack
name: Maria
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2015/11/29
date added: 2015/11/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn]]> 11064552 � New York Times Lucette Lagnado’s acclaimed, award-winning The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (“[a] crushing, brilliant book� � New York Times Book Review ) told the powerfully moving story of her Jewish family’s exile from Egypt. In her extraordinary follow-up memoir, The Arrogant Years , Lagnado revisits her first years in America, and describes a difficult coming-of-age tragically interrupted by a bout with cancer at age 16. At once a poignant mother and daughter story and a magnificent snapshot of the turbulent �60s and �70s, The Arrogant Years is a stunning work of memory and resilience that ranges from Cairo to Brooklyn and beyond—the unforgettable true story of a remarkable young woman’s determination to push past the boundaries of her life and make her way in the wider world.]]> 352 Lucette Lagnado 0061803677 Maria 4 3.82 The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn
author: Lucette Lagnado
name: Maria
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/11/17
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]]> <![CDATA[We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals]]> 6287100 460 Gillian Gill 0345484053 Maria 3 3.83 2009 We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals
author: Gillian Gill
name: Maria
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2015/11/09
date added: 2015/11/09
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]]> <![CDATA[An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History]]> 15841986 241 Cynthia Zarin 0307962199 Maria 4 3.51 2013 An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History
author: Cynthia Zarin
name: Maria
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2015/10/31
date added: 2015/10/31
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]]> <![CDATA[The Rosie Project (Don Tillman, #1)]]> 16181775
Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a “wonderful� husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon The Wife Project. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner. She will be punctual and logical—most definitely not a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver.

Yet Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent—and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don's Wife Project takes a back burner to the Father Project and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper.

The Rosie Project is a moving and hilarious novel for anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of overwhelming challenges.]]> 292 Graeme Simsion 1476729085 Maria 0 to-read 4.00 2013 The Rosie Project (Don Tillman, #1)
author: Graeme Simsion
name: Maria
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/10/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> Every Fifteen Minutes 21853628 435 Lisa Scottoline 125001011X Maria 0 3.73 2015 Every Fifteen Minutes
author: Lisa Scottoline
name: Maria
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2015/10/24
date added: 2015/10/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune]]> 17704903 �winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?
Ěý
Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world.
Ěý
Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else.
Ěý
The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic.
Ěý
Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms.

The No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Best nonfiction books of the year at Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble. One of the New York Times critic Janet Maslin's 10 favorite books of 2013.
]]> 456 Bill Dedman 0345534522 Maria 4 3.76 2013 Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
author: Bill Dedman
name: Maria
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2015/10/24
date added: 2015/10/24
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]]> Minaret 206227
With her Muslim hijab and down-turned gaze, Najwa is invisible to most eyes, especially to the rich families whose houses she cleans in London. Twenty years ago, Najwa, then at university in Khartoum, would never have imagined that one day she would be a maid. An upper-class Westernized Sudanese, her dreams were to marry well and raise a family. But a coup forces the young woman and her family into political exile in London. Soon orphaned, she finds solace and companionship within the Muslim community. Then Najwa meets Tamer, the intense, lonely younger brother of her employer. They find a common bond in faith and slowly, silently, begin to fall in love.

Written with directness and force, Minaret is a lyric and insightful novel about Islam and an alluring glimpse into a culture Westerners are only just beginning to understand.]]> 276 Leila Aboulela 0802170145 Maria 2 3.60 2005 Minaret
author: Leila Aboulela
name: Maria
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana]]> 10430 320 Isadora Tattlin 0767914848 Maria 5 3.53 2002 Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana
author: Isadora Tattlin
name: Maria
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/10/17
shelves:
review:
True, there's no plot, just a 4 year diary full of this woman's observations. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes utterly ridiculous. It was too short for me, wish she could have written another 300 pages. Loved every minute I spent reading it.
]]> Beautiful Ruins 11447921
A #1 New York Times bestseller, this “absolute masterpiece� (Richard Russo) is the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 and resurfaces fifty years later in Hollywood. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the back lots of contemporary Hollywood, this is a dazzling, yet deeply human roller coaster of a novel.

The acclaimed author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet. Hailed by critics and loved by readers of literary and historical fiction, Beautiful Ruins is gloriously inventive and constantly surprising—a story of flawed yet fascinating people navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.]]> 337 Jess Walter 0061928127 Maria 3 3.67 2012 Beautiful Ruins
author: Jess Walter
name: Maria
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2015/10/09
date added: 2015/10/09
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)]]> 2052
This is an alternate cover edition.]]> 231 Raymond Chandler 0394758285 Maria 3 3.96 1939 The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)
author: Raymond Chandler
name: Maria
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1939
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2015/09/26
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation]]> 85665 New York Times bestselling author Cokie Roberts comes New York Times bestseller Founding Mothers, an intimate and illuminating look at the fervently patriotic and passionate women whose tireless pursuits on behalf of their families–and their country–proved just as crucial to the forging of a new nation as the rebellion that established it.

While much has been written about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, battled the British, and framed the Constitution, the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters they left behind have been little noticed by history. #1 New York Times bestselling author Cokie Roberts brings us women who fought the Revolution as valiantly as the men, often defending their very doorsteps. Drawing upon personal correspondence, private journals, and even favoured recipes, Roberts reveals the often surprising stories of these fascinating women, bringing to life the everyday trials and extraordinary triumphs of individuals like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Deborah Read Franklin, Eliza Pinckney, Catherine Littlefield Green, Esther DeBerdt Reed and Martha Washington–proving that without our exemplary women, the new country might have never survived.]]> 384 Cokie Roberts 006009026X Maria 4 3.58 2004 Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation
author: Cokie Roberts
name: Maria
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/09/26
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review:
Extraordinary times, extraordinary tales. Didn't give it 5 stars because Cokie Roberts is not an extraordinary writer. Just my opinion.
]]> <![CDATA[Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania]]> 22551730
On May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months, its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era's great transatlantic "Greyhounds" and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. He knew, moreover, that his ship - the fastest then in service - could outrun any threat.

Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger's U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small - hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more--all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.

It is a story that many of us think we know but don't, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour, mystery, and real-life suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope Riddle to President Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster that helped place America on the road to war.]]> 430 Erik Larson 0307408868 Maria 4 4.10 2015 Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
author: Erik Larson
name: Maria
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2015/09/15
date added: 2015/09/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy]]> 7788069
Learning to Die in Miami opens as the plane lands and Carlos faces, with trepidation and excitement, his new life. He quickly realizes that in order for his new American self to emerge, his Cuban self must "die." And so, with great enterprise and purpose, he begins his journey.

We follow Carlos as he adjusts to life in his new home. Faced with learning English, attending American schools, and an uncertain future, young Carlos confronts the age-old immigrant’s being surrounded by American bounty, but not able to partake right away. The abundance America has to offer excites him and, regardless of how grim his living situation becomes, he eagerly forges ahead with his own personal assimilation program, shedding the vestiges of his old life almost immediately, even changing his name to Charles. Cuba becomes a remote and vague idea in the back of his mind, something he used to know well, but now it "had ceased to be part of the world."

But as Carlos comes to grips with his strange surroundings, he must also struggle with everyday issues of growing up. His constant movement between foster homes and the eventual realization that his parents are far away in Cuba bring on an acute awareness that his life has irrevocably changed. Flashing back and forth between past and future, we watch as Carlos balances the divide between his past and present homes and finds his way in this strange new world, one that seems to hold the exhilarating promise of infinite possibilities and one that he will eventually claim as his own.

An exorcism and an ode, Learning to Die in Miami is a celebration of renewal—of those times when we’re certain we have died and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.]]> 320 Carlos Eire 143918190X Maria 5 3.82 2010 Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy
author: Carlos Eire
name: Maria
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2015/09/03
date added: 2015/09/03
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The flash backs, forward, sideways, ups and downs drive me a little nuts toward the end. For someone who gave us so much detail of his 9 months living with Ricky and Lucy in Miami he sure omitted a lot toward the end of the book. Because there are no 4.5 stars I'll give him 5. His first one is his masterpiece and even though this one fell short half a star I still loved it. Swoosh!!
]]> <![CDATA[Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story: The Untold Story]]> 21801489
The untold story of how one woman's life was changed forever in a matter of seconds by a horrific trauma.

Barbara Leaming's extraordinary and deeply sensitive biography is the first book to document Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' brutal, lonely and valiant thirty-one year struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that followed JFK's assassination.

Here is the woman as she has never been seen before. In heartrending detail, we witness a struggle that unfolded at times before our own eyes, but which we failed to understand.

Leaming's biography also makes clear the pattern of Jackie's life as a whole. We see how a spirited young woman's rejection of a predictable life led her to John F. Kennedy and the White House, how she sought to reconcile the conflicts of her marriage and the role she was to play, and how the trauma of her husband's murder which left her soaked in his blood and brains led her to seek a very different kind of life from the one she'd previously sought.

A life story that has been scrutinized countless times, seen here for the first time as the serious and important story that it is. A story for our times at a moment when we as a nation need more than ever to understand the impact of trauma.]]> 368 Barbara Leaming 1250017645 Maria 1 3.69 2014 Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story: The Untold Story
author: Barbara Leaming
name: Maria
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2014
rating: 1
read at: 2015/08/28
date added: 2015/08/28
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]]> Let the Great World Spin 5941033
Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.� A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent� (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.]]> 351 Colum McCann 1400063736 Maria 4 3.95 2009 Let the Great World Spin
author: Colum McCann
name: Maria
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2015/08/02
date added: 2015/08/02
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]]> Crossroads 1918158
Cassie Wright never saw it coming. As owner of Wright Glassworks, the foremost company in a thriving New England town, Cassie’s life was quiet, focused on her work and home…until a tragic accident turns her carefully ordered world upside down. For there is a surviving child to think about—and Cassie must take in one-year-old Gwen, who has no one else to care for her. As the years pass, Cassie will raise Gwen as her own, and a little girl who lost everything will flourish in a world of privilege and opportunity.

Enter Jewel Fairbanks. Beautiful and conniving, Jewel will touch the lives of both Cassie and Gwen in powerful ways. From the moment they meet, Jewel envies Gwen, who seems to have everything Jewel wants. The two couldn’t be more different, but their lives will soon become inextricably intertwined. Both will marry—but to profoundly different men. For Gwen, it is honest, hardworking Stan who steals her heart; Jewel will set her sights on Jeff, a shrewd businessman who owns the company where Stan works.

But when Stan makes a shocking discovery on the job, relationships begin to shift and change...and soon a tangled drama of greed, jealousy, and betrayal will encircle both couples, as a chain reaction of unexpected events changes four lives forever—in ways they never could have foreseen�.]]> 336 Belva Plain 0385336845 Maria 2 3.53 2005 Crossroads
author: Belva Plain
name: Maria
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at: 2015/06/27
date added: 2015/06/27
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]]> The Newlyweds 13093000
In The Newlyweds, we follow the story of Amina Mazid, who at age twenty-four moves from Bangladesh to Rochester, New York, for love. A hundred years ago, Amina would have been called a mail-order bride. But this is an arranged marriage for the twenty-first century: Amina is wooed by - and woos - George Stillman online.

For Amina, George offers a chance for a new life and a different kind of happiness than she might find back home. For George, Amina is a woman who doesn't play games. But each of them is hiding something: someone from the past they thought they could leave behind. It is only when they put an ocean between them - and Amina returns to Bangladesh - that she and George find out if their secrets will tear them apart, or if they can build a future together.

The Newlyweds is a surprising, suspenseful story about the exhilarations - and real-life complications - of getting, and staying, married. It stretches across continents, generations, and plains of emotion. What has always set Nell Freudenberger apart is the sly, gimlet eye she turns on collisions of all kinds - sexual, cultural, familial. With The Newlyweds, she has found her perfect subject for that vision, and characters to match. She reveals Amina's heart and mind, capturing both her new American reality and the home she cannot forget, with seamless authenticity, empathy, and grace. At once revelatory and affecting, The Newlyweds is a stunning achievement.]]> 337 Nell Freudenberger 0307268845 Maria 3 3.41 2012 The Newlyweds
author: Nell Freudenberger
name: Maria
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2015/05/22
date added: 2015/05/22
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]]> One of Ours 543137 343 Willa Cather 1600969798 Maria 4 3.89 1922 One of Ours
author: Willa Cather
name: Maria
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1922
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/05/15
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]]> The Son 19101283 Sonny Lofthus is a strangely charismatic and complacent young man. Sonny's been in prison for a dozen years, nearly half his life. The inmates who seek out his uncanny abilities to soothe leave his cell feeling absolved. They don t know or care that Sonny has a serious heroin habit or where or how he gets his uninterrupted supply of the drug. Or that he's serving time for other peoples crimes.
Sonny took the first steps toward addiction when his father took his own life rather than face exposure as a corrupt cop. Now Sonny is the seemingly malleable center of a whole infrastructure of corruption: prison staff, police, lawyers, a desperate priest all of them focused on keeping him high and in jail. And all of them under the thumb of the Twin, Oslo's crime overlord. As long as Sonny gets his dope, he's happy to play the criminal and the prison's in-house savior.
But when he learns a stunning, long-hidden secret concerning his father, he makes a brilliantly executed escape from prison and from the person he d let himself become and begins hunting down those responsible for the crimes against him . . . The darkly looming question is: Who will get to him first the criminals or the cops?]]> 407 Jo Nesbø 0385351372 Maria 2 4.06 2014 The Son
author: Jo Nesbø
name: Maria
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2014
rating: 2
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date added: 2015/05/15
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]]> Gray Mountain 20707959 John Grisham has a new hero . . . and she’s full of surprises

The year is 2008 and Samantha Kofer’s career at a huge Wall Street law firm is on the fast track—until the recession hits and she gets downsized, furloughed, escorted out of the building.ĚýSamantha, though, is one of the “luckyâ€� associates. She’s offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic for one year without pay, after which there would be a slim chance that she’d get her old job back.

In a matter of days Samantha moves from Manhattan to Brady, Virginia, population 2,200, in the heart of Appalachia, a part of the world she has only read about. Mattie Wyatt, lifelong Brady resident and head of the town’s legal aid clinic, is there to teach her how to “help real people with real problems.� For the first time in her career, Samantha prepares a lawsuit, sees the inside of an actual courtroom, gets scolded by a judge, and receives threats from locals who aren’t so thrilled to have a big-city lawyer in town. And she learns that Brady, like most small towns, harbors some big secrets.

Her new job takes Samantha into the murky and dangerous world of coal mining, where laws are often broken, rules are ignored, regulations are flouted, communities are divided, and the land itself is under attack from Big Coal. Violence is always just around the corner, and within weeks Samantha finds herself engulfed in litigation that turns deadly.]]> 368 John Grisham 038553714X Maria 2 3.50 2014 Gray Mountain
author: John Grisham
name: Maria
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2015/04/05
date added: 2015/04/05
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Was this book really written by Grisham or did he lend his name to someone else? It was awful.
]]> If Sons, Then Heirs 8854668 TheĚýcritically acclaimedĚýauthor of Black Ice, Pride, and The Price of a Child offers this deeply moving story of a family’s challenge to reunite, understand the truth about its past, and secure its legacy.

Ěý

If Sons, Then Heirs sheds light on a uniquely American, largely untold story of African American land ownership, the outmigration from the South, racial violence, and the consequences of past decisions on present realities.

ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý After World War II, Needham family members migrated north to Philadelphia from South Carolina, leaving behind the tragic injustice surrounding the violent death of their patriarch, King. His devoted widow, Selma, remains on the old home place. Over the years, she raises King’s children, including his great-grandson, Rayne, on whom falls the responsibility to bring the family together to save the family land and mend the rift between him and his mother.

ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý Rayne and the other vividly drawn characters face challenges big and small that mirror the experiences of families everywhere. But in the masterful storytelling of Lorene Cary, so distinct and unique are their voices that they will live in the minds of readers long after the last page is read. ĚýIf Sons, Then Heirs is a tour de force that explores the power of family secrets, bonds, and love. This gripping novel is certain to be on the must-read lists of all who enjoy brilliantly rendered stories of family, love, and American history.]]> 320 Lorene Cary Maria 4 3.52 2011 If Sons, Then Heirs
author: Lorene Cary
name: Maria
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2015/03/14
date added: 2015/03/14
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]]> China Dolls 18404427 An exciting new novel set in the "Chop Suey Circuit" of San Francisco right before World War II, from the beloved bestselling author of Snowflower and the Secret Fan and Shanghai Girls.

In 1938, Ruby, Helen and Grace, three girls from very different backgrounds, find themselves competing at the same audition for showgirl roles at San Francisco's exclusive "Oriental" nightclub, the Forbidden City. Grace, an American-born Chinese girl has fled the Midwest and an abusive father. Helen is from a Chinese family who have deep roots in San Francisco's Chinatown. And, as both her friends know, Ruby is Japanese passing as Chinese. At times their differences are pronounced, but the girls grow to depend on one another in order to fulfill their individual dreams. Then, everything changes in a heartbeat with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly the government is sending innocent Japanese to internment camps under suspicion, and Ruby is one of them. But which of her friends betrayed her?]]> 376 Lisa See 081299289X Maria 4 3.62 2014 China Dolls
author: Lisa See
name: Maria
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2015/03/07
date added: 2015/03/07
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Dysfunctional friendships, loved the historical part of the book.
]]> Everything I Never Told You 18693763
Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James Lee; a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue - in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James's case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the centre of every party. But Lydia is under pressures that have nothing to do with growing up in 1970s small town Ohio. Her father is an American born of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and his ethnicity, and hers, make them conspicuous in any setting.

When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, James is consumed by guilt and sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to make someone accountable, no matter what the cost. Lydia's older brother, Nathan, is convinced that local bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it's the youngest in the family - Hannah - who observes far more than anyone realises and who may be the only one who knows what really happened.

Everything I Never Told You is a gripping page-turner, about secrets, love, longing, lies and race.

Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.]]> 297 Celeste Ng 159420571X Maria 3 3.81 2014 Everything I Never Told You
author: Celeste Ng
name: Maria
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2015/03/01
date added: 2015/03/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Fighting Chance (Gregor Demarkian, #29)]]> 20575415 When Father Tibor is then arrested on murder charges, it tears at the very foundation of Demarkian's world. While Gregor has very strict rules about for whom and under what conditions he will consult, all those rules go by the wayside. In "Fighting Chance," from award-winning author Jane Haddam, Demarkian is now a man possessed, and his one goal is to find out what really happened and who is really responsible for the murder Father Tibor is charged with.]]> 320 Jane Haddam 125001235X Maria 2 3.61 2014 Fighting Chance (Gregor Demarkian, #29)
author: Jane Haddam
name: Maria
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2015/02/21
date added: 2015/02/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Scientists: A Family Romance]]> 13538763 A frank, intelligent, and deeply moving debut memoir

With the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician—from the time he could get his toddler tongue to a pronounce a word like “De-oxy ribonucleic acid,â€� or recite a French poem—Marco Roth was able to share his parentsâ€� New York, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that hadĚýinfected him in the early 1980s.

What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways. The Scientists is a story of how we first learn from our parents and how we then learn to see them as separate individuals; it’s a story of how precociousness can slow us down when it comes to knowing about our desires and other people’s. A memoir of parents and children in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J.R. Ackerley, TheĚýScientists grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance, in a style that is both elegiac and defiant.

Ěý]]> 208 Marco Roth 0374210284 Maria 3 3.12 2012 The Scientists: A Family Romance
author: Marco Roth
name: Maria
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2015/02/15
date added: 2015/02/15
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]]> Practice to Deceive 17571637 Practice to Deceive, Rule's first book-length investigative chronicle since In the Still of the Night, Rule unravels a shattering case of Christmastime murder off the coast of Washington State. presented with the clarity, authority, and emotional depth that Rule's readers expect. It's a case with enough drama, greed, sex, and scandal to be called "The Real Housewives of Whidbey Island"; but this was not reality television. This was murder: pure, cruel, ugly, and senseless. And someone had to pay the price.

Nestled in Puget Sound, Whidbey Island is a gem of the Pacific Northwest. Accessible only by ferry and the soaring Deception Pass Bridge, it is known for its artistic communities and stunning natural beauty. Life there is low-key, insular, and the island's year-round residents tend to know one another's business. But when the blood-drenched body of Russel Douglas was discovered the day after Christmas in his SUV in a hidden driveway near Whidbey's most exclusive mansions, the whole island was shocked. A single bullet between his eyes was the cause of death, but no one could imagine who among them could plot such a devious, cold-blooded crime. At first, police suspected suicide, tragically common at the height of the holiday season. But when they found no gun in or near the SUV, Russel's manner of death became homicide. Like a cast of characters from a classic mystery novel, a host of Whidbey residents fell under suspicion.

Brenna Douglas was Russel's estranged and soon-to-be-ex wife, who allowed him to come home for a Christmas visit with their children. The couple owned the popular Just B's salon. Brenna's good friend Peggy Sue Thomas worked there, and Brenna complained often to her that Russel was physically and emotionally abusive. Peggy Sue's own life has been one of extremes. Married three times, hers is a rags-to-riches-and-back-again tale in which she's played many roles: aircraft mechanic, basketball coach, the "drop-dead gorgeous vamp"; beauty queen as a former Ms. Washington, Las Vegas limousine driver, million-dollar horse breeder, wealthy divorcee. But in 2003, her love affair with married guitarist Jim Huden led the two Whidbey Island natives to pursue their ultimate dreams of wealth and privilege;even at the expense of human life.

Unravel the tangled web woven by Russel Douglas's murder in Practice to Deceive, the newest heart pounding true-crime tour de force from Ann Rule.]]> 339 Ann Rule 1416544623 Maria 0 to-read 3.37 2013 Practice to Deceive
author: Ann Rule
name: Maria
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/02/10
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]]> Nice Big American Baby 50573
In “Flush,� a mammogram prompts a dark comedy of blurred identities between a mother and her two adult daughters. In “Elephant and Boy,� a surrogate mother-and-son bond, tinged with the erotic, is formed when a philanthropist attempts to “civilize� a young elephant handler. “Nadia� sounds the depths of a young woman’s complex feelings toward a friend’s mail-order bride from Eastern Europe. “Preparedness”–an Orwellian tale in Technicolor–imagines rapture in the wake of imminent apocalypse. And in “Where We Come From,� a pregnant woman’s many failed attempts to cross the border do not lessen her resolve to give birth on U.S. soil to a “nice big American baby.�

Magical, poignant, often transcendent, these are virtuoso modern fables that mine our stores of hidden urges, misunderstandings, and blind passions, inviting us on a voyage through places and times at once deeply familiar and wondrously strange.]]> 304 Judy Budnitz 0375726861 Maria 4 3.88 2005 Nice Big American Baby
author: Judy Budnitz
name: Maria
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2015/02/07
date added: 2015/02/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Housekeeper and the Professor]]> 3181564
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper’s shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.]]> 180 YĹŤko Ogawa 0312427808 Maria 5 4.04 2003 The Housekeeper and the Professor
author: YĹŤko Ogawa
name: Maria
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/02/01
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I'll be thinking about this book and the characters weeks from now, easy read, very touching.
]]> Light in August 10979 Light in August, a novel that contrasts stark tragedy with hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, which features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, a lonely outcast haunted by visions of Confederate glory; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.]]> 507 William Faulkner 0679732268 Maria 4 3.93 1932 Light in August
author: William Faulkner
name: Maria
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1932
rating: 4
read at: 2015/01/31
date added: 2015/01/31
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]]> The Syndrome 227479
Suddenly targeted by unknown assassins, he and Adrienne must run for their very lives. Forced to trust each other, they must now work together to unlock the reason why one or both of them is marked for death. For beneath the intrigue lies a dark conspiracy that stretches halfway around the world-and a sinister plot that could change the course of history.]]> 512 John Case 0345433106 Maria 4 3.74 2001 The Syndrome
author: John Case
name: Maria
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2015/01/25
date added: 2015/01/25
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]]> Moral Disorder 21898615 Wilderness Tips.

In these ten interrelated stories Atwood traces the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it, while evoking the drama and the humour that colour common experiences � the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. With settings ranging from Toronto, northern Quebec, and rural Ontario, the stories begin in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. Then the narrative goes back in time to the forties and moves chronologically forward toward the present.

In �The Art of Cooking and Serving,� the twelve-year-old narrator does her best to accommodate the arrival of a baby sister. After she boldly declares her independence, we follow the narrator into young adulthood and then through a complex relationship. In “The Entities,� the story of two women haunted by the past unfolds. The magnificent last two stories reveal the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle.

By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. This is vintage Atwood, writing at the height of her powers.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 242 Margaret Atwood Maria 3 3.77 2006 Moral Disorder
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Maria
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2014/10/08
date added: 2015/01/24
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]]> <![CDATA[The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street (The Cairo Trilogy #1-3)]]> 5488
The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sons–the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal. Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination in Palace of Desire, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s. Sugar Street brings Mahfouz’s vivid tapestry of an evolving Egypt to a dramatic climax as the aging patriarch sees one grandson become a Communist, one a Muslim fundamentalist, and one the lover of a powerful politician.

Throughout the trilogy, the family's trials mirror those of their turbulent country during the years spanning the two World Wars, as change comes to a society that has resisted it for centuries. Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, The Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller.]]> 1313 Naguib Mahfouz Maria 4 4.45 1957 The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street (The Cairo Trilogy #1-3)
author: Naguib Mahfouz
name: Maria
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1957
rating: 4
read at: 2015/01/24
date added: 2015/01/24
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]]> Leaving Tangier 6409130 372 Tahar Ben Jelloun 1906413339 Maria 3 3.44 2006 Leaving Tangier
author: Tahar Ben Jelloun
name: Maria
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2015/01/24
date added: 2015/01/24
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]]> Without a Map 325484 248 Meredith Hall 0807072737 Maria 5 3.74 2007 Without a Map
author: Meredith Hall
name: Maria
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2015/01/03
date added: 2015/01/03
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher]]> 20563988
Whether set in a claustrophobic Saudi Arabian flat or on a precarious mountain road on a Greek island, these stories share an insight into the darkest recesses of the spirit. Displaying all of Mantel's unmistakable style and wit, they reveal a great writer at the peak of her powers.]]> 242 Hilary Mantel Maria 2 3.43 2014 The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Maria
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2014/12/29
date added: 2014/12/29
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]]> I'll Be Right There 18209505 Ěý
Set in 1980s South Korea amid the tremors of political revolution, I’ll Be Right There follows Jung Yoon, a highly literate, twenty-something woman, as she recounts her tragic personal history as well as those of her three intimate college friends. When Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface, forcing her to re-live the most intense period of her life. With profound intellectual and emotional insight, she revisits the death of her beloved mother, the strong bond with her now-dying former college professor, the excitement of her first love, and the friendships forged out of a shared sense of isolation and grief.
Ěý
Yoon’s formative experiences, which highlight both the fragility and force of personal connection in an era of absolute uncertainty, become immediately palpable. Shin makes the foreign and esoteric utterly her use of European literature as an interpreter of emotion and experience bridges any gaps between East and West. Love, friendship, and solitude are the same everywhere, as this book makes poignantly clear.]]> 325 Kyung-Sook Shin 1590516737 Maria 3 3.97 2010 I'll Be Right There
author: Kyung-Sook Shin
name: Maria
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2014/12/25
date added: 2014/12/25
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]]> The Woods 43931
Paul Copeland's sister was one of the missing teenagers. Now raising a daughter alone after the death of his wife, he balances family life with a career as a prosecutor. But when a body is found, the well-buried secrets of the past threaten everything.

Could the victim be one of the missing teenagers? Could his sister be alive? Copeland has to confront so much he left behind that summer twenty years ago: his first love, Lucy; his mother, who abandoned the family; and the secrets that his parents have been hiding ...]]> 404 Harlan Coben 0525950125 Maria 4 4.03 2007 The Woods
author: Harlan Coben
name: Maria
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/12/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England]]> 7006235
Vickery makes ingenious use of upholsterer’s ledgers, burglary trials, and other unusual sources to reveal the roles of house and home in economic survival, social success, and political representation during the long eighteenth century.]]> 382 Amanda Vickery 0300154534 Maria 2 3.91 2009 Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England
author: Amanda Vickery
name: Maria
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2014/12/06
date added: 2014/12/06
shelves:
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Too detailed, irksome. Had to read 20 pages in order to extract one bit of historical information. I did like the detailed explanation of what things cost; now when I read someone inherited 100 pounds sterling in the Georgian era I understand it was a lot of money. This was rigorous academic work on the part of the author that's why I gave her an extra star.
]]> <![CDATA[At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays]]> 108743 At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman returns to one of her favorite genres, the familiar essay—a beloved and hallowed literary tradition recognized for both its intellectual breadth and its miniaturist focus on everyday experiences. With the combination of humor and erudition that has distinguished her as one of our finest essayists, Fadiman draws us into twelve of her personal obsessions: from her slightly sinister childhood enthusiasm for catching butterflies to her monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from her wistfulness for the days of letter-writing to the challenges and rewards of moving from the city to the country.

Many of these essays were composed “under the influence� of the subject at hand. Fadiman ingests a shocking amount of ice cream and divulges her passion for Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip and her brother’s homemade Liquid Nitrogen Kahlúa Coffee (recipe included); she sustains a terrific caffeine buzz while recounting Balzac’s coffee addiction; and she stays up till dawn to write about being a night owl, examining the rhythms of our circadian clocks and sharing such insomnia cures as her father’s nocturnal word games and Lewis Carroll’s mathematical puzzles. At Large and At Small is a brilliant and delightful collection of essays that harkens a revival of a long-cherished genre.

Collecting nature --
Unfuzzy lamb --
Ice cream --
Night owl --
Procrustes and the culture wars --
Coleridge the runaway --
Mail --
Moving --
Piece of cotton --
Arctic hedonist --
Coffee --
Under water]]> 240 Anne Fadiman 0374106622 Maria 0 to-read 4.10 2007 At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
author: Anne Fadiman
name: Maria
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/12/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>