Sarah's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 21 Apr 2025 14:08:42 -0700 60 Sarah's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Great Believers 45304101 A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed, indelible piece of literature; it was selected as one of New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Buzzfeed Book of the Year, a Skimm Reads pick, and a pick for the New York Public Library's Best Books of the year.]]> 421 Rebecca Makkai 073522353X Sarah 0 currently-reading 4.26 2018 The Great Believers
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Blackfish City 35068768
“Simmers with menace and heartache, suspense and wonder.� —Ann Leckie

A Best Book of the Month in

Entertainment Weekly

The Washington Post

Tor.com

B&N Sci-Fi Fantasy Blog

Amazon

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a remarkable feat of mechanical and social engineering, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy.The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, however, the city is starting to fray along the edges—crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks� is ravaging the population.

When a strange new visitor arrives—a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side—the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,� as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people—each living on the periphery—to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves.

Blackfish City is a remarkably urgent—and ultimately very hopeful—novel about political corruption, organized crime, technology run amok, the consequences of climate change, gender identity, and the unifying power of human connection.

ձ> 336 Sam J. Miller 0062684841 Sarah 4 3.54 2018 Blackfish City
author: Sam J. Miller
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves:
review:
Loved the world building. Had problems with the pacing.
]]> Erasure 355862 We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

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

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk -- or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh -- is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.]]> 280 Percival Everett 0786888156 Sarah 0 currently-reading 4.17 2001 Erasure
author: Percival Everett
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Model Home 205363963
The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.

As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural� death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?

Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.]]> 304 Rivers Solomon 0374607133 Sarah 4 3.72 2024 Model Home
author: Rivers Solomon
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
I had no idea where Solomon was going to take this one. I love their lyrical prose.
]]> <![CDATA[Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere]]> 112093865 From “weird, scary, ingenious� (The New York Times) stand-up comedian Maria Bamford, a brutally honest and hilariously frenetic memoir about show business, mental health, and the comfort of rigid belief systems—from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, to Suzuki violin training, to Richard Simmons, to 12-step programs.

Maria Bamford is a comedian’s comedian (an outsider among outsiders) and has forever fought to find a place to belong. From struggling with an eating disorder as a child of the 1980s, to navigating a career in the arts (and medical debt and psychiatric institutionalization), she has tried just about every method possible to not only be a part of the world, but to want to be a part of it.

In Bamford’s signature voice, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, brings us on a quest to participate in something. With sincerity and transparency, she recounts every anonymous fellowship she has joined (including but not limited Debtors Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous), every hypomanic episode (from worrying about selling out under capitalism to enforcing union rules on her Netflix TV show set to protect her health), and every easy 1-to-3-step recipe for fudge in between.

Singular and inimitable, Bamford’s memoir explores what it means to keep going, and to be a member of society (or any group she’s invited to) despite not being very good at it. In turn, she hopes to transform isolating experiences into comedy that will make you feel less alone (without turning into a cult following).]]> 276 Maria Bamford 1982168560 Sarah 5 3.71 2023 Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere
author: Maria Bamford
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:
Not for everyone, but definitely for me. I liked everything but the recipes, and I am glad I chose to listen to this one.
]]> <![CDATA[More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI]]> 214175198
More Than Words argues that generative AI programs like ChatGPT not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don’t challenge students to do the real work of writing. To Warner, writing is thinking—discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page—and feeling—grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human. The fact that we ask students to complete so many assignments that a machine could do is a sign that something has gone very wrong with writing instruction. More Than Words calls for us to use AI as an opportunity to reckon with how we work with words—and how all of us should rethink our relationship with writing.
ձ> 320 John Warner 1541605500 Sarah 0 to-read 4.06 2025 More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
author: John Warner
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Yellowface 62047984
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 319 R.F. Kuang 000853277X Sarah 4 3.69 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves:
review:
I am happy to have gone into this with no foreknowledge. I both knew and didn’t know where this was going, which seems like a hard line to write to.
]]> The Trees 56269278 309 Percival Everett 164445064X Sarah 5 4.06 2021 The Trees
author: Percival Everett
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves:
review:
4.5. Despite staying identifiably true to the detective genre, The Trees was startling - the violence and the humor and the closeness between them.
]]> The Illustrated Man 24830 The Illustrated Man has remained in print since being published in 1951 is fair testimony to the universal appeal of Ray Bradbury's work. Only his second collection (the first was Dark Carnival, later reworked into The October Country), it is a marvelous, if mostly dark, quilt of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In an ingenious framework to open and close the book, Bradbury presents himself as a nameless narrator who meets the Illustrated Man--a wanderer whose entire body is a living canvas of exotic tattoos. What's even more remarkable, and increasingly disturbing, is that the illustrations are themselves magically alive, and each proceeds to unfold its own story, such as "The Veldt," wherein rowdy children take a game of virtual reality way over the edge. Or "Kaleidoscope," a heartbreaking portrait of stranded astronauts about to reenter our atmosphere--without the benefit of a spaceship. Or "Zero Hour," in which invading aliens have discovered a most logical ally--our own children. Even though most were written in the 1940s and 1950s, these 18 classic stories will be just as chillingly effective 50 years from now. --Stanley Wiater

Contents:

· Prologue: The Illustrated Man · ss *
· The Veldt [“The World the Children Made”] · ss The Saturday Evening Post Sep 23 �50
· Kaleidoscope · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Oct �49
· The Other Foot · ss New Story Magazine Mar �51
· The Highway [as by Leonard Spalding] · ss Copy Spr �50
· The Man · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Feb �49
· The Long Rain [“Death-by-Rain”] · ss Planet Stories Sum �50
· The Rocket Man · ss Maclean’s Mar 1 �51
· The Fire Balloons [“‘In This Sign...’”] · ss Imagination Apr �51
· The Last Night of the World · ss Esquire Feb �51
· The Exiles [“The Mad Wizards of Mars”] · ss Maclean’s Sep 15 �49; F&SF Win �50
· No Particular Night or Morning · ss *
· The Fox and the Forest [“To the Future”] · ss Colliers May 13 �50
· The Visitor · ss Startling Stories Nov �48
· The Concrete Mixer · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Apr �49
· Marionettes, Inc. [Marionettes, Inc.] · ss Startling Stories Mar �49
· The City [“Purpose”] · ss Startling Stories Jul �50
· Zero Hour · ss Planet Stories Fll �47
· The Rocket [“Outcast of the Stars”] · ss Super Science Stories Mar �50
· Epilogue · aw *]]> 186 Ray Bradbury 000712774X Sarah 4 4.14 1951 The Illustrated Man
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1951
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves:
review:
After realizing I had piecemeal read several of these stories, I thought I would finish them off. I am really not a sci fi person, but Bradbury works for me. And I really like the framing device.
]]> In the Night Cafe 94944 231 Joyce Johnson 0525247416 Sarah 3 3.72 1989 In the Night Cafe
author: Joyce Johnson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1989
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves:
review:
The thing I liked most about this read was how she wrote about the setting, the place, the mood of the times. I didn’t realize until I had finished the book how/where she fit into the Beat Generation.
]]> Starter Villain 61885029
Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.

Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.

But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.

It's up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyperintelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.

In a dog-eat-dog world...be a cat.]]> 264 John Scalzi 0765389223 Sarah 5 4.09 2023 Starter Villain
author: John Scalzi
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
The fifth star reflects my absolute delight in the relationship between Charlie and Hera.
]]> How to Be Eaten 58950713 This darkly funny and provocative novel reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma.

In present-day New York City, five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas. Bernice grapples with the fallout of dating a psychopathic, blue-bearded billionaire. Ruby, once devoured by a wolf, now wears him as a coat. Gretel questions her memory of being held captive in a house made of candy. Ashlee, the winner of a Bachelor-esque dating show, wonders if she really got her promisedfairy tale ending. And Raina's love story will shock them all.

Though the women start out wary of one another, judging each other’s stories, gradually they begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed . . . What really brought them here? What secrets will they reveal? And is it too late for them to rescue each other?

Dark, edgy, and wickedly funny, this debut for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, Kristen Arnett, and Kelly Link takes our coziest, most beloved childhood stories, exposes them as anti-feminist nightmares, and transforms them into a new kind of myth for grown-up women.]]> 291 Maria Adelmann 0316450847 Sarah 3 3.54 2022 How to Be Eaten
author: Maria Adelmann
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves:
review:
I wanted to like this more, but the execution was clumsy.
]]> Graveyard Shift 203578770 Author of sales sensation If We Were Villains returns with a story about a ragtag group of night shift workers who meet in the local cemetery to unearth the secrets lurking in an open grave.

Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story.

One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?

Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks—and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought.

Atmospheric and eerie, with the ensemble cast her fans love and a delightfully familiar academic backdrop, Graveyard Shift is a modern Gothic tale in If We Were Villains author M. L. Rio’s inimitable style.]]> 144 M.L. Rio 1250356792 Sarah 3 3.18 2024 Graveyard Shift
author: M.L. Rio
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
review:
I started this in September, lost it, found it again and had to start again. I liked the content, the characters, the writing, and the premise, just not the novella package they came in
]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Sarah 5 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:
This was excellent on all counts.
]]> 1984 61439040
Alternate cover edition can be found here.]]> 368 George Orwell 0452284236 Sarah 4 4.21 1949 1984
author: George Orwell
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1949
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves:
review:
I wish I had read this in my early 20s instead of at 15 and 43. Still a great read.
]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Sarah 3 3.52 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves:
review:
I read this for a reading group. Without that, it would have never made my reading list. I did like July’s writing and I appreciated her focus on middle-aged female desire and perimenopause, but I had a hard time caring about the main character and, as such, didn’t love living in her head.
]]> <![CDATA[Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect (Ernest Cunningham, #2)]]> 167006698
The program is a who’s who of crime writing royalty:

the debut writer (me!)

the forensic science writer

the blockbuster writer

the legal thriller writer

the literary writer

the psychological suspense writer

But when one of us is murdered, the remaining authors quickly turn into five detectives. Together, we should know how to solve a crime.

Of course, we should also know how to commit one.

How can you find a killer when all the suspects know how to get away with murder?]]> 320 Benjamin Stevenson 006327907X Sarah 3 3.82 2023 Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect (Ernest Cunningham, #2)
author: Benjamin Stevenson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:
Just as with the first one, this was more fun than it was a great book. The problems I had with tone in the first book were resolved here. And part of the denoument was satisfying for reasons other writing teachers might recognze.
]]> The Drowned World 16234584 Heart of Darkness—complete with a mad white hunter and his hordes of native soldiers—this "powerful and beautifully clear" (Brian Aldiss) work becomes a thrilling adventure and a haunting examination of the effects of environmental collapse on the human mind.]]> 198 J.G. Ballard 0871403625 Sarah 3 3.50 1962 The Drowned World
author: J.G. Ballard
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves:
review:
I am both compelled and repelled by Ballard’s novels.
]]> Slayers: A Buffyverse Story 199526410 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, reunite for an all-new adventure about connections that never die—even if you bury them.

A decade has passed since the epic final battle that concluded Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV). The game-changing spell that gave power to all potential Slayers persists. With new Slayers constantly emerging, things are looking grim for the bad guys. Rebellious vampire Spike (James Marsters) is working undercover in Los Angeles with his old pal Clem (James Charles Leary) when he meets feisty, rookie Slayer, Indira (Laya DeLeon Hayes), who wants Spike to be her mentor. Stakes intensify as Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter) emerges from an alternate reality where she alone is the Slayer, and Buffy Summers doesn’t exist. Cordelia enlists Spike’s help with a classic big bad terrorizing her world…his ex, Drusilla (Juliet Landau). Giles (Anthony Head), Anya (Emma Caulfield Ford), Jonathan (Danny Strong), and Tara (Amber Benson) also return, but through the years and the vastness of the multiverse, not everyone is who they used to be�

Slayers: A Buffyverse Story is written and directed by Amber Benson and Chris Golden, and co-directed by Kc Wayland.

8 hours and 2 minutes]]> 9 Amber Benson Sarah 2
Beyond the premise about Cordelia (which I hated) and the Indira plot (which was fine), it seemed like not a lot happened in the second half of the series. Or maybe more like one thing happened very slowly and inevitably for four hours.]]> 3.86 2023 Slayers: A Buffyverse Story
author: Amber Benson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves:
review:
Oof. The benefit of this was that it reminded me how much I liked the original series. That nostalgia, and a few of the performances, gained it the second star, but overall I did not like it.

Beyond the premise about Cordelia (which I hated) and the Indira plot (which was fine), it seemed like not a lot happened in the second half of the series. Or maybe more like one thing happened very slowly and inevitably for four hours.
]]> The Saint of Bright Doors 61884985
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.

He walked among invisible devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen.

Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.]]> 356 Vajra Chandrasekera 1250847389 Sarah 3 3.64 2023 The Saint of Bright Doors
author: Vajra Chandrasekera
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves:
review:
I was interested in the book and what Chandrasekera was building and crafting more that I enjoyed it, if that makes sense. Some great world building and captivating prose, but not my genre. Happy to have read it, though.
]]> <![CDATA[We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse, #1)]]> 37833569
There's a reason We Are Legion, We Are Bob was named Audible's Best Sci-Fi Book of 2016. Unique, hilarious, and utterly addictive, Dennis E. Taylor's debut novel kicked off an Audible-wide obsession among sci-fi diehards and new listeners alike.

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.

Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty.

The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad � very mad.

Listener-favorite narrator Ray Porter (14, The Fold) brings the many Bobs into being in all their glory, delivering a performance that listeners have described as "outstanding," "nuanced" and a "dizzying tour de force."]]> Dennis E. Taylor Sarah 4 4.15 2016 We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse, #1)
author: Dennis E. Taylor
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves:
review:
It took me to about midpoint to really get into the story, but I agree with everyone who told me this is one to listen to rather than read. I can’t imagine it would be half as fun in print.
]]> A Children's Bible 55298364 A Children’s Bible follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, the children decide to run away when a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, embarking on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. Lydia Millet’s prophetic and heartbreaking story of generational divide offers a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.]]> 224 Lydia Millet 0393867382 Sarah 0 currently-reading 3.70 2020 A Children's Bible
author: Lydia Millet
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> You Can't Make This Stuff Up 13237747
Whether you're writing a rags-to-riches tell-all memoir or literary journalism, telling true stories well is hard work. In You Can't Make This Stuff Up , Lee Gutkind, the go-to expert for all things creative nonfiction, offers his unvarnished wisdom to help you craft the best writing possible.

Frank, to-the-point, and always entertaining, Gutkind describes and illustrates every aspect of the genre. Invaluable tools and exercises illuminate key steps, from defining a concept and establishing a writing process to the final product. Offering new ways of understanding the genre, this practical guidebook will help you thoroughly expand and stylize your work.]]> 288 Lee Gutkind 0738215546 Sarah 0 3.98 2012 You Can't Make This Stuff Up
author: Lee Gutkind
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves:
review:
Not sure how to rate this one. As a text to teach with, which is why it is on here for me now, maybe a 3. If I was to use it for myself to improve my creative nonfiction writing, at least a 4. Full of very useful content, but it feels very specific in its focus, which can make it hard to translate to other forms of creative nonfiction.
]]> <![CDATA[Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"]]> 20588698 Not That Kind of Girl. These are stories about getting your butt touched by your boss, about friendship and dieting (kind of) and having two existential crises before the age of 20. Stories about travel, both successful and less so, and about having the kind of sex where you feel like keeping your sneakers on in case you have to run away during the act. Stories about proving yourself to a room of 50-year-old men in Hollywood and showing up to "an outlandishly high-fashion event with the crustiest red nose you ever saw." Fearless, smart, and as heartbreakingly honest as ever, Not That Kind of Girl establishes Lena Dunham as more than a hugely talented director, actress and producer-it announces her as a fresh and vibrant new literary voice.]]> 265 Lena Dunham 081299499X Sarah 3 3.28 2014 Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
author: Lena Dunham
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves:
review:
Memoirs are hit and miss for me. This book wasn’t a bad read, but it was still mostly a miss.
]]> <![CDATA[Perestroika (Angels in America, #2)]]> 92254 Angels in America, Perestroika steers the characters introduced in Millennium Approaches from the opportunistic eighties to a new sense of community in the nineties.]]> 158 Tony Kushner 1559360739 Sarah 0 4.24 1993 Perestroika (Angels in America, #2)
author: Tony Kushner
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:
Whatever my rating for part 1 would be, this would be at least 1 star less.
]]> <![CDATA[Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land]]> 50640953 A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author’s encounters with gun violence.

Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of indigenous women, on indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten.

In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her own experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses. "The Worry Line" explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. "At the Workshop" focuses on her graduate school years, during which a workshop classmate repeatedly killed off thinly veiled versions of her in his stories. In "Women in the Fracklands", Jensen takes the listener inside Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and bears witness to the peril faced by women in regions overcome by the fracking boom.

In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history - as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one’s country is not the same as surviving one’s country.]]> 294 Toni Jensen 1984821180 Sarah 4 4.25 2020 Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land
author: Toni Jensen
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:
This was a great read, powerful and critical in the best ways, especially the earlier sections of her story.
]]> Solutions and Other Problems 51323365
Solutions and Other Problems includes humorous stories from Allie Brosh’s childhood; the adventures of her very bad animals; merciless dissection of her own character flaws; incisive essays on grief, loneliness, and powerlessness; as well as reflections on the absurdity of modern life.

This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features all-new material with more than 1,600 pieces of art.]]> 519 Allie Brosh 1982156945 Sarah 3 4.21 2020 Solutions and Other Problems
author: Allie Brosh
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Design Is Storytelling 34696391
Good design, like good storytelling, brings ideas to life. The latest book from award-winning writer Ellen Lupton is a playbook for creative thinking, showing designers how to use storytelling techniques to create satisfying graphics, products, services and experiences. Whether crafting a digital app or a data-rich publication, designers invite people to enter a scene and explore what’s there. An intriguing logo, page layout or retail space uses line, shape and form to lead users on dynamic journeys.

Design Is Storytelling explores the psychology of visual perception from a narrative point of view. Presenting dozens of tools and concepts in a lively, visual manner, this book will help any designer amplify the narrative power of their work. Use this book to stir emotions, build empathy, articulate values and convey action; to construct narrative arcs and create paths through space; integrate form and language; evaluate a project’s storytelling power; and to write and deliver strong narratives.]]> 160 Ellen Lupton 194230319X Sarah 3 3.96 2017 Design Is Storytelling
author: Ellen Lupton
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:
3.5. I picked this up to use with students, and the visuals and concepts will be great for that.
]]> <![CDATA[Millennium Approaches (Angels in America, #1)]]> 92250
The play is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. Certain major and minor characters are supernatural beings (angels) or deceased persons (ghosts). The play contains multiple roles for several of the actors. Initially and primarily focusing on a gay couple in Manhattan, the play also has several other storylines, some of which occasionally intersect.]]> 119 Tony Kushner 1559360615 Sarah 0 4.27 1993 Millennium Approaches (Angels in America, #1)
author: Tony Kushner
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:
I don’t know how to rate this. I watched the HBO version for a class a long time ago and wanted to revisit it, but reading plays doesn’t do a lot for me, a language that I love in performance and not on the page. But I am on my way to the second part.
]]> Daisy Jones & The Six 40597810 Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

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

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

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

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.]]> 368 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1524798622 Sarah 4
I have consumed a lot of music history content, and this felt really authentic for a lot of it (Warren!) but the author’s fingerprints were visible in the neatness of the timing, the tried and true narrative arc, and the clear narrative function of the characters.



]]> 4.20 2019 Daisy Jones & The Six
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/07
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves:
review:
I am not much of an audiobook person, but I am glad I listened to this one. A lot of the voice acting was great, and the format of the book obviously suits an audio production. 5 stars for that alone.

I have consumed a lot of music history content, and this felt really authentic for a lot of it (Warren!) but the author’s fingerprints were visible in the neatness of the timing, the tried and true narrative arc, and the clear narrative function of the characters.




]]> Do Everything in the Dark 220765
The novel follows several couples and solitary wanderers through the summer of 2001, as their internationally scattered vacations throw long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities and resentments into exotic and unbearable relief. Indiana shows his large and terrifyingly credible cast of America’s cultural elite exhibiting their worst behavior, while sympathizing with their underlying fears and frailties and thwarted good intentions.

Do Everything in the Dark is Indiana’s darkest and funniest novel, but also his deepest exploration of our least manageable, most uncomfortable emotions.]]> 274 Gary Indiana 0312312067 Sarah 2 ]]> 3.93 2003 Do Everything in the Dark
author: Gary Indiana
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves:
review:
2.5. I can get into a dark read full of messy, miserable people, but the people here seemed too two-dimensional for me to invest anything at all in them.

]]> Witchcraft for Wayward Girls 207611566 There’s power in a book�

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who knows she’s going to go home and marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

In Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, the author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group delivers another searing, completely original novel and further cements his status as a “horror master� (NPR).]]> 482 Grady Hendrix 0593548981 Sarah 0 to-read 4.00 2025 Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Anna Karenina 155
Set against this tragic affair is the story of Konstantin Levin, a melancholy landowner whom Tolstoy based largely on himself. While Anna looks for happiness through love, Levin embarks on his own search for spiritual fulfillment through marriage, family, and hard work. Surrounding these two central plot threads are dozens of characters whom Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together, creating a breathtaking tapestry of nineteenth-century Russian society.

From its famous opening sentence � "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—to its stunningly tragic conclusion, this enduring tale of marriage and adultery plumbs the very depths of the human soul.]]> 803 Leo Tolstoy 1593080271 Sarah 4 4.00 1878 Anna Karenina
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1878
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/28
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves:
review:
I didn’t come to this book at the right time, but I understand why it is regarded so highly. Tolstoy does a better job writing women than many of his contemporaries, but I often wish they had found other ways to make female characters complex. I know, I know, context and all that. But still.
]]> <![CDATA[The Department of Truth, Vol 2: The City Upon a Hill]]> 57286502
The second arc of the smash-hit THE DEPARTMENT OF TRUTH from James Tynion IV (Batman) and Martin Simmonds (Dying is Easy) is collected here!

Collects THE DEPARTMENT OF TRUTH #8-13]]> 176 James Tynion IV 1534319212 Sarah 3
But will I read the next one? Yeah.]]> 4.15 2020 The Department of Truth, Vol 2: The City Upon a Hill
author: James Tynion IV
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/08/22
shelves:
review:
My brain wanted contrast from my other reading. I get caught up in this series - I often like an unsettling text - but then I reach the end and, looking back, can't tell if I liked it or not.

But will I read the next one? Yeah.
]]> Youth Group 180723893
Will Kay find her place in a world that’s so much more God-fearing and monster-fighting than what she’s used to? Will the Stone Mission youth group find common cause with their badass peers of other faiths? Or will a pack of small-time demons use Blights like Kay as the key to starting some real big trouble?]]> 256 Jordan Morris 1250789230 Sarah 3 4.00 2024 Youth Group
author: Jordan Morris
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
review:
A fun read, but it probably won’t stick with me.
]]> Jane Eyre 10210 Alternate editions can be found here and here.

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

Charlotte Brontë tells the story of orphaned Jane Eyre, who grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, enduring loneliness and cruelty. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds employment as a governess to the young ward of Byronic, brooding Mr Rochester. As her feelings for Rochester develop, Jane gradually uncovers Thornfield Hall's terrible secret, forcing her to make a choice. Should she stay with Rochester and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions - even if it means leaving the man she loves? A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre dazzled readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom.]]> 532 Charlotte Brontë 0142437204 Sarah 4 4.14 1847 Jane Eyre
author: Charlotte Brontë
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1847
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/07
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
I rushed through this once for a class in a coffee haze. The Victorians have never been my thing, but another book I recently read had a character reading this book, and that made me want to give it a fairer shake.
]]> The Name of the World 9910 129 Denis Johnson 0413771601 Sarah 3 ]]> 3.55 2000 The Name of the World
author: Denis Johnson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/28
date added: 2024/07/28
shelves:
review:
There is something I can’t figure out about Johnson. I keep waiting for his stories to match the level of his prose, which I love and will keep me reading, even if bits stick with me more than the whole.

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

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.]]> 345 Octavia E. Butler 0446675504 Sarah 4 4.21 1993 Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves:
review:
4.5. What a shocking, beautiful book.
]]> Book One: Work, 1986-2006 154666 304 Chip Kidd 0847827852 Sarah 4 hiatus 4.24 2005 Book One: Work, 1986-2006
author: Chip Kidd
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/18
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: hiatus
review:
Once you learn to recognize Kidd’s work, it is everywhere. In a good way. I am glad to finally move this from one list to another.
]]> The Talk 61796675 Winner of the NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Graphic Novels
Winner of an Alex Award from the American Library Association
Winner of the Libby Award for Best Comic/Graphic Novel of the Year
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Nonfiction
Nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Graphic Memoir
Nominated for an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel
Named The Year's Best Graphic Novel by Publishers Weekly
Named one of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Best Books of 2023
Named one of NPR's Books We Love
Named one of Kirkus ' Best 2023 Books
Named one of the Washington Post's 10 best graphic novels of 2023
One of TIME Magazine's Must-Read Books of the Year
Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction 2024
Booklist Editors' Choice: Graphic Novels, 2023
New York Public Library's Best New Comics of 2023 Top Ten Pick
Chicago Public Library's Best Books of 2023 Top Ten Pick
Named one of School Library Journal's Best Graphic Novels of 2023
Named one of The Guardian's Best Graphic Novels of 2023

Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn’t have a realistic water gun. She said she feared for his safety, that police tend to think of little Black boys as older and less innocent than they really are.

Through evocative illustrations and sharp humor, Bell examines how The Talk shaped intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood. While coming of age in Los Angeles—and finding a voice through cartooning—Bell becomes painfully aware of being regarded as dangerous by white teachers, neighbors, and police officers and thus of his mortality. Drawing attention to the brutal murders of African Americans and showcasing revealing insights and cartoons along the way, he brings us up to the moment of reckoning when people took to the streets protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And now Bell must decide whether he and his own six-year-old son are ready to have The Talk.]]> 352 Darrin Bell 1250805147 Sarah 5 4.64 2023 The Talk
author: Darrin Bell
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/14
date added: 2024/07/14
shelves:
review:
There is something about the graphic format and the memoir that works for me. Bell’s art is very effective and makes the storytelling more effective rather than distracting from it, which is my most frequent issue with graphic novels.
]]> <![CDATA[The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories]]> 50612754
A spirit who is fated to spend eternity reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, ghostly trees that haunt the occupant of a wooden house, specters that snatch anyone who steps into the shadows, and parakeets that serve as mouthpieces for the these are just a few of the characters in this extraordinary compendium of one hundred ghost stories. Kevin Brockmeier’s fiction has always explored the space between the fantastical and the everyday with profundity and poignancy. As in his previous books, The Ghost Variations discovers new ways of looking at who we are and what matters to us, exploring how mysterious, sad, strange, and comical it is to be alive—or, as it happens, not to be.]]> 288 Kevin Brockmeier 1524748838 Sarah 0 currently-reading 3.51 2021 The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories
author: Kevin Brockmeier
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/13
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Final Girl Support Group 55829194 In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standingwhen the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives…but what happens after?

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

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

But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.]]> 352 Grady Hendrix 059320123X Sarah 3
Still read most of it in one go, though, so that is saying something.]]> 3.49 2021 The Final Girl Support Group
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves:
review:
So close. I am more inclined to think many novels would benefit from a tougher edit, but this one could have used another 50 pages towards the end.

Still read most of it in one go, though, so that is saying something.
]]> <![CDATA[How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question]]> 58484901 From the creator of The Good Place and the cocreator of Parks and Recreation, a hilarious, thought-provoking guide to living an ethical life, drawing on 2,500 years of deep thinking from around the world.

Most people think of themselves as “good,� but it’s not always easy to determine what’s “good� or “bad”—especially in a world filled with complicated choices and pitfalls and booby traps and bad advice. Fortunately, many smart philosophers have been pondering this conundrum for millennia and they have guidance for us. With bright wit and deep insight, How to Be Perfect explains concepts like deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, and more so we can sound cool at parties and become better people.

Schur starts off with easy ethical questions like “Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?� (No.) and works his way up to the most complex moral issues we all face. Such as: Can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people? How much money should I give to charity? Why bother being good at all when there are no consequences for being bad? And much more. By the time the book is done, we’ll know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. We will be perfect, and all our friends will be jealous. OK, not quite. Instead, we’ll gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day.]]> 304 Michael Schur 1982159316 Sarah 4 4.13 2022 How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question
author: Michael Schur
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves:
review:
Half of the book was a 4, half was a 3. Some of it I had heard about earlier listening to Schur on podcasts, which probably contributed to the 3.
]]> The Twyford Code 58451313
Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children's book, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. He took it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Isles, who became convinced it was the key to solving a puzzle. That a message in secret code ran through all Edith Twyford's novels. Then Miss Isles disappeared on a class field trip, and Steven's memory won't allow him to remember what happened. Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Steven decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades. Was Miss Isles murdered? Was she deluded? Or was she right about the code? And is it still in use today? Desperate to recover his memories and find out what really happened to Miss Isles, Steven revisits the people and places of his childhood. But it soon becomes clear that Edith Twyford wasn't just a writer of forgotten children's stories. The Twyford Code has great power, and he isn't the only one trying to solve it...]]> 384 Janice Hallett 1788165322 Sarah 3 3.57 2022 The Twyford Code
author: Janice Hallett
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/04
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves:
review:
This is the first time I wished to be listening to instead of reading a novel. It would make a good audio play. I had my suspicions about what was happening while reading, but it still tied up too neatly.
]]> Math with Bad Drawings 36205393 Smart, hilarious, and engaging, MATH WITH BAD DRAWINGS is a delightful re-education in math that empowers readers with a joyful appreciation and powerful understanding of how math works in our daily lives.
In MATH WITH BAD DRAWINGS, Ben Orlin answers math's three big questions: Why do I need to learn this? When am I ever going to use it? Why is it so hard? The answers come in various forms-cartoons, drawings, jokes, and the stories and insights of an empathetic teacher who believes that math should belong to everyone.

Eschewing the tired old curriculum that begins in the wading pool of addition and subtraction and progresses to the shark infested waters of calculus (AKA the Great Weed Out Course), Orlin instead shows us how to think like a mathematician by teaching us a new game of Tic-Tac-Toe, how to understand an economic crisis by rolling a pair of dice, and the mathematical reason why you should never buy a second lottery ticket.
Every example in the book is illustrated with his trademark "bad drawings," which convey both his humor and his message with perfect pitch and clarity. Organized by unconventional but compelling topics such as "Statistics: The Fine Art of Honest Lying," "Design: The Geometry of Stuff That Works," and "Probability: The Mathematics of Maybe," MATH WITH BAD DRAWINGS is a perfect read for fans of illustrated popular science.


]]> 376 Ben Orlin 0316509035 Sarah 4 4.24 2018 Math with Bad Drawings
author: Ben Orlin
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/30
date added: 2024/06/30
shelves:
review:
I like Orlin’s writing, but I wasn’t often in the mood to read about math, so it took me a year to finish this one.
]]> The Hole We're In 122762717 Meet the Pomeroys: a church-going family living in a too-red house in a Texas college town. Roger, the patriarch, has impulsively gone back to school, only to find his true ambitions at odds with the temptations of the present. His wife, Georgia, tries to keep things in order at home, but she's been feeding the bill drawer with unopened envelopes for months and can never find the right moment to confront its swelling contents. In an attempt to climb out of the holes they've dug, Roger and Georgia make a series of choices that have catastrophic consequences for their three children--especially for Patsy, the youngest, who will spend most of her life fighting to overcome them.

The Hole We're In shines a spotlight on some of the most relevant issues of our day--over-reliance on credit, vexed gender and class politics, the war in Iraq--but it is Zevin's deft exploration of the fragile economy of family life that makes this a book for the ages.

]]> 304 Gabrielle Zevin 0802161308 Sarah 3 3.49 2010 The Hole We're In
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/28
date added: 2024/06/28
shelves:
review:
Zevin's prose always feels effortless to read, which I enjoy quite a bit, but this story won't stick with me like some of her other work has.
]]> The Wallcreeper 22237292 193 Nell Zink 0989760715 Sarah 3 3.33 2014 The Wallcreeper
author: Nell Zink
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/23
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves:
review:
A generous 3 stars. I am not mad to have read it, but it was a series of events more than a narrative.
]]> Any Other City 63105496 Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang.

Side B finds Tracy, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city in 2019, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open.

Motifs recur like musical phrases, and traces of what used to be there peek through, like a palimpsest. Any Other City is a novel about friendship and other forms of love, travelling in a body across decades, and transmuting trauma through art making and queer sex—a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself.]]> 287 Hazel Jane Plante 1551529114 Sarah 4 4.12 2023 Any Other City
author: Hazel Jane Plante
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves:
review:
I love Plante’s writing, especially the fictional pop culture she weaves throughout her stories. Reading this book makes me want to go back and re-read her first.
]]> The High Desert 58312017 368 James Spooner 0358659116 Sarah 4 4.41 2022 The High Desert
author: James Spooner
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/21
date added: 2024/06/21
shelves:
review:
Really a 4.5. I was familiar with Spooner’s work on Black punk, and this graphic novel introduced me to his own story. I am not a big fan of graphic novels because they often seem too crowded for me, but the images and the words worked together well here.
]]> <![CDATA[The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry]]> 18293427
A. J. Fikry’s life is not at all what he expected it to be. His wife has died, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. Slowly but surely, he is isolating himself from all the people of Alice Island—from Lambiase, the well-intentioned police officer who’s always felt kindly toward Fikry; from Ismay, his sister-in-law who is hell-bent on saving him from his dreary self; from Amelia, the lovely and idealistic (if eccentric) Knightley Press sales rep who keeps on taking the ferry over to Alice Island, refusing to be deterred by A.J.’s bad attitude. Even the books in his store have stopped holding pleasure for him. These days, A.J. can only see them as a sign of a world that is changing too rapidly.

And then a mysterious package appears at the bookstore. It’s a small package, but large in weight. It’s that unexpected arrival that gives A. J. Fikry the opportunity to make his life over, the ability to see everything anew. It doesn’t take long for the locals to notice the change overcoming A.J.; or for that determined sales rep, Amelia, to see her curmudgeonly client in a new light; or for the wisdom of all those books to become again the lifeblood of A.J.’s world; or for everything to twist again into a version of his life that he didn’t see coming. As surprising as it is moving, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is an unforgettable tale of transformation and second chances, an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love.]]> 260 Gabrielle Zevin 1616203218 Sarah 4 4.00 2014 The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/10
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves:
review:
It isn’t too often I read a novel in one sitting. Not my usual genre choice, but I was charmed by the whole thing and just kept rolling through.
]]> Comfort Me with Apples 56179382
It's just that he's away so much. So often. He works so hard. She misses him. And he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband and everything is perfect.

But sometimes Sophia wonders about things. Strange things. Dark things. The look on her husband's face when he comes back from a long business trip. The questions he will not answer. The locked basement she is never allowed to enter. And whenever she asks the neighbors, they can't quite meet her gaze...

But everything is perfect. Isn't it?]]> 103 Catherynne M. Valente 1250816211 Sarah 0 to-read 3.57 2021 Comfort Me with Apples
author: Catherynne M. Valente
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> How to Sell a Haunted House 59414094 Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a thrilling new novel that explores the way your past—and your family—can haunt you like nothing else.

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.

Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.

But some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them…]]> 419 Grady Hendrix 0593201264 Sarah 4
Also: a freaking puppet golem? What did I just read? This book is wild.]]> 3.65 2023 How to Sell a Haunted House
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/09
date added: 2024/06/09
shelves:
review:
Rounded up from 3.5.

Also: a freaking puppet golem? What did I just read? This book is wild.
]]> Women in Clothes 20821251 Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives.

It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations.

Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed.ձ> 515 Sheila Heti 0399166564 Sarah 0 currently-reading 3.95 2014 Women in Clothes
author: Sheila Heti
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Lanny 39738353 Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller and Booker Prize Longlisted novel Lanny by the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.

There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs.

This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth.

Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.]]> 210 Max Porter 0571340288 Sarah 0 to-read 4.07 2019 Lanny
author: Max Porter
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Ernest Cunningham, #1)]]> 60879779
I'm Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I'd killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it's a little more complicated than that.

Have I killed someone? Yes. I have.

Who was it?

Let's get started.

EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE

My brother

My stepsister

My wife

My father

My mother

My sister-in-law

My uncle

My stepfather

My aunt

Me]]> 371 Benjamin Stevenson 0063279029 Sarah 3 3.75 2022 Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Ernest Cunningham, #1)
author: Benjamin Stevenson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/21
date added: 2024/05/21
shelves:
review:
I read enough murder mysteries as a teenager that the familiar beats were fun to revisit. I liked reading this book, but it seemed uncommitted to its style and tone. I will probably still read the next one.
]]> <![CDATA[Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past]]> 1383256


Growing up in the 1950s in suburban Minneapolis, Diane Wilson had a family like everybody else’s. Her Swedish American father was a salesman at Sears and her mother drove her brothers to baseball practice and went to parent-teacher conferences.



But in her thirties, Diane began to wonder why her mother didn’t speak of her past. So she traveled to South Dakota and Nebraska, searching out records of her relatives through six generations, hungering to know their stories. She began to write a haunting account of the lives of her Dakota Indian family, based on research, to recreate their oral history that was lost, or repressed, or simply set aside as gritty issues of survival demanded attention.



Spirit Car is an exquisite counterpoint of memoir and carefully researched fiction, a remarkable narrative that ties modern Minnesotans to the trauma of the Dakota War. Wilson found her family’s love and humor—and she discovered just how deeply our identities are shaped by the forces of history.]]> 224 Diane Wilson 0873515706 Sarah 5 3.79 2006 Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past
author: Diane Wilson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/04
date added: 2024/05/04
shelves:
review:

]]> All the Noise at Once 180549341
· Jay Coles, author of Tyler Johnson Was Here and Things We Couldn’t Say

All Aiden ever wanted to do was play football just like his star quarterback brother, Brandon. Unfortunately, due to Aiden’s autism, summer football tryouts did not go well when Aiden finds himself at the bottom of a pile-up resulting in an over-stimulation meltdown. But when the school year starts, a spot on the team opens urgently needing to be filled. Aiden finally gets his chance to play the game he loves most.

However, not every team member is happy about Aiden’s position on the team, wary of how his autism will present itself on game day. Tensions rise. A fight breaks out. Cops are called.

When Brandon tries to interfere on behalf of his brother, he is arrested by the very same cops who, just hours earlier, were chanting his name from the bleachers. When trumped up charges appear for felony assault on an officer, everything Brandon has worked for starts to slip away and the brothers� relationship is tested. With Brandon’s trial inching closer, Aiden is desperate to find a way to clear his brother’s name while also trying to answer the one looming question plaguing his brain: what does it mean to be Black and autistic?]]> DeAndra Davis Sarah 0 to-read 4.67 2025 All the Noise at Once
author: DeAndra Davis
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> This Thing Between Us 56269269
“This intense cosmic horror with a touch of Mexican American folklore is incredibly creepy and moving.� —Margaret Kingsbury, BuzzFeed

It was Vera’s idea to buy the Itza. The “world’s most advanced smart speaker!� didn’t interest Thiago, but Vera thought it would be a bit of fun for them amidst all the strange occurrences happening in the condo. It made things worse. The cold spots and scratching in the walls were weird enough, but peculiar packages started showing up at the house—who ordered industrial lye? Then there was the eerie music at odd hours, Thiago waking up to Itza projecting light shows in an empty room.

It was funny and strange right up until Vera was killed, and Thiago’s world became unbearable. Pundits and politicians all looking to turn his wife’s death into a symbol for their own agendas. A barrage of texts from her well-meaning friends about letting go and moving on. Waking to the sound of Itza talking softly to someone in the living room . . .

The only thing left to do was get far away from Chicago. Away from everything and everyone. A secluded cabin in Colorado seemed like the perfect place to hole up with his crushing grief. But soon Thiago realizes there is no escape—not from his guilt, not from his simmering rage, and not from the evil hunting him, feeding on his grief, determined to make its way into this world.

A bold, original horror novel about grief, loneliness and the oppressive intimacy of technology, This Thing Between Us marks the arrival of a spectacular new talent.]]> 272 Gus Moreno 0374539235 Sarah 4 3.70 2021 This Thing Between Us
author: Gus Moreno
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/07
date added: 2024/04/07
shelves:
review:
I loved reading this book more than I loved the book, and I liked the book a lot. Whenever I thought I had something figured out, I was proven wrong.
]]> The Saturday Night Ghost Club 36911680 A short, irresistible, and bittersweet coming-of-age story in the vein of "Stranger Things" and "Stand by Me" about a group of misfit kids who spend an unforgettable summer investigating local ghost stories and urban legends.

Growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls--a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place--Jake Baker spends most of his time with his uncle Calvin, a kind but eccentric enthusiast of occult artifacts and conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turns twelve, he befriends a pair of siblings new to town, and so Calvin decides to initiate them all into the "Saturday Night Ghost Club." But as the summer goes on, what begins as a seemingly lighthearted project may ultimately uncover more than any of its members had imagined. With the alternating warmth and sadness of the best coming-of-age stories, The Saturday Night Ghost Club examines the haunting mutability of memory and storytelling, as well as the experiences that form the people we become.]]> 253 Craig Davidson 0735274827 Sarah 4 3.82 2018 The Saturday Night Ghost Club
author: Craig Davidson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/03
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves:
review:
It turns out that air travel is what it takes to shake me out of a reading malaise. It helps that this book was effortless to read and satisfying to conclude.
]]> <![CDATA[An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic]]> 33571159 Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist this return to the classroom is his "one last chance" to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth--and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist. But through the sometimes uncomfortable months that the two men explore Homer's great work together--first in the classroom, where Jay persistently challenges his son's interpretations, and then during a surprise-filled Mediterranean journey retracing Odysseus's famous voyages--it becomes clear that Daniel has much to learn, too: Jay's responses to both the text and the travels gradually uncover long-buried secrets that allow the son to understand his difficult father at last.]]> 302 Daniel Mendelsohn 0385350597 Sarah 0 to-read 4.24 2017 An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic
author: Daniel Mendelsohn
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> How to Lie with Maps 1005549
The second edition is updated with the addition of two new chapters, 10 color plates, and a new foreword by renowned geographer H. J. de Blij. One new chapter examines the role of national interest and cultural values in national mapping organizations, including the United States Geological Survey, while the other explores the new breed of multimedia, computer-based maps.

To show how maps distort, Monmonier introduces basic principles of mapmaking, gives entertaining examples of the misuse of maps in situations from zoning disputes to census reports, and covers all the typical kinds of distortions from deliberate oversimplifications to the misleading use of color.

"Professor Monmonier himself knows how to gain our attention; it is not in fact the lies in maps but their truth, if always approximate and incomplete, that he wants us to admire and use, even to draw for ourselves on the facile screen. His is an artful and funny book, which like any good map, packs plenty in little space."� Scientific American

"A useful guide to a subject most people probably take too much for granted. It shows how map makers translate abstract data into eye-catching cartograms, as they are called. It combats cartographic illiteracy. It fights cartophobia. It may even teach you to find your way. For that alone, it seems worthwhile."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

". . . witty examination of how and why maps lie. [The book] conveys an important message about how statistics of any kind can be manipulated. But it also communicates much of the challenge, aesthetic appeal, and sheer fun of maps. Even those who hated geography in grammar school might well find a new enthusiasm for the subject after reading Monmonier's lively and surprising book."� Wilson Library Bulletin

"A reading of this book will leave you much better defended against cheap atlases, shoddy journalism, unscrupulous advertisers, predatory special-interest groups, and others who may use or abuse maps at your expense."—John Van Pelt, Christian Science Monitor

"Monmonier meets his goal admirably. . . . [His] book should be put on every map user's 'must read' list. It is informative and readable . . . a big step forward in helping us to understand how maps can mislead their readers."—Jeffrey S. Murray, Canadian Geographic]]> 207 Mark Monmonier 0226534219 Sarah 0 to-read 3.59 1991 How to Lie with Maps
author: Mark Monmonier
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death (Machine of Death, #2)]]> 16131226 The machines started popping up around the world. The offer was tempting: With a simple blood test, anyone could know how they would die. But the machines didn't give dates or specific circumstances - just a single word or phrase. DROWNED, CANCER, OLD AGE, CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. And though the predictions were always accurate, they were also often frustratingly vague. OLD AGE, it turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or being shot by an elderly, bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machines held on to that old-world sense of irony in death: You can know how it's going to happen, but you'll still be surprised when it does.
This addictive anthology - sinister, witty, existential, and fascinating - collects the best of the thousands of story submissions the editors received in the wake of the success of the first volume, and exceeds the first in every way.

Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
Unabridged Audiobook]]> 508 Ryan North 1455529397 Sarah 4 4.11 2013 This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death (Machine of Death, #2)
author: Ryan North
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/05
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves:
review:
I have a soft spot for these story collections for reasons I don’t fully understand, even though my interest swings wildly from story to story.
]]> Concrete Island 70251 176 J.G. Ballard 031242034X Sarah 4 3.70 1974 Concrete Island
author: J.G. Ballard
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/23
date added: 2023/11/23
shelves:
review:
I first read this book for a class and came across it while shelving some books and wanted to read it again in a different context. It is brutal and weird in ways that scratch the action-adventure itch remnants from my teenage years, but the built environment setting is perfectly suited to the reader I am now.
]]> <![CDATA[A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons]]> 44279087
In the title chapter, "A Dream About Lightning Bugs," Folds recalls his earliest childhood dream--and realizes how much it influenced his understanding of what it means to be an artist. In "Measure Twice, Cut Once" he learns to resist the urge to skip steps during the creative process. In "Hall Pass" he recounts his 1970s North Carolina working-class childhood, and in "Cheap Lessons" he returns to the painful life lessons he learned the hard way--but that luckily didn't kill him.

In his inimitable voice, both relatable and thought-provoking, Folds digs deep into the life experiences that shaped him, imparting hard-earned wisdom about both art and life. Collectively, these stories embody the message Folds has been singing about for years: Smile like you've got nothing to prove, because it hurts to grow up, and life flies by in seconds.]]> 319 Ben Folds 1984817272 Sarah 3 4.01 2019 A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons
author: Ben Folds
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/22
date added: 2023/11/22
shelves:
review:
These kinds of memoirs from people I know through their music are hit or miss for me. Often their strength in one doesn’t neatly translate to the other, and that is what I felt here. Not sorry I took the time to read it, though.
]]> To the Lighthouse 59716
As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.]]> 209 Virginia Woolf Sarah 4 3.81 1927 To the Lighthouse
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1927
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/14
date added: 2023/11/14
shelves:
review:
I will read this again some day, when the days are longer, when I am less bogged down with work, when I can more easily be gently pulled along with Woolf’s characters and their thoughts.
]]> How to Sell a Haunted House 199139356
"Wildly entertaining." -The New York Times

"Ingenious." -The Washington Post

New York Times bestselling authorGrady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a thrilling new novel that explores the way your past—and your family—can haunt you like nothing else.

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.

Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.

But some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them�

Like his novels The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and The Final Girl Support Group , How to Sell a Haunted House is classic equal parts heartfelt and terrifying—a gripping new read from “the horror master� ( USA Today ).]]> 448 Grady Hendrix 0593201272 Sarah 0 to-read 3.66 2023 How to Sell a Haunted House
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Secret Garden 2998
Mary Lennox, a spoiled, ill-tempered, and unhealthy child, comes to live with her reclusive uncle in Misselthwaite Manor on England’s Yorkshire moors after the death of her parents. There she meets a hearty housekeeper and her spirited brother, a dour gardener, a cheerful robin, and her wilful, hysterical, and sickly cousin, Master Colin, whose wails she hears echoing through the house at night.

With the help of the robin, Mary finds the door to a secret garden, neglected and hidden for years. When she decides to restore the garden in secret, the story becomes a charming journey into the places of the heart, where faith restores health, flowers refresh the spirit, and the magic of the garden, coming to life anew, brings health to Colin and happiness to Mary.]]> 331 Frances Hodgson Burnett 0517189607 Sarah 0 4.16 1911 The Secret Garden
author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1911
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/11
date added: 2023/11/11
shelves:
review:
I am not entirely sure what possessed me to pick up this book 30 years after I first read it and blow through it in a day. Beyond the period-typical attitudes about wealth and colonialism in the early parts of the book, the core holds up pretty well.
]]> 11/22/63 10644930
In 2011, Jake Epping, an English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, sets out on an insane � and insanely possible � mission to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

Leaving behind a world of computers and mobile phones, he goes back to a time of big American cars and diners, of Lindy Hopping, the sound of Elvis, and the taste of root beer.

In this haunting world, Jake falls in love with Sadie, a beautiful high school librarian. And, as the ominous date of 11/22/63 approaches, he encounters a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald...]]> 849 Stephen King 1451627289 Sarah 3 4.33 2011 11/22/63
author: Stephen King
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/08
date added: 2023/11/08
shelves:
review:
Interesting idea and well executed, but it turns out not really something I was interested enough in.
]]> <![CDATA[Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2)]]> 22299763
Kaz Brekker and his crew of deadly outcasts have just pulled off a heist so daring even they didn't think they'd survive. But instead of divvying up a fat reward, they're right back to fighting for their lives.

Double-crossed and badly weakened, the crew is low on resources, allies, and hope. As powerful forces from around the world descend on Ketterdam to root out the secrets of the dangerous drug known as jurda parem, old rivals and new enemies emerge to challenge Kaz's cunning and test the team's fragile loyalties.

A war will be waged on the city's dark and twisting streets - a battle for revenge and redemption that will decide the fate of the Grisha world.]]> 561 Leigh Bardugo Sarah 3 4.58 2016 Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/26
date added: 2023/10/26
shelves:
review:
Same as it ever was. I am not sorry to have read this, but I am also not sorry to be done. There is a relentlessness to plots like these that I would have really enjoyed once upon a time.
]]> <![CDATA[Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)]]> 23437156 Alternate cover of ISBN 9781627792127

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone...

A convict with a thirst for revenge

A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager

A runaway with a privileged past

A spy known as the Wraith

A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums

A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes

Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first.]]> 480 Leigh Bardugo 1627792120 Sarah 3 4.47 2015 Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/21
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves:
review:
I watched the related Netflix series and thought the story of this gang of characters was the most interesting thread, so here I am. I am not the target audience for this - and the genres aren’t ones I typically go for - but I get the appeal and will read the other book in the duology.
]]> Any Man 35068781
In this electric and provocative debut novel, Tamblyn blends genres of poetry, prose, and elements of suspense to give shape to the shocking narratives of victims of sexual violence, mapping the destructive ways in which our society perpetuates rape culture.

A violent serial rapist is on the loose, who goes by the name Maude. She hunts for men at bars, online, at home� the place doesn’t matter, neither does the man. Her victims then must live the aftermath of their assault in the form of doubt from the police, feelings of shame alienation from their friends and family and the haunting of a horrible woman who becomes the phantom on which society projects its greatest fears, fascinations and even misogyny. All the while the police are without leads and the media hound the victims, publicly dissecting the details of their attack.

What is extraordinary is how as years pass these men learn to heal, by banding together and finding a space to raise their voices. Told in alternating viewpoints signature to each voice and experience of the victim, these pages crackle with emotion, ranging from horror to breathtaking empathy.]]> 288 Amber Tamblyn 0062688936 Sarah 3
Edited 10/8/23. I am trying to work out my thoughts on ephemera (and e-phemera, I guess) in literature and wanted to revisit this one.]]> 3.85 2018 Any Man
author: Amber Tamblyn
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/08
date added: 2023/10/08
shelves:
review:
Reading this was like going down an internet rabbit hole late into the night. I mean that in a good way.

Edited 10/8/23. I am trying to work out my thoughts on ephemera (and e-phemera, I guess) in literature and wanted to revisit this one.
]]> <![CDATA[The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood]]> 61484888 Brian "Box" Brown brings history and culture to life through his comics. In his new graphic novel, he unravels how marketing that targeted children in the 1980s has shaped adults in the present.

Powered by the advent of television and super-charged by the deregulation era of the 1980s, media companies and toy manufacturers joined forces to dominate the psyches of American children. But what are the consequences when a developing brain is saturated with the same kind of marketing bombardment found in Red Scare propaganda?

Brian "Box" Brown's The He-Man Effect shows how corporate manipulation brought muscular, accessory-stuffed action figures to dizzying heights in the 1980s and beyond. Bringing beloved brands like He-Man, Transformers, My Little Pony, and even Mickey Mouse himself into the spotlight, this graphic history exposes a world with no rules and no concern for results beyond profit.]]> 272 Brian "Box" Brown 1250261406 Sarah 3 4.02 2023 The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood
author: Brian "Box" Brown
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/08
date added: 2023/10/08
shelves:
review:
This would be a great book for someone who was new to the topic because it provides a good history and overview. I really enjoyed the art style, especially when Brown was illustrating the toys themselves.
]]> Primordial #1 59003937 32 Jeff Lemire Sarah 0 4.13 2021 Primordial #1
author: Jeff Lemire
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/10
shelves:
review:
Reserving rating until I have read more of the series. That I am going to read more means I am enjoying it well enough, though.
]]> Different Seasons 39662
A “hypnotic� (The New York Times Book Review) collection of four novellas—including the inspirations behind the films Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption—from Stephen King, bound together by the changing of seasons, each taking on the theme of a journey with strikingly different tones and characters.

This gripping collection begins with “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,� in which an unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge—the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award-nominee The Shawshank Redemption.

Next is “Apt Pupil,� the inspiration for the film of the same name about top high school student Todd Bowden and his obsession with the dark and deadly past of an older man in town.

In “The Body,� four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. This novella became the movie Stand By Me.

Finally, a disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death in “The Breathing Method.�

“The wondrous readability of his work, as well as the instant sense of communication with his characters, are what make Stephen King the consummate storyteller that he is,� hailed the Houston Chronicle about Different Seasons.]]> 560 Stephen King 0751514624 Sarah 4 4.42 1982 Different Seasons
author: Stephen King
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/05
date added: 2023/09/05
shelves:
review:
It feels disloyal to say because of my long history with the Shawshank Redemption, but “The Body� is the best of the four. By far, I’d say.
]]> <![CDATA[Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16]]> 11569862
When he was a young boy, Kasher's mother took him on a vacation to the West Coast. Well it was more like an abduction. Only not officially. She stole them away from their father and they moved to Oakland , California. That's where the real fun begins, in the war zone of Oakland Public Schools. He was more than just out of control-his mother walked him around on a leash, which he chewed through and ran away.

Those early years read like part Augusten Burroughs, part David Sedaris, with a touch of Jim Carrol...but a lot more Jewish. In fact, Kasher later spends time in a Brooklyn Hasidic community. Then came addiction...

Brutally honest and laugh-out-loud funny, Kasher's first literary endeavor finds humor in even the most horrifying situations.]]> 303 Moshe Kasher 0446584266 Sarah 0 to-read 3.74 2012 Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16
author: Moshe Kasher
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening]]> 55883882
Collects MONSTRESS #1-6

About the Creators:

New York Times bestselling and award-winning writer Marjorie Liu is best known for her fiction and comic books. She teaches comic book writing at MIT, and leads a class on Popular Fiction at the Voices of Our Nation (VONA) workshop. Ms. Liu's extensive work includes the bestselling "Astonishing X-Men" for Marvel Comics, which featured the gay wedding of X-Man Northstar and was subsequently nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for outstanding media images of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Prior to writing full-time, Liu was a lawyer. She currently resides in Boston.

Sana Takeda is an illustrator and comic book artist who was born in Niigata, and now resides in Tokyo, Japan. At age 20 she started out as a 3D CGI designer for SEGA, a Japanese video game company, and became a freelance artist when she was 25. She is still an artist, and has worked on titles such as "X-23" and "Ms. Marvel" for Marvel Comics, and is an illustrator for trading card games in Japan.]]> 192 Marjorie M. Liu 1632157098 Sarah 0 3.96 2016 Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening
author: Marjorie M. Liu
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2019/01/30
date added: 2023/08/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain]]> 56221012
Anthony Bourdain's long time director and producer takes readers behind the scenes to reveal the insanity of filming television in some of the most volatile places in the world and what it was like to work with a legend.

In the nearly two years since Anthony Bourdain's death, no one else has come close to filling the void he left. His passion for and genuine curiosity about the people and cultures he visited made the world feel smaller and more connected. Despite his affable, confident, and trademark snarky TV persona, the real Tony was intensely private, deeply conflicted about his fame, and an enigma even to those close to him. Tony’s devoted crew knew him best, and no one else had a front-row seat for as long as his director and producer, Tom Vitale.

Over the course of more than a decade traveling together, Tony became a boss, a friend, a hero and, sometimes, a tormentor . In the Weeds takes readers behind the scenes to reveal not just the insanity that went into filming in some of the most far-flung and volatile parts of the world, but what Tony was like unedited and off-camera. From the outside, the job looked like an all-expenses-paid adventure to places like Borneo, Vietnam, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Libya. What happened off-camera was far more interesting than what made it to air. The more things went wrong, the better it was for the show. Fortunately, everything fell apart constantly.]]> 304 Tom Vitale 0306924099 Sarah 4 4.24 2021 In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain
author: Tom Vitale
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/26
date added: 2023/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The World We Make (Great Cities, #2)]]> 60399181 Four-time Hugo Award-winning andNew York Timesbestselling author N.K. Jemisin craftsa glorious taleof identity,resistance, magic andmyth.

Allis not well in the city that never sleeps.Even thoughthe avatars of New York Cityhavetemporarily managed to stop the Woman in White from invading—and destroying the entire universe in the process—the mysterious capital "E" Enemy has more subtle powers at her disposal. A new candidate for mayor wielding the populist rhetoric ofgentrification, xenophobia, and "law and order"may have what it takes to change the very nature of New York itself and take it down from the inside.

In order to defeat him, and the Enemy who holds his purse strings,the avatars will have to join together with the other Great Cities of the world in order to bring her down for good and protect their world from complete destruction.

N.K. Jemisin’s Great Cities Duology, which began withThe City We Becameand concludes withThe World We Make, is a masterpiece of speculative fiction from one of the most importantwriters of her generation.
]]> 357 N.K. Jemisin 035651269X Sarah 4 4.05 2022 The World We Make (Great Cities, #2)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/10
date added: 2023/07/10
shelves:
review:
Despite this being far removed from my usual genres, I loved this duology and suspect if it had been able to be the trilogy as originally intended, it would be five stars. I am grateful Jemisin pushed through with “sheer bloody-minded stubbornness� because this was a universe I was happy to spend time with, but I was very conscious of how many pages were left and how many threads needed to be resolved.
]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

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

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Sarah 4 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/04
date added: 2023/06/04
shelves:
review:
I burned through the last 300 pages of this in one sitting, which is something I have previously only done with genre fiction. I loved this book, even if I don't think either the book or I fully recovered from one key pivot point in the plot.
]]> The Appeal (The Appeal, #1) 54621096 447 Janice Hallett 1788165292 Sarah 3 3.83 2021 The Appeal (The Appeal, #1)
author: Janice Hallett
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/20
date added: 2023/05/20
shelves:
review:
Interesting idea, and I was maybe half right about the solution. I think my favorite part was that we didn’t have access to everyone’s correspondence. My least favorite part was the awkward maneuvering needed to stick to the central conceit.
]]> <![CDATA[Binge: 60 stories to make your brain feel different]]> 57342764 The first new work of fiction since 2013 from one of Canada's most successful, idiosyncratic and world-defining writers, Douglas Coupland. He's called it Binge because it's impossible to read just one.

Imagine feeling 100% alive every moment of every minute of the day! Maybe that's how animals live. Or trees, even. I sometimes stare at the plastic bag tree visible from my apartment window and marvel that both it and I are equally alive and that there's no sliding scale of life. You're either alive, or you're not. Or you're dead or you're not.

Thirty years after Douglas Coupland broke the fiction mould and defined a generation with Generation X, he is back with Binge, 60 stories laced with his observational profundity about the way we live and his existential worry about how we should be living: the very things that have made him such an influential and bestselling writer. Not to mention that he can also be really funny.

Here the narrators vary from story to story as Doug catches what he calls the voice of the people, inspired by the way we write about ourselves and our experiences in online forums. The characters, of course, are Doug's own: crackpots, cranks and sweetie-pies, dad dancers and perpetrators of carbecues. People in the grip of unconscionable urges; lonely people; dying people; silly people. If you love Doug's fiction, this collection is like rain on the desert.
]]> 272 Douglas Coupland 1039000525 Sarah 3 3.95 2021 Binge: 60 stories to make your brain feel different
author: Douglas Coupland
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/26
date added: 2023/04/26
shelves:
review:
I liked the accumulation of this collection more than any of the individual stories.
]]> The Aleph and Other Stories 5787 The Maker, which Borges wrote as failing eyesight and public fame began to undermine his sense of self.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 210 Jorge Luis Borges 0142437883 Sarah 5 4.43 1945 The Aleph and Other Stories
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1945
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/20
date added: 2023/04/20
shelves:
review:
I am not a big short story reader, but I picked this up to copy a story from it and blew through the whole thing. I do love when the fantastic reveals something thoughtful about the mundane.
]]> <![CDATA[You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place]]> 44286534
We rely on AI every day for recommendations, for translations, and to put cat ears on our selfie videos. We also trust AI with matters of life and death, on the road and in our hospitals. But how smart is AI really, and how does it solve problems, understand humans, and even drive self-driving cars?

Shane delivers the answers to every AI question you've ever asked, and some you definitely haven't--like, how can a computer design the perfect sandwich? What does robot-generated Harry Potter fan-fiction look like? And is the world's best Halloween costume really "Vampire Hog Bride"?

In this smart, often hilarious introduction to the most interesting science of our time, Shane shows how these programs learn, fail, and adapt--and how they reflect the best and worst of humanity. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You is the perfect book for anyone curious about what the robots in our lives are thinking.]]> 272 Janelle Shane 0316525243 Sarah 4 4.11 2019 You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place
author: Janelle Shane
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/11
date added: 2023/04/11
shelves:
review:
This was a fun read to counter the existential dread I feel about the impact generative AI will have on education.
]]> <![CDATA[How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information]]> 43726576 A leading data visualization expert explores the negative—and positive—influences that charts have on our perception of truth.

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous—and easier to share than ever. While such visualizations can better inform us, they can also deceive by displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns—or simply misinform us by being poorly designed, such as the confusing “eye of the storm� maps shown on TV every hurricane season.

Many of us are ill equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate visuals to promote their own agendas. Public conversations are increasingly driven by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie teaches us how to do just that.]]> 256 Alberto Cairo 1324001569 Sarah 5 4.07 2019 How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information
author: Alberto Cairo
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/05
date added: 2023/04/05
shelves:
review:
4.5. I was looking for a book to help me better teach students how to read charts in this frustrating media ecosystem. This was that exactly. Lots of great examples with explanations.
]]> Daytripper 8477057
Meet Brás de Oliva Domingos. The miracle child of a world-famous Brazilian writer, Brás spends his days penning other people's obituaries and his nights dreaming of becoming a successful author himself—writing the end of other people's stories, while his own has barely begun.

But on the day that life begins, would he even notice? Does it start at 21 when he meets the girl of his dreams? Or at 11, when he has his first kiss? Is it later in his life when his first son is born? Or earlier when he might have found his voice as a writer?

Each day in Brás's life is like a page from a book. Each one reveals the people and things who have made him who he is: his mother and father, his child and his best friend, his first love and the love of his life. And like all great stories, each day has a twist he'll never see coming...

In Daytripper, the Eisner Award-winning twin brothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá tell a magical, mysterious and moving story about life itself—a hauntingly lyrical journey that uses the quiet moments to ask the big questions.]]> 247 Fábio Moon 1401229697 Sarah 4 4.31 2011 Daytripper
author: Fábio Moon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/23
date added: 2023/03/23
shelves:
review:
Reread this for a class and liked it more this time because teaching it made me slow down and deal with the art. I sometimes struggle with the fullness of graphic novels, but not this time.
]]> His Feathers Were Chains 56310095
Denise K. Lajimodiere is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Belcourt, North Dakota. She has been involved in education for thirty-eight years as an Elementary teacher and principal, earning her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees from the University of North Dakota. She is also a traditional jingle dress dancer, a poet, and a birch bark-biting artist.]]> 86 Denise K. Lajimodiere 1946163228 Sarah 5 4.56 His Feathers Were Chains
author: Denise K. Lajimodiere
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.56
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/23
date added: 2023/03/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands]]> 59069071 Celebrated cartoonist Kate Beaton vividly presents the untold story of Canada.

Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant fame, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. After university, Beaton heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Beaton will be far more than she anticipates.

Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. Being one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. She encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. Her wounds may never heal.

Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full-length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.]]> 430 Kate Beaton 1770462899 Sarah 5 4.41 2022 Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
author: Kate Beaton
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/12
date added: 2023/03/12
shelves:
review:
Beaton's style perfectly suits the accumulation of events, large and small, that build into this powerful account.
]]> The Wandering 46158533 The most ingenious, unique novel you will read all year, where you choose your own story as you travel across the world

You’ve grown roots, you’re gathering moss. You’re desperate to escape your boring life teaching English in Jakarta, to go out and see the world. So you make a Faustian pact with a devil, who gives you a gift, and a warning. A pair of red shoes to take you wherever you want to go.

But where will you choose to go?

To New York, to follow your dreams?

To Berlin or Amsterdam? Lima or Tijuana? Or onto a train that will never stop?

You’re forever wandering, everywhere and nowhere, but are you ever home?

The choices you make may mean you end up as a tourist or an undocumented migrant, a mother or a murderer, and you will meet many travellers with their own stories to tell. As your paths cross and intertwine, you’ll come to realise that no story is ever new.

The Wandering is a novel about the highs and lows of global nomadism, the politics and privileges of travel and desire, and the freedoms and limitations of the choices we make, by one of Asia’s most exciting writers. It’s a playful and ingenious reminder that borders are real, that turns the traditional adventure story on its head.]]> 432 Intan Paramaditha 1787301176 Sarah 4 3.71 2017 The Wandering
author: Intan Paramaditha
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/07
date added: 2023/03/07
shelves:
review:
It’s hard to say I completed this book, despite reaching five FINIS points. I regret choosing this for a class - how does a group talk about a book when we are all reading something different? - but I already know I will go back. Maybe Europe this time. I hear Berlin is nice.
]]> Treasure Island!!! 12358020 Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. When had she ever dreamed a scheme? When had she ever done a foolish, overbold act? When had she ever, like Jim Hawkins, broke from her friends, raced for the beach, stolen a boat, killed a man, and eliminated an obstacle that stood in the way of her getting a hunk of gold?



Convinced that Stevenson's book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence and horn-blowing. Accompanied by her mother, her sister, and a hostile Amazon parrot that refuses to follow the script, our heroine embarks on a domestic adventure more frightening than anything she'd originally planned.

Treasure Island!!! is the story of a ferocious obsession, told by an original voice-intelligent, perverse, relentlessly self- extricating, and funny.

]]> 172 Sara Levine 1609450612 Sarah 0 to-read 3.36 2011 Treasure Island!!!
author: Sara Levine
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Exit West 30688435
Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.]]> 231 Mohsin Hamid 0735212171 Sarah 4
"[...] the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things, which it did for Saeed and Nadia, and so even though they spoke less and did less together, they saw each other more, although not more often" (205)]]> 3.74 2017 Exit West
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/21
date added: 2023/02/21
shelves:
review:
I might have given this 3 stars except for all of these 5-star moments. This one is my favorite:

"[...] the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things, which it did for Saeed and Nadia, and so even though they spoke less and did less together, they saw each other more, although not more often" (205)
]]> Meaning in Absurdity 14467979 136 Bernard Kastrup 1846948592 Sarah 3 4.62 2012 Meaning in Absurdity
author: Bernard Kastrup
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2013/04/22
date added: 2023/02/13
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century]]> 33917107
On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible: the election of Donald Trump as president. Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.

Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.�

Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.]]> 127 Timothy Snyder 0804190119 Sarah 4 4.24 2017 On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
author: Timothy Snyder
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/07
date added: 2023/02/07
shelves:
review:
Each lesson knocked me back and then moved on faster than I would have liked. Perhaps that was in my approach to reading it.
]]> Invisible Cities 9809 165 Italo Calvino 0156453800 Sarah 5 4.16 1972 Invisible Cities
author: Italo Calvino
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/07
date added: 2023/02/07
shelves:
review:
A book where my love for it grows with subsequent readings.
]]> <![CDATA[The Warrior Song of King Gesar]]> 114458 Iliad, this is an epic tale of the legendary Tibetan warrior king, Gesar of Ling.

The saga of Gesar's life—from the harsh circumstances of his youth to his climactic days of battle against the enemies of the four directions—is an interweaving of scenes ranging from the gritty and human to the mystical and wondrous.

Some of Central Asia's most inspiring and sacred teachings have to do with courage: the bravery to face and conquer the inner and outer obstacles that prevent us from finding true freedom. The Gesar cycle has been recreated and amended by visionary bards in Central Asia for centuries. In this modern rendition, Douglas Penick brings us the unbroken heritage of spiritual warriorship embodied by the life of the enlightened warrior-sage Gesar, King of Ling. Gesar's unique teaching lies in showing us ways to use the very energy of drama and adventure to attain lasting peace.]]> 149 Douglas J. Penick 0861711130 Sarah 0 4.20 1996 The Warrior Song of King Gesar
author: Douglas J. Penick
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at: 2023/02/01
date added: 2023/02/01
shelves:
review:
Perhaps my favorite of the old epics. Definitely among the most readable.
]]> <![CDATA[Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali]]> 469896 101 Djibril Tamsir Niane 0582264758 Sarah 0 3.64 1255 Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali
author: Djibril Tamsir Niane
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1255
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/26
date added: 2023/01/26
shelves:
review:
I read this as an undergrad and revisited it for a class I am teaching. My copy had the margin notes from 20-year-old me, which added another layer to my reading.
]]> Sea of Tranquility 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Sarah 0 to-read 4.04 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/01/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch]]> 12067
People have been predicting the end of the world almost from its very beginning, so it’s only natural to be sceptical when a new date is set for Judgement Day. This time though, the armies of Good and Evil really do appear to be massing. The four Bikers of the Apocalypse are hitting the road. But both the angels and demons � well, one fast-living demon and a somewhat fussy angel � would quite like the Rapture not to happen.

And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist…]]> 491 Terry Pratchett Sarah 4 4.27 1990 Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
author: Terry Pratchett
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/06
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves:
review:
A perfect start of the year read.
]]> Gravity’s Rainbow 415 776 Thomas Pynchon 0143039946 Sarah 0 hiatus, to-read 4.01 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/30
shelves: hiatus, to-read
review:

]]> We Sold Our Souls 37715859
Two decades later, former guitarist Kris Pulaski works as the night manager of a Best Western - she's tired, broke, and unhappy. Everything changes when she discovers a shocking secret from her heavy metal past: Turns out that Terry's meteoric rise to success may have come at the price of Kris's very soul.

This revelation prompts Kris to hit the road, reunite with the rest of her bandmates, and confront the man who ruined her life. It's a journey that will take her from the Pennsylvania rust belt to a Satanic rehab center and finally to a Las Vegas music festival that's darker than any Mordor Tolkien could imagine. A furious power ballad about never giving up, even in the face of overwhelming odds, We Sold Our Souls is an epic journey into the heart of a conspiracy-crazed, paranoid country that seems to have lost its very soul...where only a girl with a guitar can save us all.]]> 337 Grady Hendrix Sarah 4 3.70 2018 We Sold Our Souls
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/29
date added: 2022/12/29
shelves:
review:
Rounded up from 3.5 to 4. I don't think any book that insists I keep reading at night despite an early morning is a true 3 for me. This book flew by, which might be a reflection of odd pacing or it might be a reflection of the wild ride that seemed to know when I was about to put it down and dropped a cliffhanger that I had to see resolved.
]]> Of Mice and Men 890 “I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.�

They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. But George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.

While the powerlessness of the laboring class is a recurring theme in Steinbeck's work of the late 1930s, he narrowed his focus when composing Of Mice and Men, creating an intimate portrait of two men facing a world marked by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. But though the scope is narrow, the theme is universal: a friendship and a shared dream that makes an individual's existence meaningful.

A unique perspective on life's hardships, this story has achieved the status of timeless classic due to its remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films.]]> 107 John Steinbeck 0142000671 Sarah 4 3.88 1937 Of Mice and Men
author: John Steinbeck
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/28
date added: 2022/12/28
shelves:
review:
I admit that I chose to read this in the last days of 2022 because it is short, but it is another book that I have long meant to read but kept shuffling it down the stack. I knew the story, but I trust Steinbeck’s writing to punch me in the gut. It did.
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