Kat's bookshelf: all

Kat's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 08 Apr 2025 19:33:14 -0700 60 Kat's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Death of the Author 214329001 The future of storytelling is here.

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

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

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

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.]]> 448 Nnedi Okorafor 0063391155 Kat 4 sf 4.04 2025 Death of the Author

author: Nnedi Okorafor
name: Kat
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: sf
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed]]> 35703348 208 Laurie Kilmartin 1635650003 Kat 3 3.81 2018

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed

author: Laurie Kilmartin
name: Kat
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Gentleman's Honor (Bastion Club, #2)]]> 952852
Desperate and penniless, but determined, Alicia will make a spectacular match for her ravishing younger sister! Masquerading as the widowed "Mrs. Carrington"—the perfect society chaperone—Alicia intends to boldly launch her sibling into the ton. But one moonlit night stroll may prove her undoing when it leads to an accusation of murder.

Every instinct Tony Blake possesses tells him that Alicia—the exquisite, distraught beauty he discovers standing over a dead body in his godmother's garden—is innocent of serious wrongdoing. His connections will allow him to take control of the investigation,, his social prominence will certainly provide her public support.

But it is more than honor alone that compels Tony to protect his remarkable, imperiled beauty—and he will do everything in his seductive power to make Alicia his.]]> 441 Stephanie Laurens 0060002077 Kat 4 3.98 2003 A Gentleman's Honor (Bastion Club, #2)

author: Stephanie Laurens
name: Kat
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Do Something: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of '70s New York]]> 121312704
Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company that capitalized on the optimism of the 1960s as marketed to “an adventurous new breed of men.’�� But behind the facade of material prosperity lay the emotional disarray of a household dominated by a charismatic con artist father, a glamorous yet lost and careless mother, a family haunted by tragedy. By the time Trebay established a foothold at the fringes of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the diverse artistic tribes that thrived in Manhattan in that pre-digital era, his father had lost his fortune, his younger sister had been arrested for armed robbery and fled underground, the family house was in ashes, and his mother was dead.

Unschooled and on his own, Trebay became a striver, wending his way through a seemingly apocalyptic landscape populated by a vibrant cast of characters, including washed-up Hollywood screenwriters of the 30s; Warhol superstars like Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling; fashion geniuses like Charles James; and emerging artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, photographers and deejays who would powerfully influence mainstream culture in the decades to come.]]> 256 Guy Trebay 1524731978 Kat 3 mem 3.52 2024 Do Something: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of '70s New York

Do Something: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of '70s New York

author: Guy Trebay
name: Kat
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: mem
review:

]]> Crush 213870131 When a husband asks his reluctant wife to consider what might be missing from their marriage, what follows surprises them both—sex, heartbreak and heart rekindling, and a rediscovered sense of all that is possible

She’s happy and settled and productive and content in her full life—a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of “husband�� and “wife�� force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose.

Using the author’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point, Crush is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and most of all the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes. Destined to become a classic novel of marriage, and tackling the big questions being asked about partnership in postpandemic relationships, Crush is a sharp, funny, seductive, and revelatory novel about holding on to everything it’s possible to love—friends, children, parents, passion, lovers, husbands, all of the world’s good books, and most of all one’s own deep sense of purpose.]]> 288 Ada Calhoun 0593832027 Kat 3 3.00 2025 Crush

author: Ada Calhoun
name: Kat
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> My Oxford Year 35068830
American Ella Durran has had the same plan for her life since she was thirteen: Study at Oxford. At 24, she’s finally made it to England on a Rhodes Scholarship when she’s offered an unbelievable position in a rising political star’s presidential campaign. With the promise that she’ll work remotely and return to DC at the end of her Oxford year, she’s free to enjoy her Once in a Lifetime Experience. That is until a smart-mouthed local who is too quick with his tongue and his car ruins her shirt and her first day.

When Ella discovers that her English literature course will be taught by none other than that same local, Jamie Davenport, she thinks for the first time that Oxford might not be all she’s envisioned. But a late-night drink reveals a connection she wasn’t anticipating finding and what begins as a casual fling soon develops into something much more when Ella learns Jamie has a life-changing secret.

Immediately, Ella is faced with a seemingly impossible decision: turn her back on the man she’s falling in love with to follow her political dreams or be there for him during a trial neither are truly prepared for. As the end of her year in Oxford rapidly approaches, Ella must decide if the dreams she’s always wanted are the same ones she’s now yearning for.]]> 352 Julia Whelan 0062740652 Kat 4 3.85 2018 My Oxford Year

author: Julia Whelan
name: Kat
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Ciao For Now 62197589
With her thirties rapidly approaching and a mountain of student debt looming over her, Violet Luciano’s dream of finishing design school and working in fashion has cost her everything. So when she lands an internship at an up-and-coming fashion brand in Rome, she brings her A game to Italy. With nothing left to lose, Violet plans to win the competition among the interns for the ultimate prize—a job at a New York label.

But when a coffee run goes wrong and Violet accidentally destroys a stranger’s laptop, all of the apology Americanos in the world won’t help her. Because it turns out that the man from the café is Matteo, her professor’s eternally grumpy son, who thinks she’s a clumsy American…and maybe a stalker. Their animosity (and undeniable chemistry) grows as together they’re forced to face a summer of chic parties, adventures through Rome and sharing a home…with the person they can’t stand the most.

The more time she spends with him, the more distracted she finds herself. With her chance to win the competition slipping out of her grasp, Violet has to decide whether to say ciao to Matteo—or ciao to her dreams.
��ձ�> 316 Kate Bromley 1525804758 Kat 0 3.51 2023 Ciao For Now

author: Kate Bromley
name: Kat
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Spymaster's Lady (Spymasters #1)]]> 7802215
British spymaster Robert Grey must enter France and bring back the brilliant, beautiful-and dangerous-Fox Cub. His duty is to capture her and her secrets for England. When the two natural enemies are thrown into prison, they forge an uneasy alliance to break free. But their pact is temporary and betrayal seems inevitable as the fates of nations hang in the balance.]]> 367 Joanna Bourne 0425236218 Kat 0 3.76 2008 The Spymaster's Lady (Spymasters #1)

author: Joanna Bourne
name: Kat
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment, #1)]]> 60784546 After centuries of sleep, the gods are warring again��

All eighteen-year-old Iris Winnow wants to do is hold her family together. With a brother on the frontline forced to fight on behalf of the Gods now missing from the frontline and a mother drowning her sorrows, Iris’s best bet is winning the columnist promotion at the Oath Gazette.

But when Iris’s letters to her brother fall into the wrong hands �� that of the handsome but cold Roman Kitt, her rival at the paper �� an unlikely magical connection forms.

Expelled into the middle of a mystical war, magical typewriters in tow, can their bond withstand the fight for the fate of mankind and, most importantly, love?

An epic enemies-to-lovers fantasy novel filled with hope and heartbreak, and the unparalleled power of love.]]> 357 Rebecca Ross 1250857430 Kat 5 fant 4.14 2023 Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment, #1)

Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment, #1)

author: Rebecca Ross
name: Kat
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: fant
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ruthless Vows (Divine Rivals, #2)]]> 217472248 Torn apart by war. Reunited by love?

Two weeks have passed since Iris returned home bruised and heartbroken from the front, but the war is far from over.

Roman is missing, lost behind enemy lines, with no memory of his past, or Iris. Hoping his memories return, he begins to write again �� but this time for the enemy.

When a strange letter arrives through his wardrobe door, he strikes up a correspondence with a penpal who seems at once mysterious�� and strangely familiar.

As their connection deepens, the two of them will risk their very hearts and futures to change the tides of the war.]]> 480 Rebecca Ross 8702418533 Kat 5 fant 3.93 2023 Ruthless Vows (Divine Rivals, #2)

author: Rebecca Ross
name: Kat
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: fant
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Paladin's Grace (The Saint of Steel, #1)]]> 50702014 Stephen's god died on the longest day of the year��

Three years later, Stephen is a broken paladin, living only for the chance to be useful before he dies. But all that changes when he encounters a fugitive named Grace in an alley and witnesses an assassination attempt gone wrong. Now the pair must navigate a web of treachery, beset on all sides by spies and poisoners, while a cryptic killer stalks one step behind��

From the Hugo and Nebula Award winning author of Swordheart and The Twisted Ones comes a saga of murder, magic, and love on the far side of despair.]]> 366 T. Kingfisher Kat 3 4.08 2020 Paladin's Grace (The Saint of Steel, #1)

Paladin's Grace (The Saint of Steel, #1)

author: T. Kingfisher
name: Kat
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Colored Television 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,�� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content�� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.�� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Kat 4 con, race-rel 3.53 2024 Colored Television

author: Danzy Senna
name: Kat
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: con, race-rel
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics]]> 117249 Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.

For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), art almost ranked with religion and philosophy in its power to reveal the fundamental nature of existence. But although he lived in the German golden age of Goethe, Schiller and Mozart, he also believed that art was in terminal decline.

To resolve this apparent paradox, as Michael Inwood explains in his incisive Introduction, we must understand the particular place of aesthetics in Hegel's vast intellectual edifice. Its central pillars consist of logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. Art derives its value from offering a sensory vision of the God-like absolute, from its harmonious fusion of form and content, and from summing up the world-view of an age such as Homer's. While it scaled supreme heights in ancient Greece, Hegel doubted art's ability to encompass Christian belief or the reflective irony characteristic of modern societies. Many such challenging ideas are developed in this superb treatise; it counts among the most stimulating works of a master thinker.

Table of Contents
Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics Introduction A Note on the Translation and Commentary
INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON AESTHETICS

Chapter I: The Range of Aesthetic Defined, and Some Objections against the Philosophy of Art Refuted
[α Aesthetic confined to Beauty of Art
β Does Art merit Scientific Treatment?
γ Is Scientific Treatment appropriate to Art?
δ Answer to β
ε Answer to γ]

Chapter II: Methods of Science Applicable to Beauty and Art
[1. Empirical Method - Art-scholarship
(a) Its Range
(b) It generates Rules and Theories
(c) The Rights of Genius
2. Abstract Reflection
3. The Philosophical Conception of Artistic Beauty, general notion of]

Chapter III: The Conception of Artistic Beauty
Part I - The Work of Art as Made and as Sensuous
1. Work of Art as Product of Human Activity
[(a) Conscious Production by Rule
(b) Artistic Inspiration
(c) Dignity of Production by Man
(d) Man's Need to produce Works of Art]
2. Work of Art as addressed to Man's Sense
[(a) Object of Art - Pleasant Feeling?
(b) Feeling of Beauty - Taste
(c) Art-scholarship
(d) Profounder Consequences of Sensuous Nature of Art
(α) Relations of the Sensuous to the Mind
(αα) Desire
(ββ) Theory
(γγ) Sensuous as Symbol of Spiritual
(β) The Sensuous Element, how Present in the Artist
(γ) The Content of Art Sensuous]

Part II - The End of Art
3. [The Interest or End of Art
(a) Imitation of Nature?
(α) Mere Repetition of Nature is -
(αα) Superfluous
(ββ) Imperfect
(γγ) Amusing Merely as Sleight of Hand
(β) What is Good to Imitate?
(γ) Some Arts cannot be called Imitative
(b) Humani nihil - ?
(c) Mitigation of the Passions?
(α) How Art mitigates the Passions
(β) How Art purifies the Passions
(αα) It must have a Worthy Content
(ββ) But ought not to be Didactic
(γγ) Nor explicitly addressed to a Moral Purpose
(d) Art has its own Purpose as Revelation of Truth]

Chapter IV: Historical Deducation of the True Idea of Art in Modern Philosophy
1. Kant
[(a) Pleasure in Beauty not Appetitive
(b) Pleasure in Beauty Universal
(c) The Beautiful in its Teleological Aspect
(d) Delight in the Beautiful necessary though felt]
2. Schiller, Winckelmann, Schelling
3. The Irony

Chapter V: Division of the Subject
[1. The Condition of Artistic Presentation is the Correspondence of Matter and Plastic Form
2. Part I - The Ideal
3. Part II - The Types of Art
(α) Symbolic Art
(β) Classical Art
(γ) Romantic Art
4. Part III - The Several Arts
(α) Architecture
(β) Sculpture
(γ) Romantic Art, comprising
(i) Painting
(ii) Music
(iii) Poetry
5. Conclusion]

Commentary

]]> 197 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 014043335X Kat 0 to-read, phil 3.91 Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics

author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
name: Kat
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read, phil
review:

]]> Uncertain Magic 802157
They call Faelan Savigar "the Devil Earl"—a handsome, impoverished lord damned by dark rumor and whispered innuendo. But the secrets Faelan hides within are what stir Roderica's desire—and her need to experience the intoxicating ecstasy of his kiss. But be he liar, swindler, or worse, Roderica knows she can have no other—and she will trust this enigmatic stranger with her life...and her heart.]]> 384 Laura Kinsale 0380751402 Kat 0 3.56 1987 Uncertain Magic

author: Laura Kinsale
name: Kat
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> My Sweet Folly 657046 400 Laura Kinsale 0425209792 Kat 3 3.76 1997

author: Laura Kinsale
name: Kat
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
such a promising premise that did not follow through
]]> Midsummer Moon 802143 A duke’s well-ordered world is turned upside down when a female inventor sends his heart soaring in this Regency romance by a New York Times–bestselling author.

Merlin Lambourne has invented the “speaking box”—a sort of telephone—which is so valuable that Napoleon has killed for it. Sent by the crown to bring both inventor and invention to safety, Ransom Falconer, Duke of Damerell, is shocked to learn Mr. Lambourne is a Miss.

Perhaps more shocking, however, are his feelings for the eccentric genius. She is everything he doesn’t like: incapable of following orders, unaware of conventional etiquette, preoccupied, disorganized, and unkempt. Yet she beguiles him. One of the most ingenious inventors in England, she is also one of the country’s greatest hopes in the defense against the power mad Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, if he could just get her mind out of the clouds and convince her to marry him . . .

Merlin is not absentminded, it’s just that she only seems to be able to pay attention to one thing at a time. And maybe she does take everything people say literally, but people ought to say what they mean. Now this Ransom Falconer wants her to forget her current interest in flying machines and focus on the speaking box she’s lost interest in finishing. It’s quite disconcerting. In fact, everything about him is disconcerting; in her isolated life Merlin has never met anyone who affects her quite like Ransom does.]]> 392 Laura Kinsale 158586322X Kat 0 3.69 1987 Midsummer Moon

author: Laura Kinsale
name: Kat
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Prince of Midnight 910688 380 Laura Kinsale 0759203180 Kat 0 3.78 1990

author: Laura Kinsale
name: Kat
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Lessons in French 6734558
Trevelyan and Callie are childhood sweethearts with a taste for adventure, until the fateful day her father discovers them embracing in the carriage house and, in a furious frenzy, drives Trevelyan away in disgrace. Nine long, lonely years later, Trevelyan returns. Callie discovers that he can still make her blood race and fill her life with excitement, but he can't give her the one thing she wants more than anything--himself.

For Trevelyan, Callie is a spark of light in a world of darkness and deceit. Before he can bear to say his last goodbyes, he's determined to sweep her into one last, fateful adventure, just for the two of them.]]> 480 Laura Kinsale 1402237014 Kat 4 3.71 2010 Lessons in French

author: Laura Kinsale
name: Kat
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[For My Lady's Heart (Medieval Hearts, #1)]]> 802147 480 Laura Kinsale 0425206599 Kat 4 3.86 1993

For My Lady's Heart (Medieval Hearts, #1)

author: Laura Kinsale
name: Kat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Seize the Fire 910685 453 Laura Kinsale 0380753995 Kat 0 3.94 1989

author: Laura Kinsale
name: Kat
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,�� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics�� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,�� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Kat 5 short-stories 3.87 2024

author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Kat
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: short-stories
review:

]]> Don't Be a Stranger 205436030 A mesmerizing new novel from the author of the story of a woman swept into a love affair at mid-life

Ivy Cooper is 52 years old when Ansel Fleming first walks into her life. Twenty years her junior, a musician newly released from prison on a minor drug charge, Ansel’s beguiling good looks and quiet intensity instantly seduce her. Despite the gulf between their ages and experience the physical chemistry between them is overpowering, and over the heady weeks and months that follow Ivy finds her life bifurcated by his.

On the surface she is a responsible mother, managing the demands of friends, an ex-husband, home; but emotionally, psychologically, sexually, she is consumed by desire and increasingly alive only in the stolen moments-out-of-time, with Ansel in her bed.

In spellbinding prose, Susan Minot has crafted a luminous novel about erotic obsession, and the hunger for intimacy, communication, and oblivion. Don't Be a Stranger is a gripping, sensual, and provocative work from one of the most remarkable voices in contemporary fiction.]]> 320 Susan Minot 0593802446 Kat 4 3.14 2024

author: Susan Minot
name: Kat
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
excellent book that is weirdly horrible to read because we have all been ivy at some point so all feels painfully true
]]> <![CDATA[The Shadow and the Star (Victorian Hearts, #2)]]> 802151
Wealthy, powerful and majestically handsome, he is a man of dark secrets--a master of the ancient martial arts of an exotic distant land. Scarred by a childhood of shocking degradation, he has sworn to love chastely... but burns with the fires of unfulfilled passion.

THE STAR

Lovely, innocent and nearly destitute, she is drawn to him by a fevered yearning she could never deny -- following her enigmatic "shadow warrior" into a dangerous world of desire and righteous retribution.]]> 464 Laura Kinsale 0380761319 Kat 3 3.99 1991 The Shadow and the Star (Victorian Hearts, #2)

The Shadow and the Star (Victorian Hearts, #2)

author: Laura Kinsale
name: Kat
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Bone Season (The Bone Season, #1)]]> 195391688 The lavishly reimagined 10th Anniversary Edition of the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller.

The year is 2059. For two centuries, the Republic of Scion has led an oppressive campaign against unnaturalness in Europe.

In London, Paige Mahoney holds a high rank in the criminal underworld. The right hand of the ruthless White Binder, Paige is a dreamwalker, a rare and formidable kind of clairvoyant. Under Scion law, she commits treason simply by breathing.

When Paige is arrested for murder, she meets the mysterious founders of Scion, who have designs on her uncommon abilities. If she is to survive and escape, Paige must use every skill at her disposal �� and put her trust in someone who ought to be her enemy.]]> 624 Samantha Shannon 163973418X Kat 3 fant 3.99 2013 The Bone Season (The Bone Season, #1)

author: Samantha Shannon
name: Kat
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: fant
review:

]]> Tipping the Velvet 25104465 472 Sarah Waters Kat 3 queer 4.12 1998

author: Sarah Waters
name: Kat
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: queer
review:

]]> Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3) 209439446
Now Violet must journey beyond the failing Aretian wards to seek allies from unfamiliar lands to stand with Navarre. The trip will test every bit of her wit, luck, and strength, but she will do anything to save what she loves—her dragons, her family, her home, and him.

Even if it means keeping a secret so big, it could destroy everything. They need an army. They need power. They need magic. And they need the one thing only Violet can find—the truth. But a storm is coming...and not everyone can survive its wrath.]]> 527 Rebecca Yarros 1649374186 Kat 3 fant 4.17 2025 Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3)

author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Kat
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: fant
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Subtle Blood (The Will Darling Adventures, #3)]]> 52238002
And then a brutal murder in a gentleman’s club plunges them back into the shadow world of crime, deception, and the power of privilege. Worse, it brings them up against Kim’s noble, hostile family, and his upper-class life where Will can never belong.

With old and new enemies against them, and secrets on every side, Will and Kim have to fight for each other harder than ever—or be torn apart for good.]]> 290 K.J. Charles Kat 4 queer 4.41 2021 Subtle Blood (The Will Darling Adventures, #3)

Subtle Blood (The Will Darling Adventures, #3)

author: K.J. Charles
name: Kat
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: queer
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Sugared Game (The Will Darling Adventures, #2)]]> 52237997
But when Will encounters a face from the past in a disreputable nightclub, Kim turns up, as shifty, unreliable, and irresistible as ever. And before Will knows it, he's been dragged back into Kim's shadowy world of secrets, criminal conspiracies, and underhand dealings.

This time, though, things are underhanded even by Kim standards. This time, the danger is too close to home. And if Will and Kim can't find common ground against unseen enemies, they risk losing everything.

A 1920s m/m romance trilogy in the spirit of Golden Age pulp fiction.]]> 288 K.J. Charles 1912688174 Kat 4 queer 4.26 2020 The Sugared Game (The Will Darling Adventures, #2)

The Sugared Game (The Will Darling Adventures, #2)

author: K.J. Charles
name: Kat
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: queer
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Slippery Creatures (The Will Darling Adventures, #1)]]> 52237989
Will has no idea what that information is, and nobody to turn to, until Kim Secretan—charming, cultured, oddly attractive—steps in to offer help. As Kim and Will try to find answers and outrun trouble, mutual desire grows along with the danger.

And then Will discovers the truth about Kim. His identity, his past, his real intentions. Enraged and betrayed, Will never wants to see him again.

But Will possesses knowledge that could cost thousands of lives. Enemies are closing in on him from all sides—and Kim is the only man who can help.

A 1920s m/m romance trilogy in the spirit of Golden Age pulp fiction.]]> 265 K.J. Charles 1912688158 Kat 4 queer 4.00 2020 Slippery Creatures (The Will Darling Adventures, #1)

Slippery Creatures (The Will Darling Adventures, #1)

author: K.J. Charles
name: Kat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: queer
review:

]]> Playworld 211025439
“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.��

Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse.

Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.

Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.]]> 528 Adam Ross 0385351291 Kat 4 bildung 3.78 2025 Playworld

author: Adam Ross
name: Kat
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: bildung
review:

]]> The Briefcase 12474332
As Tsukiko and Sensei grow to know and love one another, time’s passing comes across through the seasons and the food and beverages they consume together. From warm sake to chilled beer, from the buds on the trees to the blooming of the cherry blossoms, the reader is enveloped by a keen sense of pathos and both characters�� keen loneliness.]]> 176 Hiromi Kawakami 1582435995 Kat 0 to-read 3.80 2001 The Briefcase

author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Kat
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Life (All Souls, #3)]]> 16054217 The #1 New York Times bestselling series finale and sequel to A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night

Bringing the magic and suspense of the All Souls Trilogy to a deeply satisfying conclusion, this highly anticipated finale went straight to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. In The Book of Life, Diana and Matthew time-travel back from Elizabethan London to make a dramatic return to the present—facing new crises and old enemies. At Matthew’s ancestral home, Sept-Tours, they reunite with the beloved cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches—with one significant exception. But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when it is, the search for Ashmole 782 and its missing pages takes on even more urgency.]]> 561 Deborah Harkness 0670025593 Kat 4 4.15 2014 The Book of Life (All Souls, #3)

author: Deborah Harkness
name: Kat
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/23
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Most Intriguing Lady (Buccleuch Family, #2)]]> 59573749 368 Sarah Ferguson 0063216825 Kat 0 3.51 2023

A Most Intriguing Lady (Buccleuch Family, #2)

author: Sarah Ferguson
name: Kat
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Starling House 65213595 A grim and gothic new tale from author Alix E. Harrow about a small town haunted by secrets that can't stay buried and the sinister house that sits at the crossroads of it all.

Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland--and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the uncanny house―and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling―go to rot.

Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. Too quickly, though, Starling House starts to feel dangerously like something she’s never had: a home.

As sinister forces converge on Starling House, Opal and Arthur are going to have to make a dire choice to dig up the buried secrets of the past and confront their own fears, or let Eden be taken over by literal nightmares.

If Opal wants a home, she’ll have to fight for it.]]> 320 Alix E. Harrow 1250799058 Kat 3 3.77 2023 Starling House

author: Alix E. Harrow
name: Kat
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves:
review:

]]> Every Arc Bends Its Radian 207293958 From PEN Award–winning author Sergio de la Pava comes an existential detective novel about a private investigator who flees New York City for Colombia after a personal tragedy and finds himself entangled in a young woman’s strange disappearance—which may be connected to one of the world’s most ruthless criminal organizations. Riv—poet, philosopher, private eye—arrives in Cali, Colombia, hoping to find nothing. Running away from his family and an unspeakable event surrounding his ex-wife Jane, Riv accidentally connects with his cousin Mauro and great Aunt Corelletta who asks him to find her daughter Angelica Alfa. No sooner is Riv on the trail when it becomes clear that not only are the cops not looking for Angelica, but they are actively preventing him from finding her. This could be a good thing because the police are clearly in the pocket of one Exeter Mondragon, a name best never uttered in public if one wants to stay alive. But Riv is not one to leave things incomplete. When his investigation leads him straight into the heart of Mondragon’s criminal empire, he is forced not only to face unimaginable horrors, but also to plunge into the deepest and most perplexing conundrums of the human condition. Lightning fast on the page and steeped in the cultural history of Columbia, Every Arc Bends Its Radian is a novel only Sergio de la Pava could write. As incredibly funny as it is ridiculously smart, it poses large philosophical questions while keeping you laughing. A novel idea about the biggest idea of them all—what in God’s name are we even put on earth for, this book is a singular exploration of the human mind.]]> 265 Sergio de la Pava 1668056704 Kat 3 3.15 Every Arc Bends Its Radian

author: Sergio de la Pava
name: Kat
average rating: 3.15
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves:
review:

]]> The Hypocrite 202102022 From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation’s Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father’s fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter’s voice.

August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might hope, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. The play has been met with rave reviews but Sophia’s father has studiously avoided reading any of them. But when the house lights dim, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of men of his generation.

Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts through time and perspective, illuminating an argument between a father and his daughter that, with impeccable nuance, examines the fraught inheritances each generation is left to contend with, and the struggle to nurture empathy in a world changing at lightning-speed.]]> 240 Jo Hamya 0593701038 Kat 4 3.42 2024 The Hypocrite

author: Jo Hamya
name: Kat
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Rental House 208584952 From the award-winning author of Chemistry, a sharp-witted, insightful novel about a marriage as seen through the lens of two family vacations.

Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,�� says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign�� wife.

Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation. At a Cape Cod beach house, and later at a luxury Catskills bungalow, Keru, Nate, and their giant sheepdog navigate visits from in-laws and unexpected guests, all while wondering if they have what it takes to answer the big questions: How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what can you do to shepherd everyone back together?]]> 224 Weike Wang 0593545540 Kat 2 3.30 2024 Rental House

author: Weike Wang
name: Kat
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Lifeform 208209822
What happened was this: Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and in that period there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on the xylophone, but also she was rabid with fear of losing this love, because of past injury. And then what happened was that she became a wild-pregnant-mammal-thing and then she exploded herself by having a whole baby blast through her vagina during a global plague and then she was expected to carry on like everything was normal—but was this normal, and had she or anything ever been normal? Herein lies an account of this journey, told in five phases—Single, True Love, Pregnancy, Baby, and Ongoing—through luminous, laugh-out-loud funny, unclassifiable essays that take the form of letters to a doctor, dreams of a stork, fantasy therapy sessions, gossip between racoons, excerpts from an imaginary olden timey play, obituaries, theories about post-partum hair loss, graduation speeches, and more. No one writes like Jenny Slate.]]> 240 Jenny Slate 0316263931 Kat 3 mem, ess 3.71 2024 Lifeform

author: Jenny Slate
name: Kat
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: mem, ess
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans]]> 39103327 232 David L. Eng 1478001607 Kat 0 race-rel, aa, partial 4.20 2019

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

author: David L. Eng
name: Kat
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: race-rel, aa, partial
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis]]> 22318476 Award-winning journalist Sam Anderson’s long-awaited debut is a brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City--a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny.

Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous "Land Run" in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team's 2012-13 season, when the Thunder's brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti's all-in gamble on "the Process"—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city's history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed.

Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.]]> 428 Sam Anderson 0804137315 Kat 0 partial 4.37 2018 Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

author: Sam Anderson
name: Kat
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: partial
review:

]]> A Reason to See You Again 199531902
The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. Triggered by the death of their patriarch, Rudy, the glue that held them all together, everyone’s lives soon take a dramatic turn.

Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of twenty-one to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her.

But they each learn in different ways that running from the past can’t save you—and then must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need to move forward.

Beginning in the 1970s and spanning forty years, A Reason to See You Again takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma, the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another, and the many unexpected forms that love can take.]]> 240 Jami Attenberg 0063039842 Kat 4 3.20 2024 A Reason to See You Again

author: Jami Attenberg
name: Kat
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:
extremely spare but quite beautiful
]]> The Pairing 199440249 definitely not.

Theo and Kit have been a lot of things: childhood best friends, crushes, in love, and now estranged exes. After a brutal breakup on the transatlantic flight to their dream European food and wine tour, they exited each other's lives once and for all.

Time apart has done them good. Theo has found confidence as a hustling bartender by night and aspiring sommelier by day, with a long roster of casual lovers. Kit, who never returned to America, graduated as the reigning sex god of his pastry school class and now bakes at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. Sure, nothing really compares to what they had, and life stretches out long and lonely ahead of them, but—yeah. It's in the past.

All that remains is the unused voucher for the European tour that never happened, good for 48 months after its original date and about to expire. Four years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip. Solo. Separately.

It's not until they board the tour bus that they discover they've both accidentally had the exact same idea, and now they're trapped with each other for three weeks of stunning views, luscious flavors, and the most romantic cities of France, Spain, and Italy. It's fine. There's nothing left between them. So much nothing that, when Theo suggests a friendly wager to see who can sleep with their hot Italian tour guide first, Kit is totally game. And why stop there? Why not a full-on European hookup competition?

But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can't have.]]> 432 Casey McQuiston 1250862744 Kat 3 queer queer angst / bi chaos 3.70 2024 The Pairing

author: Casey McQuiston
name: Kat
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: queer
review:
queer angst / bi chaos
]]> Our Evenings 209891406 From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

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

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

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

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

This is “one of our most gifted writers�� (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.]]> 496 Alan Hollinghurst 0593243064 Kat 5 queer, race-rel really excellent! 3.92 2024 Our Evenings

author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Kat
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: queer, race-rel
review:
really excellent!
]]> The Bright Sword 201750794
They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Tables, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.

But Arthur’s death has revealed Britain’s fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords are laying siege to Camelot, and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they’ll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain’s dark past.]]> 673 Lev Grossman 0735224048 Kat 0 unfinished
felt like i needed arthurian pre-reqs to read this book]]> 3.93 2024 The Bright Sword

author: Lev Grossman
name: Kat
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: unfinished
review:
DNF

felt like i needed arthurian pre-reqs to read this book
]]> Beautyland 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Kat 3 sf 4.08 2024 Beautyland

author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Kat
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: sf
review:

]]> I Hope This Finds You Well 200987323 In this wildly funny and heartwarming office comedy, an admin worker accidentally gains access to her colleagues�� private emails and DMs and decides to use this intel to save her job—a laugh-till-you-cry debut novel you’ll be eager to share with your entire list of contacts, perfect for fans of Anxious People and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

As far as Jolene is concerned, her interactions with her colleagues should start and end with her official duties as an admin for Supershops, Inc. Unfortunately, her irritating, incompetent coworkers don’t seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her secret to survival? She vents her grievances in petty email postscripts, then changes the text colour to white so no one can see. That is, until one of her secret messages is exposed. Her punishment: sensitivity training (led by the suspiciously friendly HR guy, Cliff) and rigorous email restrictions.

When an IT mix-up grants her access to her entire department’s private emails and DMs, Jolene knows she should report it, but who could resist reading what their coworkers are really saying? And when she discovers layoffs are coming, she realizes this might just be the key to saving her job. The plan is simple: gain her boss’s favour, convince HR she’s Supershops material and beat out the competition.

But as Jolene is drawn further into her coworker’s private worlds and secrets, her carefully constructed walls begin to crumble—especially around Cliff, who she definitely cannot have feelings for. Soon she will need to decide if she’s ready to leave the comfort of her cubicle, even if it means coming clean to her colleagues.

Crackling with laugh-out-loud dialogue and relatable observations, I Hope This Finds You Well is a fresh and surprisingly tender comedy about loneliness and love beyond our computer screens. This sparkling debut novel will open your heart to the everyday eccentricities of work culture and the undeniable human connection that comes with it.]]> 338 Natalie Sue 0063320363 Kat 4 3.74 2024 I Hope This Finds You Well

author: Natalie Sue
name: Kat
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Rules for Ghosting 202468408 Rule #1: They can't speak.
Rule #2: They can't move.
Rule #3: They can't hurt you.

Ezra Friedman sees ghosts, which made growing up in a funeral home a bit complicated. It might have been easier if his grandfather’s ghost didn’t give him such scathing looks of disapproval as he went through a second, HRT-induced puberty, or if he didn't have the pressure of all those relatives—living and dead—judging every choice he makes. It’s no wonder that Ezra runs as far away from the family business as humanly possible.

But when the floor of his dream job drops out from under him and his mother uses the family Passover seder to tell everyone that she’s running away with the rabbi’s wife, Ezra finds himself back in the thick of it. With his parents�� marriage imploding and the Friedman Family Memorial Chapel on the brink of financial ruin, Ezra agrees to step into his mother's shoes and help out . . . which means long days surrounded by ghosts that no one else can see.

And then there's his unfortunate crush on Jonathan, the handsome funeral home volunteer who just happens to live downstairs from Ezra's new apartment . . . and the appearance of the ghost of Jonathan's gone-too-soon husband, Ben, who is breaking every spectral rule Ezra knows.

Because Ben can speak. He can move. And as Ezra tries to keep his family together and his heart from getting broken, he quickly realizes that there's more than one way to be haunted—and more than one way to become a ghost.]]> 400 Shelly Jay Shore 0593723945 Kat 4 queer 3.88 2024 Rules for Ghosting

author: Shelly Jay Shore
name: Kat
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/18
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: queer
review:

]]> Scattered All Over the Earth 58470813
As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm.]]> 256 Yōko Tawada 0811229289 Kat 2 in-translation 3.28 2018 Scattered All Over the Earth

author: Yōko Tawada
name: Kat
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/01
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: in-translation
review:

]]> Conversations with Friends 32766661 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth."]]> 310 Sally Rooney 0451499050 Kat 4 summer-2017, bildung 3.68 2017

author: Sally Rooney
name: Kat
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: summer-2017, bildung
review:
Sharp and deeply impressive considering Rooney's youth
]]> <![CDATA[Ella Enchanted (Ella Enchanted, #1)]]> 24337
Gail Carson Levine's examination of traditional female roles in fairy tales takes some satisfying twists and deviations from the original. Ella is bound by obedience against her will, and takes matters in her own hands with ambition and verve. Her relationship with the prince is balanced and based on humor and mutual respect; in fact, it is she who ultimately rescues him. Ella Enchanted has won many well-deserved awards, including a Newbery Honor.]]> 240 Gail Carson Levine 0590920685 Kat 4 fant 4.01 1997 Ella Enchanted (Ella Enchanted, #1)

author: Gail Carson Levine
name: Kat
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/25
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: fant
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)]]> 56534999 Welcome to the thrilling and unnervingly prescient world of the slow horses. This team of MI5 agents is united by one common bond: They've screwed up royally and will do anything to redeem themselves.

This special tenth-anniversary deluxe edition of a modern classic includes a foreword by the author, discussion questions for book clubs, and an exclusive short story featuring the slow horses.

London, England: Slough House is where washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what’s left of their failed careers. The “slow horses,�� as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated there. Maybe they botched an Op so badly they can’t be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they have in common, though, is they want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there─even if it means having to collaborate with one another.

When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, the slow horses see an opportunity to redeem themselves. But is the victim really who he appears to be?]]> 334 Mick Herron 1641292970 Kat 4 4.05 2010 Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)

author: Mick Herron
name: Kat
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Godwin 198563648
Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the UK, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Messi.

Narrated in turn by Mark and his work colleague Lakesha Williams, the novel is both a tale of family and migration and an international adventure story that implicates the brothers in the beauty and ugliness of soccer, the perils and promises of international business, and the dark history of transatlantic money-making.

As only he can do, Joseph O'Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.]]> 288 Joseph O'Neill 0593701321 Kat 3 race-rel 3.54 2024 Godwin

author: Joseph O'Neill
name: Kat
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: race-rel
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV]]> 203020280 Cue The Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.

Nussbaum traces four paths of reality innovation—game shows, prank shows, soap operas, and clip shows—that united in the Survivor format, sparking a tumultuous Hollywood gold-rush. Along the way, we meet tricksters and innovators—from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; Bachelor mastermind Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray, the visionary behind The Real World—along with dozens of crew members and ordinary people whose lives became fodder for the reality revolution. We learn about the tools of the trade—like Candid Camera’s brilliant “reveal�� and the notorious Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and the moral outrage that reality shows provoked. But Cue The Sun! also celebrates what made the genre so powerful: a jolt of authentic emotion.

Through broad-ranging reporting, Nussbaum examines seven tumultuous decades, exploring the celebreality boom, reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, and the dark truth behind The Apprentice. A shrewd observer who cares about television, she is the ideal voice for the first substantive cultural history of the genre that has, for better or worse, made America what it is today.]]> 464 Emily Nussbaum 0525508996 Kat 0 hist, pop 3.94 2024 Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV

Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV

author: Emily Nussbaum
name: Kat
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: hist, pop
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo]]> 32620332
Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the ��80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story nears its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.]]> 389 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1501139231 Kat 4 queer 4.39 2017 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Kat
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/28
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: queer
review:

]]> The Dinner List 36399096 We’ve been waiting for an hour. That’s what Audrey says. She states it with a little bit of an edge, her words just bordering on cursive. That’s the thing I think first. Not: Audrey Hepburn is at my birthday dinner, but Audrey Hepburn is annoyed.

At one point or another, we’ve all been asked to name five people, living or dead, with whom we’d like to have dinner. Why do we choose the people we do? And what if that dinner was to actually happen? These are the questions Rebecca Serle contends within her utterly captivating novel, The Dinner List, a story imbued with the same delightful magical realism as One Day, and the life-changing romance of Me Before You.

When Sabrina arrives at her thirtieth birthday dinner she finds at the table not just her best friend, but also three significant people from her past, and well, Audrey Hepburn. As the appetizers are served, wine poured, and dinner table conversation begins, it becomes clear that there’s a reason these six people have been gathered together.

Delicious but never indulgent, sweet with just the right amount of bitter, The Dinner List is a romance for our times. Bon appetit.]]> 288 Rebecca Serle Kat 0 3.53 2018

author: Rebecca Serle
name: Kat
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir]]> 203931803 A powerful memoir that reckons with mental health as well as the insidious ways men impact the lives of women.

In early 2021, popular artist Anna Marie Tendler checked herself into a psychiatric hospital following a year of crippling anxiety, depression and self-harm. Over two weeks, she underwent myriad psychological tests, participated in numerous therapy sessions, connected with fellow patients and experienced profound breakthroughs, such as when a doctor noted, “There is a you inside that feels invisible to those looking at you from the outside.��

In Men Have Called Her Crazy, Tendler recounts her hospital experience as well as pivotal moments in her life that preceded and followed. As the title suggests, many of these moments are impacted by men: unrequited love in high school; the twenty-eight-year-old she lost her virginity to when she was sixteen; the frustrations and absurdities of dating in her mid-thirties; and her decision to freeze her eggs as all her friends were starting families.

This stunning literary self-portrait examines the unreasonable expectations and pressures women face in the 21st century. Yet overwhelming and despairing as that can feel, Tendler ultimately offers a message hope. Early in her stay in the hospital, she says, “My wish for myself is that one day I’ll reach a place where I can face hardship without trying to destroy myself.�� By the end of the book, she fulfills that wish.]]> 304 Anna Marie Tendler 1668032341 Kat 0 mem 3.42 2024 Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

author: Anna Marie Tendler
name: Kat
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: mem
review:

]]> Margo's Got Money Troubles 199534613
“[An] enormously entertaining and lovable book.�� —Nick Hornby, New York Times Book Review

A bold, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartwarming story about one young woman’s attempt to navigate adulthood, new motherhood, and her meager bank account in our increasingly online world—from the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of The Knockout Queen.

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.

Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?

Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine who’s struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.

“A wholly original novel. . . . Thorpe is both poetic and profound in the way she brings her remarkable story to an end.�� —The Associated Press]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Kat 0 3.86 2024 Margo's Got Money Troubles

author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Kat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> There's Going to Be Trouble 186872535 A woman is pulled into a love affair with a radical activist, unknowingly echoing her family's dangerous past and risking the foundations of her future in this electrifying novel.

The course of your life can change with one split-second decision.

Minnow has always tried to lead the life her single father modeled—private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when an instinctive decision to help a student makes her the extremely public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. As tensions rise, vandalism and death threats follow, and an overwhelmed Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris. There, Minnow falls into an exhilarating and all-consuming relationship with Charles, a young Frenchman whose activism has placed him at odds with his powerful family. As Minnow is pulled into the daring protest Charles and his friends are planning, she unknowingly draws close to repeating a secret tragedy from her family's past. For her father wasn’t always the restrained, conservative man he appears today. There are things he has taken great pains to bury from his family and from the world.

In 1968, Keen is avoiding the Vietnam draft by pursuing a PhD at Harvard. He lives his life in the basement chemistry lab, studiously avoiding the news. But when he unexpectedly falls in love with Olya, a fiery community organizer, he is consumed by her world and loses sight of his own. Learning that his deferment has ended and he’s been drafted, Keen agrees to participate in the latest action that Olya is organizing—one with more dangerous and far-reaching consequences than he could have imagined.

Minnow’s and Keen's intertwining stories take us through the turmoil of the late sixties student movements and into the chaos of the modern world. Exploding with suspense, heart, and intelligence, There's Going to Be Trouble is a story about revolution, legacy, passionate love, and how we live with the consequences of our darkest secrets.]]> 320 Jen Silverman 0593448359 Kat 4 3.82 2024

author: Jen Silverman
name: Kat
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> You Dreamed of Empires 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan �� today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma �� who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods �� the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 Álvaro Enrigue 059354479X Kat 0 in-translation 3.75 2022 You Dreamed of Empires

author: Álvaro Enrigue
name: Kat
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: in-translation
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Broken Queen (The Nine Realms, #3)]]> 45046564 Sarah Kozloff, author of Queen of Raiders, continues her breathtaking and cinematic epic fantasy series The Nine Realms with book three, A Broken Queen, and all four books will be published within a month of each other, so you can binge your favorite new fantasy series.

Time can heal all wounds, but not all wounds are visible.

Barely surviving her ordeal in Oromondo and scarred by its Fire Spirit, Cerulia is taken to a recovery house in Wyeland to heal from the trauma. In a ward with others who are all bound to serve each other, she discovers that not all scars are visible, and dying can be done with grace and acceptance.

While she would like to stay in this place of healing, will she ever be able to the peace she has found to re-take the throne?

The Nine Realms Series
#1 A Queen in Hiding
#2 The Queen of Raiders
#3 A Broken Queen]]> 419 Sarah Kozloff 125016866X Kat 0 fant 4.16 2020 A Broken Queen (The Nine Realms, #3)

author: Sarah Kozloff
name: Kat
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: fant
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Cerulean Queen (The Nine Realms, #4)]]> 45046550 Sarah Kozloff's breathtaking and cinematic epic fantasy series The Nine Realms, which began with A Queen in Hiding, comes to a thrilling conclusion in The Cerulean Queen.

The true queen of Weirandale has returned.

Cerulia has done the impossible and regained the throne. However, she's inherited a council of traitors, a realm in chaos, and a war with Oromondo.

Now a master of her Gift, to return order to her kingdom she will use all she has learned—humility, leadership, compassion, selflessness, and the necessity of ruthlessness.

The Nine Realms Series
#1 A Queen in Hiding
#2 The Queen of Raiders
#3 A Broken Queen
#4 The Cerulean Queen]]> 495 Sarah Kozloff 1250168961 Kat 0 fant 4.20 2020 The Cerulean Queen (The Nine Realms, #4)

The Cerulean Queen (The Nine Realms, #4)

author: Sarah Kozloff
name: Kat
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: fant
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Queen in Hiding (The Nine Realms, #1)]]> 45046606
But to do it she must win the favor of the spirits who play in mortal affairs, assemble an unlikely group of rebels, and wrest the throne from a corrupt aristocracy whose rot has spread throughout her kingdom.]]> 477 Sarah Kozloff 1250168546 Kat 0 fant 3.77 2020 A Queen in Hiding (The Nine Realms, #1)

author: Sarah Kozloff
name: Kat
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: fant
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Queen of Raiders (The Nine Realms, #2)]]> 45046587 Sarah Kozloff, author of A Queen in Hiding, continues the breathtaking and cinematic epic fantasy series The Nine Realms with book two, The Queen of Raiders, and all four books will be published within a month of each other, so you can binge your favorite new fantasy series.

The soliders of Oromondo have invaded the Free States, leaving a wake of misery and death. Thalen, a young scholar, survives and gathers a small cadre of guerilla fighters for a one-way mission into the heart of an enemy land.

Unconsciously guided by the elemental Spirits of Ennea Mon, Cerulia is drawn to the Land of the Fire Mountains to join Thelan's Raiders, where she will learn the price of war.]]> 487 Sarah Kozloff 1250168562 Kat 0 fant 4.19 2020 The Queen of Raiders (The Nine Realms, #2)

The Queen of Raiders (The Nine Realms, #2)

author: Sarah Kozloff
name: Kat
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: fant
review:

]]> <![CDATA[America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States]]> 44287174
The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans , Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported.

Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America. Forcing us to confront this history, Lee explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America. Now updated with an afterword reflecting on how the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged xenophobia, America for Americans is an urgent spur to action for any concerned citizen.]]> 432 Erika Lee 1541672607 Kat 3 race-rel 4.33 2019 America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States

America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States

author: Erika Lee
name: Kat
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: race-rel
review:

]]> The Island Dwellers: Stories 35732271 For readers of Miranda July, Rebecca Lee, and Mary Gaitskill, a debut short-story collection that is a mesmerizing blend of wit, transgression, and heart.

A passive-aggressive couple in the midst of a divorce compete over whose new fling is more exotic. A Russian migrant in Tokyo agonizes over the money her lover accepts from a yakuza. A dead body on a drug dealer's floor leads to the strangest first date ever.

In this razor-sharp debut collection, Jen Silverman delivers eleven interconnected stories that take place in expat bars, artist colonies, train platforms, and matchbox apartments in the United States and Japan. Unforgettable characters crisscross through these transient spaces, loving, hurting, and leaving each other as they experience the loneliness and dangerous freedom that comes with being an outsider. In "Maria of the Grapes," a pair of damaged runaways get lost in the seductive underworld beneath Tokyo's clean streets; in "Pretoria," a South African expat longs for the chaos of her homeland as she contemplates a marriage proposal; in "Girl Canadian Shipwreck," a young woman in Brooklyn seeks permission to flee from her boyfriend and his terrible performance art; in "Maureen," an aspiring writer realizes that her beautiful, neurotic boss is lonelier than she lets on.

The Island Dwellers ranges near and far in its exploration of solitude and reinvention, identity and sexuality, family and home. Jen Silverman is the rare talent who can evoke the landscape of a whole life in a single subtle phrase--vital, human truths that you may find yourself using as a map to your own heart.]]> 259 Jen Silverman 0399591494 Kat 4 short-stories 3.93 2018 The Island Dwellers: Stories

author: Jen Silverman
name: Kat
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: short-stories
review:

]]> Alphabetical Diaries 127282792
Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. Passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are her alphabetical diaries.]]> 224 Sheila Heti 0374610789 Kat 4 3.95 2024

author: Sheila Heti
name: Kat
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:

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

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Kat 3 3.86 2024 Intermezzo

author: Sally Rooney
name: Kat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 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 Kat 5 3.52 2024 All Fours

author: Miranda July
name: Kat
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves:
review:

]]> The Thorn Birds 22169070 The Thorn Birds Colleen McCullough Kat 0 to-read 4.21 1977

author: Colleen McCullough
name: Kat
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Cassandra at the Wedding 902010 256 Dorothy Baker 1590171128 Kat 0 to-read 3.96 1962

author: Dorothy Baker
name: Kat
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Practice of Light 23312866 369 Sean Cubitt 1322151393 Kat 0 to-read, atheory 5.00 2014

author: Sean Cubitt
name: Kat
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read, atheory
review:

]]> Funny You Should Ask 58065414 Then. Twentysomething writer Chani Horowitz is stuck. While her former MFA classmates are nabbing book deals, she's in the trenches writing puff pieces. Then she's hired to write a profile of movie star Gabe Parker. The Gabe Parker--her forever celebrity crush, the object of her fantasies, the background photo on her phone--who's also just been cast as the new James Bond. It's terrifying and thrilling all at once... yet if she can keep her cool and nail the piece, it could be a huge win. Gabe will get good press, and her career will skyrocket. But what comes next proves to be life-changing in ways Chani never saw coming, as the interview turns into a whirlwind weekend that has the tabloids buzzing.

Now. Ten years later, after a brutal divorce and a heavy dose of therapy, Chani is back in Los Angeles, laser-focused on one thing: her work. But she's still spent the better part of the last decade getting asked about her deeply personal Gabe Parker profile at every turn. No matter what new essay collection or viral editorial she's promoting, it always comes back to Gabe. So when his PR team requests that they reunite for a second interview, she wants to say no. She wants to pretend that she's forgotten about the time they spent together, years ago. But the truth is that those seventy-two hours are still crystal clear, etched in her memory. And so... he says yes.

Chani knows that facing Gabe again also means facing feelings she's tried so hard to push away. Alternating between their first meeting and their reunion a decade later, this deliciously irresistible novel will have you hanging on until the last word.

A restless young journalist with big dreams interviews a Hollywood heartthrob--and, ten years later, it's clear that their time together meant more than meets the eye in this sexy, engrossing adult debut novel. ]]> 352 Elissa Sussman 0593357329 Kat 1
On the other, what a fascinating cultural artifact]]> 3.55 2022 Funny You Should Ask

author: Elissa Sussman
name: Kat
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:
On one hand�� ????????

On the other, what a fascinating cultural artifact
]]> <![CDATA[Ten Thousand Stitches (Regency Faerie Tales, #2)]]> 60420293 Regency housemaid Euphemia Reeves has acquired a faerie godfather. Unfortunately, he has no idea what he's doing.

Effie has most inconveniently fallen in love with the dashing Mr Benedict Ashbrooke. There's only one problem; Effie is a housemaid, and a housemaid cannot marry a gentleman. It seems that Effie is out of luck until she stumbles into the faerie realm of Lord Blackthorn, who is only too eager to help Effie win Mr Ashbrooke's heart. All he asks in return is that Effie sew ten thousand stitches onto his favourite jacket.

Effie has heard rumours about what happens to those who accept help from faeries, but life as a maid at Hartfield is so awful that she is willing to risk even her immortal soul for a chance at something better. Now, she has one hundred days - and ten thousand stitches - to make Mr Ashbrooke fall in love and propose. . . if Lord Blackthorn doesn't wreck things by accident, that is. For Effie's greatest obstacle might well prove to be Lord Blackthorn's overwhelmingly good intentions.

From the author of HALF A SOUL comes a whimsical fantasy romance with a Cinderella twist. Pick up TEN THOUSAND STITCHES, and dive into another enchanting faerie tale set in Olivia Atwater's charming, magical version of Regency England!]]> 288 Olivia Atwater 031646290X Kat 4 3.91 2020 Ten Thousand Stitches (Regency Faerie Tales, #2)

Ten Thousand Stitches (Regency Faerie Tales, #2)

author: Olivia Atwater
name: Kat
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Longshadow (Regency Faerie Tales, #3)]]> 60420294 Proper Regency ladies are not supposed to become magicians �� but Miss Abigail Wilder is far from proper.

The marriageable young ladies of London are dying mysteriously, and Abigail Wilder intends to discover why. Abigail's father, the Lord Sorcier of England, believes that a dark lord of faerie is involved �� but while Abigail is willing to match her magic against Lord Longshadow, neither her father nor high society believe that she is capable of doing so.

Thankfully, Abigail is not the only one investigating the terrible events in London. Mercy, a street rat and self-taught magician, insists on joining Abigail to unravel the mystery. But while Mercy's own magic is strange and foreboding, she may well post an even greater danger to Abigail's heart.

From the author of HALF A SOUL comes a queer faerie tale romance full of love and defiant hope. Pick up LONG SHADOW, and return once more to Olivia Atwater's charming, magical version of Regency England.]]> 263 Olivia Atwater 0316463124 Kat 0 3.82 2021 Longshadow (Regency Faerie Tales, #3)

author: Olivia Atwater
name: Kat
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Witchwood Knot (Victorian Faerie Tales, #1)]]> 199271100 Olivia Atwater returns to the world of Half a Soul. Dive into The Witchwood Knot, and enjoy a dark faerie tale set in a magical version of Victorian England.

The faeries of Witchwood Manor have stolen its young lord. His governess intends to steal him back.

Victorian governess Winifred Hall knows a con when she sees one. When her bratty young charge transforms overnight into a perfectly behaved block of wood, she soon realises that the real boy has been abducted by the Fair Folk. Unfortunately, the lord of Witchwood Manor is the only man in England who doesn’t believe in faeries—which leaves Winnie in the unenviable position of rescuing the young lord-to-be all by herself.

Witchwood Manor is bigger than its inhabitants realise, however, and full of otherworldly dangers. As Winnie delves deeper into the other side of the house, she enlists the aid of its dark and dubious faerie butler, Mr Quincy, who hides several awful secrets behind his charming smile. Winnie hopes to make her way to the centre of the Witchwood Knot through wit and cleverness�� but when all of her usual tricks fail, who will she dare to trust?]]> 330 Olivia Atwater 1778271391 Kat 0 4.13 2023 The Witchwood Knot (Victorian Faerie Tales, #1)

The Witchwood Knot (Victorian Faerie Tales, #1)

author: Olivia Atwater
name: Kat
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/01
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Half a Soul (Regency Faerie Tales, #1)]]> 60717747 It's difficult to find a husband in Regency England when you're a young lady with only half a soul.

Ever since she was cursed by a faerie, Theodora Ettings has had no sense of fear or embarrassment - a condition which makes her prone to accidental scandal. Dora hopes to be a quiet, sensible wallflower during the London Season - but when the strange, handsome and utterly uncouth Lord Sorcier discovers her condition, she is instead drawn into dangerous and peculiar faerie affairs.

If Dora's reputation can survive both her curse and her sudden connection with the least-liked man in all of high society, then she may yet reclaim her normal place in the world. . . but the longer Dora spends with Elias Wilder, the more she begins to suspect that one may indeed fall in love, even with only half a soul.

Bridgerton meets Howl's Moving Castle in this enchanting historical fantasy, where the only thing more meddlesome than faeries is a marriage-minded mother.

Pick up HALF A SOUL, and be stolen away into Olivia Atwater's charming, magical version of Regency England!]]> 304 Olivia Atwater Kat 3 4.04 2020 Half a Soul (Regency Faerie Tales, #1)

author: Olivia Atwater
name: Kat
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/09
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> You Deserve Each Other 50027029 When your nemesis also happens to be your fiancé, happily ever after becomes a lot more complicated in this wickedly funny, lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy debut.

Naomi Westfield has the perfect fiancé: Nicholas Rose holds doors open for her, remembers her restaurant orders, and comes from the kind of upstanding society family any bride would love to be a part of. They never fight. They're preparing for their lavish wedding that's three months away. And she is miserably and utterly sick of him.

Naomi wants out, but there's a catch: whoever ends the engagement will have to foot the nonrefundable wedding bill. When Naomi discovers that Nicholas, too, has been feigning contentment, the two of them go head-to-head in a battle of pranks, sabotage, and all-out emotional warfare.

But with the countdown looming to the wedding that may or may not come to pass, Naomi finds her resolve slipping. Because now that they have nothing to lose, they're finally being themselves--and having fun with the last person they expect: each other.]]> 368 Sarah Hogle Kat 4 3.90 2020 You Deserve Each Other

author: Sarah Hogle
name: Kat
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/26
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> You, with a View 59737396 Two weeks on the road... stuck in a car with your high-school enemy.

Noelle Shepard is grieving the loss of her beloved grandmother when she discovers decades-old photos and letters that hint to a forbidden love in her gram's past. Needing to know the full story, she creates a TikTok video appealing for information - and it goes viral.

Through her video, she manages to track down her grandmother's secret love, Paul, who offers to take her on the honeymoon road-trip he and Gram planned but never got to go on.

Noelle jumps at the chance to make this one last connection with her grandmother. There's just one problem - Paul's grandson is Noelle's frustratingly handsome high-school rival Theo.

And Theo has to come, too.

It's only two weeks. Surely Noelle can survive that long? But with one car between them - and often only one bed - it doesn't take long for things to heat up...
]]> 352 Jessica Joyce 059354840X Kat 4 4.05 2023 You, with a View

author: Jessica Joyce
name: Kat
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Persuasion 2156 249 Jane Austen 0192802631 Kat 5 19th-brit 4.15 1817

author: Jane Austen
name: Kat
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1817
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: 19th-brit
review:

]]> Remarkably Bright Creatures 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 Kat 3 4.35 2022 Remarkably Bright Creatures

author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Kat
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> North Woods 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Kat 3 4.11 2023 North Woods

author: Daniel Mason
name: Kat
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Restless Truth (The Last Binding, #2)]]> 59807966 Magic! Murder! Shipboard romance!

Maud Blyth has always longed for adventure. She expected plenty of it when she volunteered to serve as an old lady’s companion on an ocean liner, in order to help her beloved older brother unravel a magical conspiracy that began generations ago.

What she didn’t expect was for the old lady in question to turn up dead on the first day of the voyage. Now she has to deal with a dead body, a disrespectful parrot, and the lovely, dangerously outrageous Violet Debenham, who’s also returning home to England. Violet is everything that Maud has been trained to distrust yet can’t help but desire: a magician, an actress, and a magnet for scandal.

Surrounded by the open sea and a ship full of suspects, Maud and Violet must first drop the masks that they’ve both learned to wear before they can unmask a murderer and somehow get their hands on a magical object worth killing for—without ending up dead in the water themselves.]]> 388 Freya Marske 1250788919 Kat 4 queer, fant 3.86 2022 A Restless Truth (The Last Binding, #2)

author: Freya Marske
name: Kat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/02
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: queer, fant
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Power Unbound (The Last Binding, #3)]]> 65211689
Secrets! Magic! Enemies to. . .something more?

Jack Alston, Lord Hawthorn, would love a nice, safe, comfortable life. After the death of his twin sister, he thought he was done with magic for good. But with the threat of a dangerous ritual hanging over every magician in Britain, he’s drawn reluctantly back into that world.

Now Jack is living in a bizarre puzzle-box of a magical London townhouse, helping an unlikely group of friends track down the final piece of the Last Contract before their enemies can do the same. And to make matters worse, they need the help of writer and thief Alan Ross.

Cagey and argumentative, Alan is only in this for the money. The aristocratic Lord Hawthorn, with all his unearned power, is everything that Alan hates. And unfortunately, Alan happens to be everything that Jack wants in one gorgeous, infuriating package.

When a plot to seize unimaginable power comes to a head at Cheetham Hall―Jack’s ancestral family estate, a land so old and bound in oaths that it’s grown a personality as prickly as its owner―Jack, Alan and their allies will become entangled in a night of champagne, secrets, and bloody sacrifice . . . and the foundations of magic in Britain will be torn up by the roots before the end.]]> 422 Freya Marske 1250788951 Kat 4 fant, queer 4.26 2023 A Power Unbound (The Last Binding, #3)

author: Freya Marske
name: Kat
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/03
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: fant, queer
review:

]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780063251922.

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

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

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver Kat 4 4.46 2022

author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Kat
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/05
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Business or Pleasure 62710608
Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. Her next project is ghostwriting a memoir for Finn Walsh, a C-list actor best known for playing a lovable nerd on a cult classic werewolf show who now makes a living appearing at fan conventions across the country. But Chandler knows him better from their one-night stand of hilarious mishaps.

Chandler’s determined to keep their partnership as professional as possible, but when she admits to Finn their night together wasn’t as mind-blowing as he thought it was, he’s distraught. He intrigues her enough that they strike a deal: when they’re not working on his book, Chandler will school Finn in the art of satisfaction. As they grow closer both in and out of the bedroom, they must figure out which is more important, business or pleasure—or if there's a way for them to have both.]]> 352 Rachel Lynn Solomon 0593548531 Kat 0 3.72 2023

author: Rachel Lynn Solomon
name: Kat
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/30
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Good Material 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story��

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 Kat 5 3.85 2023 Good Material

author: Dolly Alderton
name: Kat
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2) 90202302 “The first year is when some of us lose our lives. The second year is when the rest of us lose our humanity.�� —Xaden Riorson

Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College—Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky.

Now the real training begins, and Violet’s already wondering how she’ll get through. It’s not just that it’s grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it’s designed to stretch the riders�� capacity for pain beyond endurance. It’s the new vice commandant, who’s made it his personal mission to teach Violet exactly how powerless she is–unless she betrays the man she loves.

Although Violet’s body might be weaker and frailer than everyone else’s, she still has her wits—and a will of iron. And leadership is forgetting the most important lesson Basgiath has taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules.

But a determination to survive won’t be enough this year.

Because Violet knows the real secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College—and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end.]]> 623 Rebecca Yarros 1649374178 Kat 0 4.33 2023 Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2)

author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Kat
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/25
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)]]> 61431922 Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders...

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile�� humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.

She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die]]> 528 Rebecca Yarros 1649374046 Kat 4 4.56 2023 Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)

author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Kat
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Rhapsodic (The Bargainer, #1) 62316279 From bestselling indie author Laura Thalassa comes the newly revised and edited first book in her smash-hit dark fantasy romance between a siren and the "bargainer" she owes countless favors to.

Callypso Lillis is a siren with a very big problem, one that stretches up her arm and far into her past.

For the last seven years Callie has been wearing a bracelet of black beads up her wrist, magical IOUs for favors she once received. Only death or repayment will fulfill her obligations.

Everyone knows that if you need a favor, you go to the Bargainer to make it happen. He's a man who can get you anything you want �� at a price. And everyone knows that sooner or later he always collects. But for Callie, he's never asked for repayment. Not until now.

When Callie finds the Bargainer in her room, a grin on his lips and a twinkle in his eye, she knows things are about to change. At first it's admitting a truth—a single bead's worth—acknowledging the attraction between them. But the Bargainer is after more than just rekindling their connection. Something is happening in the Otherworld. Fae warriors are going missing one by one, and only the women are returned, each in a glass casket, a child clutched to her breast.

For the Bargainer to save his people, he'll need the help of the siren he spurned long ago. If she can forgive him.]]> 423 Laura Thalassa 1728272912 Kat 4 3.85 2016 Rhapsodic (The Bargainer, #1)

author: Laura Thalassa
name: Kat
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/13
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dark Harmony (The Bargainer, #4)]]> 62843810 There are worse things than death. Things that lurk in the shadows and slip into your dreams. Things that have no business existing. Things that once slept �� but have now awoken.

For Callypso Lillis, the fae magic that now runs through her veins is equal parts curse and good fortune. For the very thing that bonds her to Desmond Flynn, the King of the Night, also makes her vulnerable to the Thief of Souls, a man who wants to break the world �� and Callie along with it.

But it’s not just the Thief whose shadow looms over the Otherworld. Des’s father is back from the dead, and he wants revenge on the son who sent him to the grave in the first place.

Des and Callie must figure out how to stop both men, and time is running out. Because there are forces at play working to tear the lovers apart once and for all �� and unfortunately for them, death is no longer the worst thing to fear.]]> 488 Laura Thalassa Kat 0 4.05 2018 Dark Harmony (The Bargainer, #4)

author: Laura Thalassa
name: Kat
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Strange Hymn (The Bargainer, #2)]]> 62891197
She survived the mad king...but the nightmare isn't over.

Siren Callypso Lillis still wears the physical reminders of her time as Karnon's captive, even after reuniting with soulmate Desmond Flynn, the King of Night. Not only that, but mounting evidence suggests the Thief of Souls, the being responsible for the disappearance of countless fae warriors, is still out there.

Invited to an annual Solstice celebration, Callie and Des journey to the Kingdom of Flora to continue their investigation. But under the bright lights and striking blooms of the realm, new complications arise, ones that no amount of bargaining can undo. Soldiers begin to go missing from the gathering, and some of the fae begin to suspect Des is the man behind it all. To Callie, one thing is no one is who they appear to be. Not even her soulmate.

Fairies play dangerous games. Some want love, some want vengeance, some want flesh, and some want horrors too unspeakable to name. Something is stirring in the Land of All that Grows, and if Callie isn't careful, it will claim everything she loves—and her along with it.]]> 390 Laura Thalassa 1728272939 Kat 4 3.89 2017 A Strange Hymn (The Bargainer, #2)

author: Laura Thalassa
name: Kat
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Emperor of Evening Stars (The Bargainer, #3)]]> 62973161 In the beginning, there was darkness.
Before he met Callie, before he became the Bargainer, there was Desmond Flynn, the bastard son of a scribe. A boy born to a weak mother, cursed with little magic, and destined to marry a slave.

But fate had something else in mind.

Till darkness dies.
From the barren caves of Arestys to the palace of Somnia to the streets of earth, this is how Desmond Flynn, a fairy who began with nothing, became the Emperor of Evening Stars.]]> 254 Laura Thalassa 1728272971 Kat 4 3.98 2017 The Emperor of Evening Stars (The Bargainer, #3)

The Emperor of Evening Stars (The Bargainer, #3)

author: Laura Thalassa
name: Kat
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Everything I Know About Love 46041465
When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else�� realizing that you are enough.

Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones�� Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.]]> 368 Dolly Alderton 0062968785 Kat 3 mem 3.97 2018

author: Dolly Alderton
name: Kat
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: mem
review:

]]> Funny Story 194802722 A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

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

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

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

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex... right?]]> 400 Emily Henry Kat 4 4.21 2024 Funny Story

author: Emily Henry
name: Kat
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Ghosts 50042494
A new relationship couldn't have come at a better time - her thirties have not been the liberating, uncomplicated experience she was sold. Everywhere she turns, she is reminded of time passing and opportunities dwindling. Friendships are fading, ex-boyfriends are moving on and, worse, everyone's moving to the suburbs. There's no solace to be found in her family, with a mum who's caught in a baffling mid-life makeover and a beloved dad who is vanishing in slow-motion into dementia.

Dolly Alderton's debut novel is funny and tender, filled with whip-smart observations about relationships, family, memory, and how we live now.]]> 352 Dolly Alderton 0241434548 Kat 3 3.86 2020 Ghosts

author: Dolly Alderton
name: Kat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism]]> 46178699 In the decade between age twenty-seven and thirty-seven, Elizabeth Tallent published five literary books with Knopf, her short stories appeared in The New Yorker, and she secured a coveted teaching job at Stanford University. But this extraordinary start to her career was followed by twenty-two years of silence. She wrote —or rather published�� nothing at all. Why? Scratched is the remarkable response to that question. Elizabeth’s story begins in a hospital in mid-1950s suburban Washington, D.C., when her mother refuses to hold her newborn daughter, shocking behavior that baffles the nurses. Imagining her mother’s perfectionist ideal at this critical moment, Elizabeth moves back and forth in time, juxtaposing moments in the past with the present in this innovative and spellbinding narrative. She traces her journey from her early years in which she perceived herself as “the child whose flaws let disaster into an otherwise perfect family,�� to her adulthood, when perfectionism came to affect everything. As she toggles between teaching at Stanford in Palo Alto and the Mendocino coast where she lives, raises her son Gabriel, and pursues an important psychoanalysis, Elizabeth grapples with the ferocious desire for perfection which has shaped her personal life and writing life. Eventually, she finds love and acceptance in the most unlikely place, and finally accepts an “as is�� relationship with herself and others. Her final triumph is the writing of this extraordinary memoir, filled with wit, humor, and heart—a brave book that repeatedly searches for the emotional truth beneath the conventional surface of existence.]]> 240 Elizabeth Tallent 0062410377 Kat 2 mem 3.08 2020 Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism

author: Elizabeth Tallent
name: Kat
average rating: 3.08
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: mem
review:

]]> Wellness 65650229 A witty and poignant novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture and the bonds that keep people together

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.��ձ�> 611 Nathan Hill 0593536118 Kat 5 3.97 2023 Wellness

author: Nathan Hill
name: Kat
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Happy Place 61718053
They broke up six months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends.

Which is how they find themselves sharing the largest bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blue week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.

Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends�� hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week�� in front of those who know you best?

A couple who broke up months ago make a pact to pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.]]> 400 Emily Henry 0593441273 Kat 4 3.95 2023 Happy Place

author: Emily Henry
name: Kat
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> You, Again 75665887 Can they stop hating each other long enough to fall in love?

A commitment-phobe and a hopeless romantic clash over and over again--until heartbreak and unexpected chemistry bring them together in this clever enemies-to-friends-to-lovers debut romance.

When Ari and Josh first meet, the wrong kind of sparks fly. They hate each other. Instantly.

A free-spirited, struggling comedian who likes to keep things casual, Ari sublets, takes gigs, and she never sleeps over after hooking up. Born-and-bred Manhattanite Josh has ambitious plans: Take the culinary world by storm, find The One, and make her breakfast in his spotless kitchen. They have absolutely nothing in common . . . except that they happen to be sleeping with the same woman.

Ari and Josh never expect their paths to cross again. But years later, as they're both reeling from ego-bruising breakups, a chance encounter leads to a surprising connection: friendship. Turns out, spending time with your former nemesis is fun when you're too sad to hate each other--and too sad for hate sex.

As friends-without-benefits, they find comfort in late-night Netflix binges, swiping through each other's online dating profiles, and bickering across boroughs. It's better than romance. Until one night, the unspoken boundaries of their platonic relationship begin to blur. . . .

With sharp observations and sizzling chemistry, You, Again explores the dynamics of co-ed friendship in this sparkling romantic comedy of modern love in all its forms.]]> 448 Kate Goldbeck 059344812X Kat 4 3.55 2023

author: Kate Goldbeck
name: Kat
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> The Flat Share 61043839 Tiffy and Leon share a flat
Tiffy and Leon share a bed
Tiffy and Leon have never met��

Tiffy Moore needs a cheap flat, and fast. Leon Twomey works nights and needs cash. Their friends think they’re crazy, but it’s the perfect solution: Leon occupies the one-bed flat while Tiffy’s at work in the day, and she has the run of the place the rest of the time.

But with obsessive ex-boyfriends, demanding clients at work, wrongly imprisoned brothers and, of course, the fact that they still haven’t met yet, they’re about to discover that if you want the perfect home you need to throw the rulebook out the window…]]> Beth O'Leary Kat 4 3.92 2019 The Flat Share

author: Beth O'Leary
name: Kat
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]>