Cat's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:50:11 -0700 60 Cat's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Bodyguard 58803341 Hannah Brooks looks more like a kindergarten teacher than somebody who could kill you with her bare hands. But the truth is, she's an elite bodyguard and she's just been hired to protect a superstar actor from his stalker.

Jack Stapleton's a Hollywood heartthrob - captured by paparazzi on beaches the world over, rising out of the waves in clingy board shorts and glistening like a Roman deity.

When Jack's mom gets sick, he comes home to the family's Texas ranch to help out. Only one catch: He doesn't want his family to know about his stalker. Or the bodyguard thing. And so Hannah - against her will and her better judgment - finds herself pretending to be Jack's girlfriend as a cover.

Protecting Jack should be easy. But protecting her own heart? That's the hardest thing she's ever done...]]> 310 Katherine Center 125021940X Cat 0 currently-reading 4.06 2022 The Bodyguard
author: Katherine Center
name: Cat
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2) 150260809
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.]]> 886 Rebecca Yarros Cat 4 2025 4.56 2023 Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2)
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Cat
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (Vera Wong, #1)]]> 61827543 Tea-shop owner. Matchmaker. Detective?

Sixty-year-old self-proclaimed tea expert Vera Wong enjoys nothing more than sipping a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy ‘detective� work on the internet (AKA checking up on her son to see if he’s dating anybody yet).

But when Vera wakes up one morning to find a dead man in the middle of her tea shop, it’s going to take more than a strong Longjing to fix things. Knowing she’ll do a better job than the police possibly could � because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands � Vera decides it’s down to her to catch the killer.

Nobody spills the tea like this amateur sleuth.]]> 339 Jesse Q. Sutanto 0593549228 Cat 0 to-read 4.01 2023 Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (Vera Wong, #1)
author: Jesse Q. Sutanto
name: Cat
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)]]> 44421460 What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?]]> 213 Toshikazu Kawaguchi 1529029589 Cat 0 to-read 3.66 2015 Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)
author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
name: Cat
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Flatshare 48715812 here.

Tiffy and Leon share an apartment. Tiffy and Leon have never met.

After a bad breakup, Tiffy Moore needs a place to live. Fast. And cheap.

Desperation makes her open-minded, so she answers an ad for a flatshare. Leon, a night-shift worker, will take the apartment during the day, and Tiffy can have it nights and weekends. He’ll be there only when she’s at the office. In fact, they’ll never even have to meet.

Of course, since they live together, sometimes they do need to share information. Tiffy and Leon start writing each other notes—first about what day is garbage day, then politely establishing which leftovers are up for grabs and debating the evergreen question of whether the toilet seat should stay up or down. Soon, they're sharing details of their lives: their work, their families, their romances. And it's amazing how much they learn about their flatmate just by sharing a space.

Even though they are complete opposites, Tiffy and Leon soon become friends. And then maybe more.

But falling in love with your roommate is probably a terrible idea . . . especially if you've never met. What happens when you finally bump into each other?

A joyful, quirky romantic comedy, The Flatshare is a feel-good novel about finding love in the most unexpected of places—under the same roof.]]> 328 Beth O'Leary 1250295637 Cat 5 2021 3.98 2019 The Flatshare
author: Beth O'Leary
name: Cat
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2021/02/14
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: 2021
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Resilient Parenting Prioritizing Connection Over Correction]]> 59627738 "This book is for any parent who has ever struggled under the substantial weight of caregiving--which is to say, all of us. Good Inside is not only a wise and practical guide to raising resilient, emotionally healthy kids, it's also a supportive resource for overwhelmed parents who need more compassion and less stress. Dr. Becky is the smart, thoughtful, in-the-trenches parenting expert we've been waiting for!"--Eve Rodsky, New York Times bestselling author of Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space

Dr. Becky Kennedy, wildly popular parenting expert and creator of @drbeckyatgoodinside, shares her groundbreaking approach to raising kids and offers practical strategies for parenting in a way that feels good.

Over the past several years, Dr. Becky Kennedy--known to her followers as "Dr. Becky"--has been sparking a parenting revolution. Millions of parents, tired of following advice that either doesn't work or simply doesn't feel good, have embraced Dr. Becky's empowering and effective approach, a model that prioritizes connecting with our kids over correcting them.

Parents have long been sold a model of childrearing that simply doesn't work. From reward charts to time outs, many popular parenting approaches are based on shaping behavior, not raising humans. These techniques don't build the skills kids need for life, or account for their complex emotional needs. Add to that parents' complicated relationships with their own upbringings, and it's easy to see why so many caretakers feel lost, burned out, and worried they're failing their kids. In Good Inside, Dr. Becky shares her parenting philosophy, complete with actionable strategies, that will help parents move from uncertainty and self-blame to confidence and sturdy leadership.

Offering perspective-shifting parenting principles and troubleshooting for specific scenarios--including sibling rivalry, separation anxiety, tantrums, and more--Good Inside is a comprehensive resource for a generation of parents looking for a new way to raise their kids while still setting them up for a lifetime of self-regulation, confidence, and resilience.]]> 336 Becky Kennedy 0063159481 Cat 0 to-read 4.53 Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Resilient Parenting Prioritizing Connection Over Correction
author: Becky Kennedy
name: Cat
average rating: 4.53
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Whole-Brain Child: Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind]]> 10353369
In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson demystify the meltdowns and aggravation, explaining the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. The “upstairs brain,� which makes decisions and balances emotions, is under construction until the mid-twenties. And especially in young children, the right brain and its emotions tend to rule over the logic of the left brain. No wonder kids can seem—and feel—so out of control. By applying these discoveries to everyday parenting, you can turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child’s brain and foster vital growth. Raise calmer, happier children using twelve key strategies, including

� Name It to Tame It: Corral raging right-brain behavior through left-brain storytelling, appealing to the left brain’s affinity for words and reasoning to calm emotional storms and bodily tension.
� Engage, Don’t Enrage: Keep your child thinking and listening, instead of purely reacting.
� Move It or Lose It: Use physical activities to shift your child’s emotional state.
� Let the Clouds of Emotion Roll By: Guide your children when they are stuck on a negative emotion, and help them understand that feelings come and go.
� SIFT: Help children pay attention to the Sensations, Images, Feelings, and Thoughts within them so that they can make better decisions and be more flexible.
� Connect Through Conflict: Use discord to encourage empathy and greater social success.

Complete with clear explanations, age-appropriate strategies for dealing with day-to-day struggles, and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, The Whole-Brain Child shows you how to cultivate healthy emotional and intellectual development so that your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives.]]> 192 Daniel J. Siegel 0553807919 Cat 0 to-read 4.25 2011 The Whole-Brain Child: Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind
author: Daniel J. Siegel
name: Cat
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids]]> 28815322
The book delivers fresh advice on how to:
- Encourage free play
- Foster authenticity and confidence
- Nurture empathy
- Emphasize teamwork over power struggles
- Celebrate togetherness

Filled with practical takeaways and inspiring examples, The Danish Way of Parenting will help parents from all walks of life raise the happiest, most well-adjusted kids in the world.]]> 208 Jessica Joelle Alexander 014311171X Cat 0 to-read 4.08 2014 The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids
author: Jessica Joelle Alexander
name: Cat
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness]]> 171681821
A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

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

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

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

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

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.]]> 400 Jonathan Haidt 0593655036 Cat 0 to-read 4.36 2024 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
author: Jonathan Haidt
name: Cat
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections]]> 62926962 An illuminating exploration of how to maintain a happy sex life in a long-term relationship, from the New York Times bestselling author of Come as You Are and co-author of Burnout.

In Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski, PhD, provided science-backed lessons that revolutionized the way we think about women’s sexuality. Now, in Come Together, Nagoski takes on a fundamentally misunderstood subject: sex in long-term relationships.

Nagoski breaks down the myths many of us have been taught about sex—for instance, the belief that sexual satisfaction and desire are highest at the beginning of a relationship and that they will inevitably decline the longer that relationship lasts. Nagoski assures us that’s not true.

So, what is true? Come Together isn’t about how much we want sex, or how often we’re having it; it’s about whether we like the sex we’re having. Nagoski breaks down the obstacles that impede us from enjoying sex—from stress and body image, to relationship difficulties and gendered beliefs about how sex “should� be—and presents the best ways to overcome them. You'll learn:
� that “spontaneous desire� is not the kind of desire to strive for if you want to have great sex for decades
� vocabulary for talking with partners about ways to get in “the mood� and how to not take it personally when “the mood� is nowhere to be found
� how to understand your own and your partner’s “emotional floorplan,� so that you have a blueprint for how to get to a sexy state of mind

With her signature insight, humor, and empathy, Nagoski shows us what great sex can look like, how to create it in our own lives, and what to do when struggles arise.]]> 368 Emily Nagoski 0593500822 Cat 0 to-read 4.13 2024 Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections
author: Emily Nagoski
name: Cat
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood]]> 62217096 A radical new examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body

During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis. Other than during adolescence, there is no other time in a human's life with such dramatic change, yet science, medicine, and philosophy have neglected this life-altering transition. Its seismic effects go largely unrepresented across literature and the arts. Speaking about motherhood as anything other than a pastel-hued dream remains, for the most part, taboo.

In this ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, acclaimed journalist and author Lucy Jones brings to light the emerging concept of 'matrescence'. Drawing on new research across various fields—neuroscience and evolutionary biology; psychoanalysis and existential therapy; sociology, economics and ecology—Jones shows how the changes in the maternal mind, brain, and body are far more profound, wild, and enduring than we have been led to believe. She reveals the dangerous consequences of our neglect of the maternal experience, and interrogates the patriarchal and capitalist systems that have created the untenable situation mothers face today.

Here is an urgent examination of the modern institution of motherhood that seeks to unshackle all parents from oppressive social norms. As it deepens our understanding of matrescence, it raises vital questions about motherhood and femininity; interdependence and individual identity; and our relationships with each other and the world.]]> 310 Lucy Jones 0241513480 Cat 0 to-read 4.45 2023 Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood
author: Lucy Jones
name: Cat
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years (The ParentData Series)]]> 55997402
“Emily Oster dives into the data on parenting issues, cuts through the clutter, and gives families the bottom line to help them make better decisions.� –Good Morning America

“A targeted mini-MBA program designed to help moms and dads establish best practices for day-to-day operations." - The Washington Post

From the bestselling author of Expecting Better and Cribsheet , the next step in data driven parenting from economist Emily Oster.

In The Family Firm , Brown professor of economics and mom of two Emily Oster offers a classic business school framework for data-driven parents to think more deliberately about the key issues of the elementary school, health, extracurricular activities, and more.

Unlike the hourly challenges of infant parenting, the big questions in this age come up less frequently. But we live with the consequences of our decisions for much longer. What's the right kind of school and at what age should a particular kid start? How do you encourage a healthy diet? Should kids play a sport and how seriously? How do you think smartly about encouraging children's independence? Along with these bigger questions, Oster investigates how to navigate the complexity of day-to-day family logistics.

Making these decisions is less about finding the specific answer and more about taking the right approach. Parents of this age are often still working in baby mode, which is to say, under stress and on the fly. That is a classic management problem, and Oster takes a page from her time as a business school professor at the University of Chicago to show us that thoughtful business process can help smooth out tough family decisions.

The Family Firm is a smart and winning guide to how to think clearly--and with less ambient stress--about the key decisions of the elementary school years.

Parenting is a full-time job. It's time we start treating it like one.]]> 320 Emily Oster 1984881752 Cat 0 to-read 3.71 2021 The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years (The ParentData Series)
author: Emily Oster
name: Cat
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Was Told There’d Be a Village: Transforming Motherhood Through the Power of Connection]]> 217182469
Melissa Wirt thought she had everything—she'd built her own company and moved to a beautiful farm with her family. Then during a personal crisis, she despite having created an online community reaching thousands of moms, she’d also somehow, become utterly isolated.

In I Was Told There'd Be a Village , Melissa describes how she began making small changes—leaving behind a damaging Isolation Mindset and developing an advantageous Village Mindset. Using personal anecdotes and stories from moms across the country, this book provides specific, actionable steps to transform oppressive, solitary parenting into a connected, collective (even joyful) endeavor.]]> 320 Melissa Wirt 1538759055 Cat 0 to-read 4.00 I Was Told There’d Be a Village: Transforming Motherhood Through the Power of Connection
author: Melissa Wirt
name: Cat
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
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]]> Sandwich 199124697 From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and—thanks to the cottage’s ancient plumbing—septic too.

This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

It's one precious week: everything is in balance; everything is in flux. And when Rocky comes face to face with her family’s history and future, she is forced to accept that she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.]]> 236 Catherine Newman 0063345188 Cat 5 2025 3.76 2024 Sandwich
author: Catherine Newman
name: Cat
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Catastrophic Happiness: Finding Joy in Childhood's Messy Years]]> 26030709
Much is written about a child's infancy and toddler years, which is good since children will never remember it themselves. It is ages 4-14 that make up the second act, as Catherine Newman puts it in this delightfully candid, outlandishly funny new memoir about the years that "your children will remember as childhood."

Following Newman's son and daughter as they blossom from preschoolers into teenagers, Catastrophic Happiness is about the bittersweet joy of raising children -- and the ever-evolving landscape of issues parents traverse. In a laugh out-loud, heart-wrenching, relatable voice, Newman narrates events as momentous as grief and as quietly moving as the moonlit face of a sleeping child.

From tantrums and friendship to fear and even sex, Newman's fresh take will appeal to any parent riding this same roller coaster of laughter and heartbreak.]]> 224 Catherine Newman 0316337501 Cat 0 to-read 3.93 2016 Catastrophic Happiness: Finding Joy in Childhood's Messy Years
author: Catherine Newman
name: Cat
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)]]> 63219094 Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from #1 New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Yarros.

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.]]> 665 Rebecca Yarros Cat 4 2025 4.74 2023 Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Cat
average rating: 4.74
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool]]> 52706033 The instant New York Times bestseller!

An NPR Book of the Year

From the author of Expecting Better, an economist's guide to the early years of parenting.

"The book is jampacked with information, but it's also a delightful read because Oster is such a good writer." --NPR

With Expecting Better, award-winning economist Emily Oster spotted a need in the pregnancy market for advice that gave women the information they needed to make the best decision for their own pregnancies. By digging into the data, Oster found that much of the conventional pregnancy wisdom was wrong. In Cribsheet, she now tackles an even greater challenge: decision-making in the early years of parenting.

As any new parent knows, there is an abundance of often-conflicting advice hurled at you from doctors, family, friends, and strangers on the internet. From the earliest days, parents get the message that they must make certain choices around feeding, sleep, and schedule or all will be lost. There's a rule--or three--for everything. But the benefits of these choices can be overstated, and the trade-offs can be profound. How do you make your own best decision?

Armed with the data, Oster finds that the conventional wisdom doesn't always hold up. She debunks myths around breastfeeding (not a panacea), sleep training (not so bad!), potty training (wait until they're ready or possibly bribe with M&Ms), language acquisition (early talkers aren't necessarily geniuses), and many other topics. She also shows parents how to think through freighted questions like if and how to go back to work, how to think about toddler discipline, and how to have a relationship and parent at the same time.

Economics is the science of decision-making, and Cribsheet is a thinking parent's guide to the chaos and frequent misinformation of the early years. Emily Oster is a trained expert--and mom of two--who can empower us to make better, less fraught decisions--and stay sane in the years before preschool.]]> 322 Emily Oster 0525559272 Cat 0 currently-reading 4.29 2019 Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool
author: Emily Oster
name: Cat
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital]]> 19473852 Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink’s landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina � and her suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice

In the tradition of the best investigative journalism, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amid chaos.

After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.

Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.




From the Hardcover edition.]]> 546 Sheri Fink 0307718980 Cat 0 to-read 4.04 2013 Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
author: Sheri Fink
name: Cat
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Weyward 57823095 I am a Weyward, and wild inside.

2019: Under cover of darkness, Kate flees London for ramshackle Weyward Cottage, inherited from a great aunt she barely remembers. With its tumbling ivy and overgrown garden, the cottage is worlds away from the abusive partner who tormented Kate. But she begins to suspect that her great aunt had a secret. One that lurks in the bones of the cottage, hidden ever since the witch-hunts of the 17th century.

1619: Altha is awaiting trial for the murder of a local farmer who was stampeded to death by his herd. As a girl, Altha’s mother taught her their magic, a kind not rooted in spell casting but in a deep knowledge of the natural world. But unusual women have always been deemed dangerous, and as the evidence for witchcraft is set out against Altha, she knows it will take all of her powers to maintain her freedom.

1942: As World War II rages, Violet is trapped in her family's grand, crumbling estate. Straitjacketed by societal convention, she longs for the robust education her brother receives––and for her mother, long deceased, who was rumored to have gone mad before her death. The only traces Violet has of her are a locket bearing the initial W and the word weyward scratched into the baseboard of her bedroom.

Weaving together the stories of three extraordinary women across five centuries, Emilia Hart's Weyward is an enthralling novel of female resilience and the transformative power of the natural world.]]> 408 Emilia Hart Cat 0 to-read 4.21 2023 Weyward
author: Emilia Hart
name: Cat
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
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review:

]]> The Guncle (The Guncle, #1) 54508798
So when tragedy strikes and Maisie and Grant lose their mother and Patrick’s brother has a health crisis of his own, Patrick finds himself suddenly taking on the role of primary guardian. Despite having a set of “Guncle Rules� ready to go, Patrick has no idea what to expect, having spent years barely holding on after the loss of his great love, a somewhat-stalled career, and a lifestyle not-so-suited to a six- and a nine-year-old. Quickly realizing that parenting—even if temporary—isn’t solved with treats and jokes, Patrick’s eyes are opened to a new sense of responsibility, and the realization that, sometimes, even being larger than life means you’re unfailingly human.]]> 326 Steven Rowley 0525542280 Cat 4 2025 4.09 2021 The Guncle (The Guncle, #1)
author: Steven Rowley
name: Cat
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Quest for Snacks (Cat & Cat Adventures #1)]]> 56197493 Cats, magical portals, and snacks, oh my!

One day when their human leaves for work, Squash and Ginny find themselves in the most unfortunate predicament: without snacks. With a little help from a magical portal, the two cats embark on a quest to find ingredients for a potion that will produce unlimited goodies.

At first, their mission doesn't seem so tough. It takes them on a boat race across Mewmaid Ocean and a hot air balloon ride over Mount Lava. But when the cats reach the Enchanted Rain Forest to gather enchanted rainwater, the last item on their list, their mission runs dry. . . It turns out it hasn't rained in the Enchanted Rain Forest in weeks! What a cat-astrophe !

Can Squash and Ginny get to the bottom of what's causing this dry spell and secure the final ingredient they need? Or have Squash and Ginny taken their last bite . . . for good?]]> 96 Susie Yi 0063083809 Cat 0 to-read 4.16 The Quest for Snacks (Cat & Cat Adventures #1)
author: Susie Yi
name: Cat
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> What We Owe the Future 59802037 An Oxford philosopher makes the case for "longtermism"—that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.

The fate of the world is in our hands. Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more—or it could end tomorrow. Astonishing numbers of people could lead lives of great happiness or unimaginable suffering, or never live at all, depending on what we choose to do today.

In What We Owe the Future, philosopher William MacAskill argues for longtermism, that idea that positively influencing the distant future is a key moral priority of our time. From this perspective, it’s not enough to reverse climate change or avert the next pandemic. We must ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; counter the end of moral progress; and prepare for a planet where the smartest beings are digital, not human.

If we make wise choices today, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty.]]> 335 William MacAskill 1541618629 Cat 0 to-read 3.81 2022 What We Owe the Future
author: William MacAskill
name: Cat
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3) 209668781 Discover the instant #1 New York Times bestseller! TV series now in development at MGM Amazon Studios with Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society.

Accolades for Fourth Wing
Amazon Best Books of the Year, #4 � Apple Best Books of the Year 2023 � Barnes & Noble Best Fantasy Book of 2023 � NPR "Books We Love" 2023 � Audible Best Books of 2023 � Hudson Book of the Year � Google Play Best Books of 2023 � Indigo Best Books of 2023 � Waterstones Book of the Year finalist � ŷ Choice Award Winner � Newsweek Staffers� Favorite Books of 2023 � Paste Magazine’s Best Books of 2023 � TikTok Book Awards UK and Ireland Book of the Year (International) 2024

After nearly eighteen months at Basgiath War College, Violet Sorrengail knows there’s no more time for lessons. No more time for uncertainty.

Because the battle has truly begun, and with enemies closing in from outside their walls and within their ranks, it’s impossible to know who to trust.

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.

The Empyrean series is best enjoyed in order.
Reading Order:
Book #1 Fourth Wing
Book #2 Iron Flame
Book #3 Onyx Storm]]> 758 Rebecca Yarros 1649376944 Cat 0 to-read 4.42 2025 Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3)
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Cat
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Bright Young Women 112978985
The survivors, including key witness Pamela Schumacher, will be forever changed by this night. They have all become victims. But they tell their perspectives here, they remain masters of their stories. And they hunt the perpetrator on their own - against resistance from the justice system and the police; against public opinion, which idolizes the serial killer.]]> 384 Jessica Knoll Cat 0 to-read 4.05 2023 Bright Young Women
author: Jessica Knoll
name: Cat
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Locked In (Department Q, #10) 209455837
On the day after Christmas, head of Department Q, Detective Carl Mørck, finds himself handcuffed in a police car headed for Copenhagen's Vestre prison. After fifteen years, a violent case from his past has caught up with him. Charges of drug trafficking and murder threaten to destroy his life and career. But he is being framed. Someone has a million-dollar bounty on his head to make sure he doesn't talk, putting him in grave danger among the prison's incarcerated criminals and corrupt officers. The question that remains is, Why?

Carl's colleagues at the Copenhagen Police Department instantly turn their backs on him, leaving the ever-loyal Department Q team as his only hope. In search of answers, Rose, Assad, and Gordon must disobey direct orders from way up the chain to try to unravel case. With only one another to trust and Carl's battle against the unknown mastermind's henchmen worsening by the day, they must work faster than ever before if they are to clear his name—and save his life.]]> 512 Jussi Adler-Olsen 0593475690 Cat 0 to-read 4.17 2023 Locked In (Department Q, #10)
author: Jussi Adler-Olsen
name: Cat
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Faculty Lounge 199605487 By the acclaimed author of Moxie, a funny, bighearted adult debut that is at once an ode to educators, a timely glimpse at today’s pressing school issues, and a tender character study, following a sprawling cast of teachers, administrators, and staff at a Texas high school

With its ensemble of warm and unforgettable characters, The Faculty Lounge shows readers a different side of school life. It all starts when an elderly substitute teacher at Baldwin High School is found dead in the faculty lounge. After a bit of a stir, life quickly returns to normal—it’s not like it’s the worst (or even most interesting) thing that has happened within the building’s walls. But when, a week later, the spontaneous scattering of his ashes on the school grounds catches the attention of somebusybody parents, it sets in motion a year that can only be described as wild, bizarre, tragic, mundane, beautiful, and humorous all at once.

In the midst of the ensuing hysteria and threats of disciplinary action, the novel peeks into the lives of the implicated adults who, it turns out, actually have first names and continue to exist when the school day is done. We a former punk band front man, now a middle-aged principal who must battle it out with the schoolboard to keep his job; a no-nonsense school nurse willing to break the rules, despite the close watch on their campus, when a student arrives at her office with a dilemma; and a disgruntled English instructor who finds himself embroiled in even more controversy when he misfires a snarky email. Oh, and there’s also a teacher make-out session in a supply closet during a lockdown.

As these people continue to manage the messiness of this school year, there is the looming threat of what will become of their beloved Baldwin High.Ultimately, at the heart of this unconventional workplace novel is a story of the power of human connection and of the joy of finding purpose in what it is we do every day.]]> 304 Jennifer Mathieu 0593475399 Cat 0 to-read 3.84 2024 The Faculty Lounge
author: Jennifer Mathieu
name: Cat
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs]]> 60321040 A rare, riveting insider’s account on Wall Street—an updated Liar’s Poker—where greed coupled with misogyny and discrimination enforces a culture of exclusion in the upper echelons of Goldman Sachs

Jamie Fiore Higgins became one of the few women at the highest ranks of Goldman Sachs. Spurred on by the obligation she felt to her working-class immigrant family, she rose through the ranks and saw it all: out-of-control, lavish parties flowing with never-ending drinks; affairs flaunted in the office; rampant drug use; and most pervasively, a discriminatory culture that seemed designed to hold back the few women and people of color employed at the company.

Goldman Sachs had the right talking points and statistics, but Fiore Higgins soon realized that these provided a veneer to cover up what she found to be an abusive culture. Her account is one filled with shocking stories of harassment and jaw-dropping tales of exclusionary behavior: when she was told she only got promoted because she is a woman; when her coworkers mooed at her after she pumped for her fourth child, defying the superior who had advised her not to breastfeed; or when a male boss used a racial epithet in front of her, other colleagues, and clients without any repercussions.

Bully Market sounds the alarm on the culture of finance and corporate America, while offering clear, actionable ideas for creating a fairer workplace. Both a revealing, extraordinary look at the industry and a top Wall Streeter’s explosive personal story, Bully Market is an essential account of one woman’s experience in a flawed system that speaks to the challenge and urgency for change.]]> 320 Jamie Fiore Higgins 1668001020 Cat 0 to-read 4.14 Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs
author: Jamie Fiore Higgins
name: Cat
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed]]> 40203647 From a psychotherapist, and national advice columnist comes a thought-provoking new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist's world -- where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).

One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.]]> 413 Lori Gottlieb Cat 4 2025 4.41 2019 Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
author: Lori Gottlieb
name: Cat
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys]]> 59028580 Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle investigates of the notorious Dozier Boys School--the true story behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys--and the contentious process to exhume the graves of the boys buried there in order to reunite them with their families.

The Arthur G. Dozier Boys School was a well-guarded secret in Florida for over a century, until reports of cruelty, abuse, and "mysterious" deaths shut the institution down in 2011. Established in 1900, the juvenile reform school accepted children as young as six years of age for crimes as harmless as truancy or trespassing. The boys sent there, many of whom were Black, were subject to brutal abuse, routinely hired out to local farmers by the school's management as indentured labor, and died either at the school or attempting to escape its brutal conditions.

In the wake of the school's shutdown, Erin Kimmerle, a leading forensic anthropologist, stepped in to locate the school's graveyard to determine the number of graves and who was buried there, thus beginning the process of reuniting the boys with their families through forensic and DNA testing. The school's poorly kept accounting suggested some thirty-one boys were buried in unmarked graves in a remote field on the school's property. The real number was at least twice that. Kimmerle's work did not go unnoticed; residents and local law enforcement threatened and harassed her team in their eagerness to control the truth she was uncovering--one she continues to investigate to this day.

We Carry Their Bones is a detailed account of Jim Crow America and an indictment of the reform school system as we know it. It's also a fascinating dive into the science of forensic anthropology and an important retelling of the extraordinary efforts taken to bring these lost children home to their families--an endeavor that created a political firestorm and a dramatic reckoning with racism and shame in the legacy of America.]]> 256 Erin Kimmerle 0063030241 Cat 0 to-read 3.84 2022 We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys
author: Erin Kimmerle
name: Cat
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family]]> 177393 Bringing Up Ben & Birdy, a weekly column on babycenter.com. Now in the delightfully candid, outlandishly funny Waiting for Birdy, Newman charts the year she anticipated the birth of her second child while also coping with the realities of raising a toddler. As she navigates life with her existentially curious and heartbreakingly sweet three-year-old, and her doozy of a pregnancy, she lends her irresistibly unique voice to the secret thoughts and fears of parents everywhere. Filled with quirky warmth and razor-sharp wit, Waiting for Birdy captures the universal wonder, terror, humor, and tenderness of raising a family.]]> 272 Catherine Newman 0143034774 Cat 0 to-read 4.10 2005 Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family
author: Catherine Newman
name: Cat
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Deep End 212806619 A competitive diver and an ace swimmer jump into forbidden waters in this steamy college romance from the New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis.

Scarlett Vandermeer is swimming upstream. A Junior at Stanford and a student-athlete who specializes in platform diving, Scarlett prefers to keep her head down, concentrating on getting into med school and on recovering from the injury that almost ended her career. She has no time for relationships—at least, that’s what she tells herself.

Swim captain, world champion, all-around aquatics golden boy, Lukas Blomqvist thrives on discipline. It’s how he wins gold medals and breaks records: complete focus, with every stroke. On the surface, Lukas and Scarlett have nothing in common. Until a well-guarded secret slips out, and everything changes.

So they start an arrangement. And as the pressure leading to the Olympics heats up, so does their relationship. It was supposed to be just a temporary, mutually satisfying fling. But when staying away from Lukas becomes impossible, Scarlett realizes that her heart might be treading into dangerous water...]]> 446 Ali Hazelwood 0593641051 Cat 4 2025 3.88 2025 Deep End
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Cat
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> The Covenant of Water 63429926 From the New York Times–bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial new epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala and following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret.

The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of Cutting for Stone. Published in 2009, Cutting for Stone became a literary phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi—literally “Big Mother”—will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life. All of Verghese’s great gifts are on display in this new there are astonishing scenes of medical ingenuity, fantastic moments of humor, a surprising and deeply moving story, and characters imbued with the essence of life.

A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 802 Abraham Verghese Cat 0 to-read 4.58 2023 The Covenant of Water
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Cat
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Cutting for Stone 8122546
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

penguinrandomhouse.com]]> 672 Abraham Verghese 030727134X Cat 0 to-read 4.51 2009 Cutting for Stone
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Cat
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Silence of the Choir 201741637 ragazzi, the “guys� that the Santa Marta Association have taken responsibility for. In this small Sicilian town, their arrival changes lifefor everybody.

While they wait to know their fate, the ragazzi encounter all kinds of a strange vicar who rewrites their pasts, a woman committed to ensuring them asylum, a man determined to fight against it, an older ragazzo who has become an interpreter, and a reclusive poet who no longer writes.

Each character in this moving and important saga is forced to reflect on what it means to encounter people they know nothing about. They watch as a situation unfolds over which they have little control or insight. A story told through a growing symphony of voices that ends only when one final voice brings silence to the choir.]]> 378 Mohamed Mbougar Sarr Cat 0 to-read 4.12 2017 The Silence of the Choir
author: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
name: Cat
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery]]> 49127514
Each patient presents a mystery, one that will only be unpacked over years. They seek Gildiner's help to overcome an immediate challenge in their lives, but discover that the source of their suffering has been long buried.

As in such recent classics as The Glass Castle and Educated, each patient embodies self-reflection, stoicism, perseverance, and forgiveness as they work unflinchingly to face the truth. Gildiner's account of her journeys with them is moving, insightful, and sometimes very funny. Good Morning Monster offers an almost novelistic, behind-the-scenes look into the therapist's office, illustrating how the process can heal even the most unimaginable wounds.]]> 368 Catherine Gildiner 1250271487 Cat 0 to-read 4.44 2020 Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery
author: Catherine Gildiner
name: Cat
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hampton Heights: One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin]]> 199743722
On a cold winter’s evening in 1987, six middle-school paperboys wander an unfamiliar Milwaukee neighborhood, selling newspaper subscriptions, fueled by their manager Kevin’s promises of cash bonuses and dinner at Burger King. But the freaks come out at night in Hampton Heights. Sent out into the neighborhood in pairs, the boys will encounter a host of primordial monsters—and triumph over them.

Sigmone, who is bussed to a white school, is stuck with Joel, a white kid who idolizes Black culture. Mark, who's wrestling with his sexuality, joins his secret crush, Ryan. Nishu and Al are outsiders; one is a second-generation immigrant, the other a poor kid in a rich school. Over the course of one eventful evening, the three pairs will encounter the wild things of Hampton Heights—werewolves, witches with a centuries-old story to tell, and a creepy, ancient monster who feeds on memories. Meanwhile, Kevin is having an adventure of his own, seducing a beautiful woman in the neighborhood’s tavern . . . but who is actually in control? As the night nears its end, everyone will reunite for a cataclysmic finale.

Funny, thrilling, outrageous, and sneakily beautiful, Dan Kois’s Hampton Heights captures without sentimentality the dreams and fears of teenage boys in a tender horror-comedy about camaraderie, bravery, vulnerability, and the terrifying prospect of growing up.]]> 208 Dan Kois 0063358751 Cat 0 to-read 3.44 2024 Hampton Heights: One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
author: Dan Kois
name: Cat
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind]]> 23692271 512 Yuval Noah Harari Cat 0 to-read 4.33 2011 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
author: Yuval Noah Harari
name: Cat
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer]]> 25387382
Thousands of parents, from regular moms and dads to Hollywood superstars, have come to baby expert Dr. Harvey Karp to learn his remarkable techniques for soothing babies and increasing sleep. Now his landmark book—fully revised and updated with the latest insights into infant sleep, bedsharing, breastfeeding, swaddling, and SIDS risk—can teach you too! Dr. Karp’s highly successful method is based on four revolutionary concepts:

1. The Fourth Trimester: Why babies still yearn for a womblike atmosphere . . . even after birth
2. The Calming Reflex: An “off switch� all babies are born with
3. The 5 S’s: Five easy steps to turn on your baby’s amazing calming reflex
4. The Cuddle Cure: How to combine the 5 S’s to calm even colicky babies

With Dr. Karp’s sensible advice, parents and grandparents, nurses and nannies, will be able to transform even the fussiest infant into the happiest baby on the block!

Praise for The Happiest Baby on the Block

“Dr. Karp’s book is fascinating and will guide new parents for years to come.�—Julius Richmond, M.D., Harvard Medical School, former Surgeon General of the United States

�The Happiest Baby on the Block is fun and convincing. I highly recommend it.�—Elisabeth Bing, co-founder of Lamaze International

“Will fascinate anyone who wants to know how babies experience the world, and wants to answer their cries lovingly and effectively.��The San Diego Union-Tribune]]> 319 Harvey Karp 0553393235 Cat 3 2025 4.06 2002 The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer
author: Harvey Karp
name: Cat
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir]]> 53060552 "There is no writer quite like Dolly Alderton working today and very soon the world will know it.�-- Lisa Taddeo, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Three Women

“Dolly Alderton has always been a sparkling Roman candle of talent. She is funny, smart, and explosively engaged in the wonders and weirdness of the world. But what makes this memoir more than mere entertainment is the mature and sophisticated evolution that Alderton describes in these pages. It’s a beautifully told journey and a thoughtful, important book. I loved it.�--Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and City of Girls

The wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking internationally bestselling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the ride

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 0062968807 Cat 0 to-read 3.90 2018 Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Cat
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Hating Game 33986333
Nemesis (n.) 1) An opponent or rival whom a person cannot best or overcome.
2) A person’s undoing
3) Joshua Templeman

Lucy Hutton has always been certain that the nice girl can get the corner office. She’s charming and accommodating and prides herself on being loved by everyone at Bexley & Gamin. Everyone except for coldly efficient, impeccably attired, physically intimidating Joshua Templeman. And the feeling is mutual.

Trapped in a shared office together 40 (OK, 50 or 60) hours a week, they’ve become entrenched in an addictive, ridiculous never-ending game of one-upmanship. There’s the Staring Game. The Mirror Game. The HR Game. Lucy can’t let Joshua beat her at anything—especially when a huge new promotion goes up for the taking.

If Lucy wins this game, she’ll be Joshua’s boss. If she loses, she’ll resign. So why is she suddenly having steamy dreams about Joshua, and dressing for work like she’s got a hot date? After a perfectly innocent elevator ride ends with an earth shattering kiss, Lucy starts to wonder whether she’s got Joshua Templeman all wrong.

Maybe Lucy Hutton doesn’t hate Joshua Templeman. And maybe, he doesn’t hate her either. Or maybe this is just another game. ​​]]> 369 Sally Thorne Cat 0 to-read 4.11 2016 The Hating Game
author: Sally Thorne
name: Cat
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Regrets of Clover]]> 61364899 What’s the point of giving someone a beautiful death if you can’t give yourself a beautiful life?

From the day she watched her kindergarten teacher drop dead during a dramatic telling of Peter Rabbit, Clover Brooks has felt a stronger connection with the dying than she has with the living. After the beloved grandfather who raised her dies alone while she is traveling, Clover becomes a death doula in New York City, dedicating her life to ushering people peacefully through their end-of-life process.

Clover spends so much time with the dying that she has no life of her own, until the final wishes of a feisty old woman send Clover on a trip across the country to uncover a forgotten love story––and perhaps, her own happy ending. As she finds herself struggling to navigate the uncharted roads of romance and friendship, Clover is forced to examine what she really wants, and whether she’ll have the courage to go after it.

Probing, clever, and hopeful, The Collected Regrets of Clover turns the normally taboo subject of death into a reason to celebrate life.]]> 320 Mikki Brammer 1250284406 Cat 0 to-read 4.29 2023 The Collected Regrets of Clover
author: Mikki Brammer
name: Cat
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Unhoneymooners (Unhoneymooners, #1)]]> 43341641
Starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews * Publishers Weekly * Library Journal

Named a “Must-Read� by TODAY, Us Weekly , Bustle , BuzzFeed , ŷ , Entertainment Weekly , Publishers Weekly , Southern Living, Book Riot, Woman’s Day , The Toronto Star, and more!

For two sworn enemies, anything can happen during the Hawaiian trip of a lifetime—maybe even love—in this romantic comedy from the New York Times bestselling authors of Roomies .

Olive Torres is used to being the unlucky from inexplicable mishaps to a recent layoff, her life seems to be almost comically jinxed. By contrast, her sister Ami is an eternal champion...she even managed to finance her entire wedding by winning a slew of contests. Unfortunately for Olive, the only thing worse than constant bad luck is having to spend the wedding day with the best man (and her nemesis), Ethan Thomas.

Olive braces herself for wedding hell, determined to put on a brave face, but when the entire wedding party gets food poisoning, the only people who aren’t affected are Olive and Ethan. Suddenly there’s a free honeymoon up for grabs, and Olive will be damned if Ethan gets to enjoy paradise solo.

Agreeing to a temporary truce, the pair head for Maui. After all, ten days of bliss is worth having to assume the role of loving newlyweds, right? But the weird thing is...Olive doesn’t mind playing pretend. In fact, the more she pretends to be the luckiest woman alive, the more it feels like she might be.

With Christina Lauren’s “uniquely hilarious and touching voice� ( Entertainment Weekly ), The Unhoneymooners is a romance for anyone who has ever felt unlucky in love.]]> 429 Christina Lauren Cat 0 to-read 4.09 2019 The Unhoneymooners (Unhoneymooners, #1)
author: Christina Lauren
name: Cat
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Part of Your World (Part of Your World, #1)]]> 58706519 A refreshingly modern fairy tale and instantNew York Times bestseller thatLove Hypothesis author Ali Hazelwood hails as "an uplifting, feel-good, romantic read." After a wild bet, gourmet grilled-cheese sandwich, and cuddle with a baby goat, Alexis Montgomery has had her world turned upside down. The Daniel Grant, a ridiculously hot carpenter who’s ten years younger than her and as casual as they come—the complete opposite of sophisticated city-girl Alexis. And yet their chemistry is undeniable. While her ultra-wealthy parents want her to carry on the family legacy of world-renowned surgeons, Alexis doesn’t need glory or fame. She’s fine with being a “mere� ER doctor. And every minute she spends with Daniel and the tight-knit town where he lives, she’s discovering just what’s really important. Yet letting their relationship become anything more than a short-term fling would mean turning her back on her family and giving up the opportunity to help thousands of people. Bringing Daniel into her world is impossible, and yet she can’t just give up the joy she’s found with him either. With so many differences between them, how can Alexis possibly choose between her world and his?"Abby Jimenez’s words are like fairy dust... they sprinkled humor and warmth all over my life. Pick upPart of Your Worldif you’re looking for an uplifting, feel-good, romantic read—and for a beautiful reminder that we should always try to live the life that makes us the happiest." --Ali Hazelwood, New York Times bestselling author ofThe Love Hypothesis Book of the Month Club Best Book of the Year finalistŷ Choice Awards finalistBookPage Magazine Best Books of the YearBooklist Best Romances of the YearSheReads RomanceBook of the YearAwardnomination ]]> 401 Abby Jimenez 1538704366 Cat 0 to-read 4.33 2022 Part of Your World (Part of Your World, #1)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Cat
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> We All Want Impossible Things 60647499 Gilligan's Island reruns and REM concerts; hickeys and heartbreak; surprise Scottish wakes; marriages, infertility, and children. As Ash says, "Edi's memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine." But now the unthinkable has happened. Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and spending her last days at a hospice near Ash, who stumbles into heartbreak surrounded by her daughters, ex(ish) husband, dear friends, a poorly chosen lover (or two), and a rotating cast of beautifully, fleetingly human hospice characters.

As The Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack blasts all day long from the room next door, Edi and Ash reminisce, hold on, and try to let go. Meanwhile, Ash struggles with being an imperfect friend, wife, and parent--with life, in other words, distilled to its heartbreaking, joyful, and comedic essence.

For anyone who's ever lost a friend or had one. Get ready to laugh through your tears.]]> 228 Catherine Newman 0063230917 Cat 0 to-read 4.18 2022 We All Want Impossible Things
author: Catherine Newman
name: Cat
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1)]]> 30918623
But Gamache knows that evil is lurking somewhere behind the white picket fences and that, if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will start to give up its dark secrets...]]> 321 Louise Penny Cat 0 to-read 4.12 2005 Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1)
author: Louise Penny
name: Cat
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mile High (Windy City, #1) 123014107
Chicago hockey isn't complete without me - everyone's favourite player to hate. I know my role, and I play it well. In fact, I thoroughly enjoy spending the majority of my game time in the penalty box before leaving the arena with a new girl on my arm each night.

What I don't like is the new flight attendant on our team's private plane. She works for me, not the other way around. But I'll be sure to remind her of that, and I can guarantee, by the end of the season, she'll be begging to quit her job.

But every road trip blurs the lines, and I can't quite figure out if I keep pushing that flight attendant call button in order to push her buttons, or if it's more than that.

STEVIE

I've been a flight attendant for years. I thought I'd seen it all, but when my new job lands me onboard working for the most egotistical and self-righteous diva in the NHL, I start to second guess everything. Including the promise I made to myself of never hooking up with an athlete again . . . no matter how annoyingly tempting he may be.

Evan Zanders is unfiltered, unapologetic, and too attractive for his own good. He loves his image, but I hate everything about it.

Everything but him.]]> 490 Liz Tomforde Cat 0 to-read 4.18 2022 Mile High (Windy City, #1)
author: Liz Tomforde
name: Cat
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> Ink Blood Sister Scribe 62967342 In this spellbinding debut novel, two estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family's library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection--a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of magic and power.

For generations, the Kalotay family has guarded a collection of ancient and rare books. Books that let a person walk through walls or manipulate the elements--books of magic that half-sisters Joanna and Esther have been raised to revere and protect.

All magic comes with a price, though, and for years the sisters have been separated. Esther has fled to a remote base in Antarctica to escape the fate that killed her own mother, and Joanna's isolated herself in their family home in Vermont, devoting her life to the study of these cherished volumes. But after their father dies suddenly while reading a book Joanna has never seen before, the sisters must reunite to preserve their family legacy. In the process, they'll uncover a world of magic far bigger and more dangerous than they ever imagined, and all the secrets their parents kept hidden; secrets that span centuries, continents, and even other libraries . . .

In the great tradition of Ninth House, The Magicians, and Practical Magic, this is a suspenseful and richly atmospheric novel that draws readers into a vast world filled with mystery and magic, romance, and intrigue--and marks the debut of an extraordinary new voice in speculative fiction.]]> 484 Emma Törzs 0063253488 Cat 0 to-read 4.20 2023 Ink Blood Sister Scribe
author: Emma Törzs
name: Cat
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Measure 56898742 Eight ordinary people. One extraordinary choice.

It seems like any other day. You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out.

But today, when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate: the answer to the exact number of years you will live.

From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. In an instant, the world is thrust into a collective frenzy. Where did these boxes come from? What do they mean? Is there truth to what they promise?

As society comes together and pulls apart, everyone faces the same shocking Do they wish to know how long they'll live? And, if so, what will they do with that knowledge?

The Measure charts the dawn of this new world through an unforgettable cast of characters whose decisions and fates interweave with one best friends whose dreams are forever entwined, pen pals finding refuge in the unknown, a couple who thought they didn't have to rush, a doctor who cannot save himself, and a politician whose box becomes the powder keg that ultimately changes everything.

Enchanting and deeply uplifting, The Measure is a sweeping, ambitious, and invigorating story about family, friendship, hope, and destiny that encourages us to live life to the fullest.]]> 348 Nikki Erlick 0063204223 Cat 0 to-read 4.05 2022 The Measure
author: Nikki Erlick
name: Cat
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[You Could Make This Place Beautiful]]> 61940694 “Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.�

In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman’s personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is “extraordinary� (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.]]> 316 Maggie Smith Cat 5 2025 4.21 2023 You Could Make This Place Beautiful
author: Maggie Smith
name: Cat
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/07
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> Atmosphere 220817728 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s Space Shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.

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

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

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

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

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.]]> 352 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0593158717 Cat 0 to-read 4.44 2025 Atmosphere
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Cat
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Bride (Bride, #1) 181344829 A dangerous alliance between a Vampyre bride and an Alpha Werewolf becomes a love deep enough to sink your teeth into in this new paranormal romance.

Misery Lark, the only daughter of the most powerful Vampyre councilman of the Southwest, is an outcast—again. Her days of living in anonymity among the Humans are over: she has been called upon to uphold a historic peacekeeping alliance between the Vampyres and their mortal enemies, the Weres, and she sees little choice but to surrender herself in the exchange—again...

Weres are ruthless and unpredictable, and their Alpha, Lowe Moreland, is no exception. He rules his pack with absolute authority, but not without justice. And, unlike the Vampyre Council, not without feeling. It’s clear from the way he tracks Misery’s every movement that he doesn’t trust her. If only he knew how right he was�.

Because Misery has her own reasons to agree to this marriage of convenience, reasons that have nothing to do with politics or alliances, and everything to do with the only thing she's ever cared about. And she is willing to do whatever it takes to get back what’s hers, even if it means a life alone in Were territory…alone with the wolf.]]> 410 Ali Hazelwood Cat 0 to-read 3.98 2024 Bride (Bride, #1)
author: Ali Hazelwood
name: Cat
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy]]> 42973186 This thrilling critique of the forces vying for our attention re-defines what we think of as productivity, shows us a new way to connect with our environment, and reveals all that we've been too distracted to see about our selves and our world.

When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as . . . doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process.]]> 225 Jenny Odell 1612197507 Cat 4 2025 3.64 2019 How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
author: Jenny Odell
name: Cat
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: 2025
review:

]]> Poor Deer 127823311 A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.

No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.

Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.]]> 240 Claire Oshetsky 006332766X Cat 0 to-read 3.97 2024 Poor Deer
author: Claire Oshetsky
name: Cat
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Long Island Compromise 55777544 “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?�

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives� successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives� tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.]]> 464 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0593133498 Cat 0 to-read 3.72 2024 Long Island Compromise
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Cat
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read
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 Cat 0 to-read 3.52 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Cat
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Lost Bookshop 65137920 The Keeper of Stories meets The Lost Apothecary in this evocative and charming novel full of mystery and secrets.

‘The thing about books,� she said ‘is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.�

On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found�

For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives.

But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder� where nothing is as it seems.]]> 432 Evie Woods 0008609209 Cat 0 to-read 4.03 2023 The Lost Bookshop
author: Evie Woods
name: Cat
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir]]> 214175247 An unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary life—one forged through a poverty-stricken childhood in “slummy, one-horse towns�; obsessive desire; bursts of comedy; and indispensable friendships, reflecting on the way art, music, and a deep connection to nature helped her on a singular journeyto become a beloved, Grammy-nominated artist.

Neko Case has long been revered as one of music’s most influential artists, whose authenticity, lyrical storytelling, and sly wit have endeared her to a legion of critics, musicians, and lifelong fans.InThe Harder I Fight, the More I Love You,Casebrings her trademarkcandor andprecisionto a memoir that traces her evolution from an invisiblegirl “raised by two dogs and a space heater� in rural Washington state toher improbable emergence as an internationally-acclaimed talent. In luminous, sharp-edged prose, Caseshows readers what it’s like to be left alone for hours and hours as a child, to take refuge in the woods around her home, and to channel themonotony and loneliness and joy that comes from music, camaraderie, and shared experience into art.

The Harder I Fight, the More I Love Youis a rebellious meditation on identity and corruption, and a manifesto on how to make space for ourselves in this world, despite the obstacles we face.


]]> 271 Neko Case 1538710501 Cat 0 to-read 4.07 2025 The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: A Memoir
author: Neko Case
name: Cat
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
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 Cat 0 to-read 3.77 2023 Starling House
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: Cat
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[You or Someone You Love: Reflections from an Abortion Doula]]> 62919371
An eye-opening, transformative, and actionable journey through radical and compassionate community abortion care and support what it looks like, how each and every one of us can practice and incorporate it into our daily lives, and what we can imagine and build together in a post-Roe v. Wade United States.

Abortion touches all of our lives. While statistically nearly everyone knows someone who will receive an abortion in their lifetime, limiting narratives flatten our understanding and assumptions around abortion, while stigma and criminalization stifle discussion. What we lack are the language and tools to provide care and support to all of the members of our communities who receive abortions, before, during, and after them.

Now, Hannah Matthews—abortion care worker, doula, journalist and essayist, and reproductive rights advocate—breathes depth and nuance into the oversimplified narratives surrounding abortion, presenting an accessible guide to the emotional and physical realities of providing and supporting abortion care for our own communities. Featuring stories of real abortion experiences, including Matthews’s own, You or Someone You Love offers a glimpse into the stunningly diverse landscape of abortion care across gender, race, and class lines, while illustrating how we can better support and protect the people who seek abortion in a country that increasingly promotes secrecy and shame.]]> 352 Hannah Matthews 1668005255 Cat 0 to-read 4.37 You or Someone You Love: Reflections from an Abortion Doula
author: Hannah Matthews
name: Cat
average rating: 4.37
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Wedding People 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Cat 4 2025 4.11 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Cat
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: 2025
review:

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

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

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

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.]]> 628 Kelly Link 0812996585 Cat 0 to-read 3.45 2024 The Book of Love
author: Kelly Link
name: Cat
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All the Colors of the Dark 203019740 From the New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End comes a soaring thriller and an epic love story that spans decades.

1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Mohammed Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing.

When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy with one eye, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake.

Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.

A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession, and the blinding light of hope.]]> 608 Chris Whitaker 0593798872 Cat 0 to-read 4.23 2024 All the Colors of the Dark
author: Chris Whitaker
name: Cat
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist]]> 61237011 �This is the story of one of the boldest women in American history: a self-made millionaire, a celebrity in her era, a woman beloved by her patients and despised by the men who wanted to control them.�


In Madame Restell, readers are instantly transported to the glamorous mansions and bejeweled carriages of pre-Gilded Age New York, where they meet our eponymous heroine: the city’s premiere abortionist. An industrious woman who built her business from the ground up, Restell was a self-taught surgeon on the cutting edge of healthcare, and her bustling “boarding house� provided birth control, abortions, and medical assistance to thousands of women—rich and poor alike. As her practice expanded, her notoriety swelled, and Restell established herself as a prime target for tabloids, threats, and lawsuits galore. But far from fading into the background, she flaunted her wealth defiantly, parading across the city in designer duds and expensive jewelry, rubbing her success in the faces of the many politicians, publishers, religious zealots, and male competitors determined to bring her down.

Unfortunately for Madame Restell, her rise to the top of her field coincided with “the greatest scam you’ve never heard about�: the campaign to curtail women’s power by restricting their access to healthcare. For centuries, midwives and female practitioners, like Restell, had tended to public healthcare needs of both men and women. But after the birth of the medical clinic, newly-minted male MDs were eager to edge out their feminine competition—by forcing women back into the home and turning medicine into a standardized, male-only practice. At the same time, a group of powerful, secular men—threatened by women’s burgeoning independence in other fields—persuaded the Christian leadership to declare abortion a sin, rewriting the meaning of “Christian morality� to protect their own interests. By unraveling the misogynistic and misleading lies that put women’s health in jeopardy, Wright simultaneously restores Restell to her rightful place in history and obliterates the faulty, fractured reasoning underlying the very foundation of what has since been dubbed the “pro-life� movement.

Thought-provoking, character-driven, boldly written, and feminist as hell, Madame Restellis required reading for anyone and everyone who believes that when it comes to women’s rights, women’s bodies, and women’s history, women should have the last word.]]> 352 Jennifer Wright 0306826798 Cat 0 to-read 4.16 2023 Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist
author: Jennifer Wright
name: Cat
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Plot (The Book Series, #1)]]> 55315487 Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a psychologically suspenseful novel about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.

Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written—let alone published—anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.

Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that—a story that absolutely needs to be told.

In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.

As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his “sure thing� of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?]]> 320 Jean Hanff Korelitz 125079076X Cat 0 to-read 3.75 2021 The Plot (The Book Series, #1)
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Cat
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mexican Gothic 51513806
Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.]]> 301 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 1529402654 Cat 3 2023 3.70 2020 Mexican Gothic
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Cat
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/11
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: 2023
review:

]]> Cloud Cuckoo Land 56783258 When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.

How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.

Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.

Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?

Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.

Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.]]> 626 Anthony Doerr 1982168439 Cat 0 to-read 4.24 2021 Cloud Cuckoo Land
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Cat
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Playground 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Cat 0 to-read 4.16 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: Cat
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Pumpkin Spice Café (Dream Harbor, #1)]]> 198100928 A spicy small-town romance and TikTok phenomenon, perfect for fans of Hannah Grace and Stephanie Archer.

When Jeanie's aunt gifts her the beloved Pumpkin Spice Café in the small town of Dream Harbor, Jeanie jumps at the chance for a fresh start away from her very dull desk job.

Logan is a local farmer who avoids Dream Harbor's gossip at all costs. But Jeanie's arrival disrupts Logan's routine and he wants nothing to do with the irritatingly upbeat new girl, except that he finds himself inexplicably drawn to her.

Will Jeanie's happy-go-lucky attitude win over the grumpy-but-gorgeous Logan, or has this city girl found the one person in town who won't fall for her charm, or her pumpkin spice lattes�

The Pumpkin Spice Café is a cozy romantic mystery for fans of Gilmore Girls, with a grumpy x sunshine dynamic, a small-town setting and a HEA guaranteed!

Tropes:

� grumpy x sunshine
� small town
� found family
� spicy]]> 360 Laurie Gilmore 0008610673 Cat 4 2024 3.48 2023 The Pumpkin Spice Café (Dream Harbor, #1)
author: Laurie Gilmore
name: Cat
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Gingerbread Bakery (Dream Harbor, #5)]]> 220255008 From the international bestselling author of The Pumpkin Spice Café and The Cinnamon Bun Book Store, comes the highly anticipated Dream Harbor romance for 2025!

A wedding in Dream Harbor can only mean one thing, everyone wants to get involved!

With Jeanie and Logan set to tie the knot, and Kira desperate to hire out her newly renovated barn at the Christmas tree farm, everything seems to be going well. Annie has agreed to bake the cake, and Mac is responsible for, well� just being Mac. And as the whole of Dream Harbor comes together to celebrate the wedding of the year with the snow falling around them, can Annie and Mac put aside their dislike for each just long enough for the ‘I Do’s� or is that one request too far�

The Gingerbread Bakery is a cozy romantic novel with an enemies to lovers dynamic, small-town setting and a HEA guaranteed!

Tropes:

� enemies to lovers
� found family
� small town
� forced proximity]]> 384 Laurie Gilmore 0008728097 Cat 0 to-read 3.89 2025 The Gingerbread Bakery (Dream Harbor, #5)
author: Laurie Gilmore
name: Cat
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Strawberry Patch Pancake House (Dream Harbor, #4)]]> 213186396 Fall in love with the brand new spring romance set in Dream Harbor, from the bestselling author of The Pumpkin Spice Café.

As a renowned chef, single-dad Archer never planned on moving to a small town, let alone running a pancake restaurant. But Dream Harbor needs a new chef, and Archer needs a community to help raise his daughter, Olive.

Iris has never managed to hold down a job for more than a few months. So when Mayor Kelly suggests Archer is looking for a nanny, and Iris might be available, she shudders at the thought. But in need of money she reluctantly agrees.

As Archer and Iris get used to their new roles, is it possible that they might have more in common than they first thought, or is Olive just determined to play match-maker�

Tropes:

� single dad
� forced proximity
� slow burn
� found family
� one bed]]> 361 Laurie Gilmore 0008713340 Cat 0 to-read 3.91 2025 The Strawberry Patch Pancake House (Dream Harbor, #4)
author: Laurie Gilmore
name: Cat
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Christmas Tree Farm (Dream Harbor, #3)]]> 207668463 From the author of the viral TikTok sensation, The Pumpkin Spice Café, comes the only spicy grumpy x sunshine Christmas romcom you need this year!

Kira North hates Christmas. Which is unfortunate since she just bought a Christmas tree farm in a town that’s too cute for its own good.

Bennett Ellis is on vacation in Dream Harbor taking a break from his life in California. And most importantly, taking a break from his latest run of disastrous dates.

After a run in with Kira in her fields, Ben has no intention of offering to help the grumpy owner set up her tree farm, despite the fact she’s clearly got no idea what she’s doing.

Kira knows she should stop being so stubborn, but her farm is not all cute and cozy like people always show on social media, it’s borderline dangerous with no heating, and she’d rather no one saw it.

But somehow fate finds Ben at Kira’s farm once more, and as Kira watches him swing an ax at the first tree, she finds herself appreciating his strength and questionning why she refused help in the first place..

The Christmas Tree Farm is a spicy romantic mystery for fans of Gilmore Girls with a HEA guaranteed!

Tropes:

� grumpy x sunshine
� small town
� forced proximity
� one bed]]> 356 Laurie Gilmore 0008610746 Cat 0 to-read 3.66 2024 The Christmas Tree Farm (Dream Harbor, #3)
author: Laurie Gilmore
name: Cat
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Cinnamon Bun Book Store (Dream Harbor, #2)]]> 210163133 From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller and viral TikTok phenomenon, The Pumpkin Spice Café, comes a brand new spicy romance set in Dream Harbor!

When a secret message turns up hidden in a book in the Cinnamon Bun Bookstore, Hazel can't understand it. As more secret codes appear between the pages, she decides to follow the trail of clues� she just need someone to help her out.

Gorgeous and outgoing fisherman, Noah, is always up for an adventure. And a scavenger hunt sounds like a lot of fun. Even better that the cute bookseller he's been crushing on for months is the one who wants his help!

Hazel didn’t go looking for romance, but as the treasure hunt leads her and Noah around Dream Harbor, their undeniable chemistry might be just as hot as the fresh-out-of-the-oven cinnamon buns the bookstore sells�

The Cinnamon Bun Book Store is a cozy romantic mystery with a HEA guaranteed!

Tropes:
� opposites attract
� small town
� forced proximity
� he falls first]]> 348 Laurie Gilmore 0008641587 Cat 0 to-read 3.68 2024 The Cinnamon Bun Book Store (Dream Harbor, #2)
author: Laurie Gilmore
name: Cat
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Discovery of Witches (All Souls Trilogy, #1)]]> 11468955
Deborah Harkness’s sparkling debut, A Discovery of Witches, has brought her into the spotlight and galvanized fans around the world. In this tale of passion and obsession, Diana Bishop, a young scholar and a descendant of witches, discovers a long-lost and enchanted alchemical manuscript, Ashmole 782, deep in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Its reappearance summons a fantastical underworld, which she navigates with her leading man, vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont.

Harkness has created a universe to rival those of Anne Rice, Diana Gabaldon, and Elizabeth Kostova, and she adds a scholar's depth to this riveting tale of magic and suspense. The story continues in book two, Shadow of Night, and concludes with The Book of Life, coming from Viking in July 2014.]]> 579 Deborah Harkness 0143119680 Cat 3 2024 4.01 2011 A Discovery of Witches (All Souls Trilogy, #1)
author: Deborah Harkness
name: Cat
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: 2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Haunting Adeline (Cat and Mouse, #1)]]> 58823325
I can manipulate the emotions of anyone who lets me.
I will make you hurt, make you cry, make you laugh and sigh.
But my words don't affect him. Especially not when I plead for him to leave.
He's always there, watching and waiting.
And I can never look away.
Not when I want him to come closer.


The Shadow

I didn't mean to fall in love.
But now that I have, I can't stay away.
I'm mesmerized by her smile, by her eyes, and the way she moves.
The way she undresses...
I'll keep watching and waiting. Until I can make her mine.
And once she is, I'll never let her go.
Not even when she begs me to.

While not required, it is highly suggested to read the novella, Satan's Affair, first.

Warning: This book ends on a cliffhanger.]]> 585 H.D. Carlton Cat 0 to-read 4.26 2021 Haunting Adeline (Cat and Mouse, #1)
author: H.D. Carlton
name: Cat
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Lights Out 211200239 MEET BOOKTOK'S LATEST OBSESSION . . . DARK, FUNNY AND SUPER SPICY, CAN YOU HANDLE THE RIDE?

I want someone with a soul as black as night. Someone who would burn the world down for me and not lose a single minute of sleep over it.

Trauma nurse Aly escapes her hard-working days by thirsting after masked men online. To her, nothing could top the fantasy of her favorite tattooed and masked man hunting her down. But she never could have guessed that one drunken text would turn those dreams into reality . . .

I want things most people don't, craving darkness and depravity instead of light and love.

Josh has spent his life avoiding the limelight, but his online persona is another story. At night, he posts masked thirst traps for his millions of fans, until one follower catches his Aly.

Together, Aly and Josh live out their darkest fantasies, unaware that Aly has captured the attention of someone with far more sinister intentions. As Josh turns from predator to protector, he must ask himself how far he'll go for the woman he can't live without.

Lights Out is a fast-paced dark romance with a morally grey male lead. Some themes and scenes may be disturbing to listeners. Please check the content warning at the beginning of the book.

Lights Out, New York Times bestseller, November 2024.]]> 416 Navessa Allen 1638932239 Cat 0 to-read 4.20 2024 Lights Out
author: Navessa Allen
name: Cat
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Spite Before Christmas 217774946
After three years, Frank Campbell, is still grieving the wife he lost to cancer. His sons want him to grow and heal, and urge him to downsize and move out of their family home. When Frank agrees, he finds himself living in a country house, ripe for extreme Christmas decorating–something he does to honor his late wife each year. Things seem to be working out, until his new next door neighbor, Margie, comes charging over and tries to shut down his Christmas joy.

Tension only grows when the two learn they are co-sponsors for the small town Christmas Market, and will have to put their differences aside in order to make it a success. But it’s hard to collaborate, when the top seller at the Christmas Market will take home a prize for the charity of their choice. And Frank’s charity could have a very real impact on his sick granddaughter.

Soon the two are battling both at home and in pursuit of the charity prize. Between trying to sabotage each other’s efforts, Margie and Frank don’t know how they will survive as neighbors. But one enthusiastic little girl, an aging basset hound, a weather disaster, and a little Christmas magic will force them to put their differences aside and learn that life can still begin anew after fifty.

This small-town, enemies-to-lovers, Christmas romance is part of the Ruston Festival series, but can be read as a standalone. This is an open door romance and contains themes of grief, childhood illness, and references to domestic abuse, but has a guaranteed HEA.]]> 334 Jessica Booth Cat 0 to-read 4.49 The Spite Before Christmas
author: Jessica Booth
name: Cat
average rating: 4.49
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Match Made in Autumn 63276975
Amelia is tasked to serve as organizer of the annual fall festival by her demanding boss at the local chamber of commerce. She hopes to give it new life and prove she has what it takes to revitalize the small Louisiana town she has always called home. With the help of her best friend and coworker, Beth, and her feisty Aunt Margie, she's well on her way to making the event one like the city has never seen before. At least, she was until a meddling old woman, rumored to be the town witch, tried to sabotage it.

Local newspaper reporter Rhett's work is suffering. On the heels of a broken marriage, he desperately needs a good story to pull him out of his rut. The newspaper archives draw him to the cold case of a boy who went missing twenty years prior-one he feels an inexplicable connection with.

When the missing boy's story leads Rhett to the city's fall festival site, Amelia and Rhett must confront their embarrassing past and help one another. With the assistance of fate (and a meddling one-eyed rescue dog), Rhett and Amelia rediscover hope, humor, and romance.

Full of romance, love, heartbreak, mystery, and all kinds of autumnal and pumpkin spicy goodness, A Match Made in Autumn is perfect for fans of found family, self-discovery, and serendipity.]]> 273 Jessica Booth Cat 0 to-read 3.80 A Match Made in Autumn
author: Jessica Booth
name: Cat
average rating: 3.80
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Loved One 221473262 336 Aisha Muharrar 0593655842 Cat 0 to-read 3.97 Loved One
author: Aisha Muharrar
name: Cat
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sugar Shack (Peapod Farm, #3) 208430610 Like the seasons, everything changes with time, and for one city-kid turned country girl, she's ready to settle in for the winter...too bad there is always work to be done!Don't miss out on the final volume of New York Times bestselling author Lucy Knisley's Peapod Farm series!

Winter has come to Peapod Farm and Jen couldn't be more excited to spend time with her step-sisters. Jen has been so focused on trying to figure out how she fits into her new family that she hasn't realized she's found her place until Reese calls her 'sister'.

Unfortunately, this puts a rift between Jen and Andy. Andy has been and will always be Reese's ACTUAL sister, Jen is just the STEP sister. Just when Jen thought she had everything figured out she's suddenly not so sure...Jen still has a lot to learn about living life outside the city!

Maybe between Peapod Farm's first snow and learning how to tap a tree for sugar, Jen and Andy both will have a chance to truly understand what it means to be family.]]> 240 Lucy Knisley 0593125509 Cat 0 to-read 4.29 2025 Sugar Shack (Peapod Farm, #3)
author: Lucy Knisley
name: Cat
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore]]> 201751300 An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations

Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In The Bookshop, we see those stakes: what has been, and what might be lost.

Evan Friss’s history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including The Strand, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who appeared to sign books at Marshall Field’s in 1944.

The Bookshop is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life—and why we still need them.]]> 416 Evan Friss 0593299922 Cat 0 to-read 3.92 2024 The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
author: Evan Friss
name: Cat
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today]]> 158649729 The fascinating history of women’s health as it’s never been told before.

For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined and ignored, idealized and sexualized, shamed, subjugated, mutilated, and dismissed. The history of women’s healthcare is a story in which women themselves have too often been voiceless—a narrative instead written from the perspective of men who styled themselves as authorities on the female of the species, yet uninformed by women’s own voices, thoughts, fears, pain and experiences. The result is a cultural and societal legacy that continues to shape the (mis)treatment and care of women.

While the modern age has seen significant advancements in the medical field, the notion that female bodies are flawed inversions of the male ideal lingers on—as do the pervasive societal stigmas and lingering ignorance that shape women’s health and relationships with their own bodies.

Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist and medical historian Dr. Elizabeth Comen peels back the curtain on the collective medical history of women to reintroduce us to our whole bodies—how they work, the actual doctors and patients whose perspectives and experiences laid the foundation for today’s medical thought, and the many oversights that still remain unaddressed. With a physician’s knowledge and empathy, Dr. Comen follows the road map of the eleven organ systems to share unique and untold stories, drawing upon medical texts and journals, interviews with expert physicians, as well as her own experience treating thousands of women.

Empowering women to better understand ourselves and advocate for care that prioritizes healthy and joyful lives—for us and generations to come�All in Her Head is written with humor, wisdom, and deep scientific and cultural insight. Eye-opening, sometimes enraging, yet always captivating, this shared memoir of women’s medical history is an essential contribution to a holistic understanding and much-needed reclaiming of women’s history and bodies.]]> 368 Elizabeth Comen 0063293013 Cat 0 to-read 4.36 2024 All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today
author: Elizabeth Comen
name: Cat
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Want 207006355 What do you want, when no one is watching?
What do you want, when the lights are off?
What do you want, when you are anonymous?

When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet for many reasons � some complicated, some not � so many of us don't talk about it. Our deepest, most intimate fears and fantasies remain locked away inside of us, until someone comes along with the key. Here's the key. In this generation-defining book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous letters of hundreds of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous letter). Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous.]]> 372 Gillian Anderson 1419777297 Cat 0 to-read 3.43 2024 Want
author: Gillian Anderson
name: Cat
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation]]> 75496481 Dr. Jen Gunter fights myths and fear-mongering with real science, inclusive facts, and shame-free advice on the topic that impacts more than 72 million Americans every month: menstruation.

Most women, transgender, and non-binary people who menstruate can expect to have hundreds of periods in a lifetime. So why is real information so hard to find? Despite the significance of menstruation, most education focuses on either increasing the chances of pregnancy or preventing it. Those who menstruate deserve to know more about their bodies than just what happens in service to reproduction. At a time when charlatans, politicians, and social media are succeeding in propagating damaging disinformation with real and devastating consequences, Dr. Gunter provides the antidote with science, myth busting, and no-nonsense facts.]]> 480 Jen Gunter 0806540680 Cat 0 to-read 4.20 2024 Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation
author: Jen Gunter
name: Cat
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[It's Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (But Were Never Told)]]> 195790756 An inclusive and essential guide to reproductive health—including period problems, pelvic pain, menopause, fertility, sexual health, vaginal and urinary conditions, and overall wellbeing―from leading expert Dr. Karen Tang

Reproductive healthcare, from abortion to gender-affirming care, is under siege. The onus continues to fall on patients to find and advocate for the care they need. Dr. Karen Tang is on a mission to transform how women engage with their bodies and their healthcare.

Did you know that one in three women experiences menstrual abnormalities or pelvic issues, yet these conditions are overwhelmingly misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or dismissed? The root causes for these issues, such as polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis, fibroids, ovarian cysts, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and pelvic-floor muscle dysfunction, don’t receive the stream of funding for research and new treatments that other conditions do, despite the potential to affect up to half the population.

It’s Not Hysteria is a comprehensive guide to common conditions and potential treatment options, with practical tools such as symptom prompts and sample questions to ask one's provider. In the face of uncertainty and misinformation, It’s Not Hysteria is destined to become a new classic that educates and empowers.]]> 384 Karen Tang 1250894158 Cat 0 to-read 4.20 2024 It's Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (But Were Never Told)
author: Karen Tang
name: Cat
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> Anita de Monte Laughs Last 127306192 New York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a mesmerizing novel about a first-generation Ivy League student who uncovers the genius work of a female artist decades after her suspicious death

1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn’t. By 1998 Anita’s name has been all but forgotten—certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret.

But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita’s story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.

Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love, and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.]]> 342 Xóchitl González 1250786215 Cat 0 to-read 3.76 2024 Anita de Monte Laughs Last
author: Xóchitl González
name: Cat
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Real Americans 62929342 Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? ]]> 399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 Cat 0 to-read 3.93 2024 Real Americans
author: Rachel Khong
name: Cat
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Blue Sisters 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]> 342 Coco Mellors 0593723767 Cat 0 to-read 3.93 2024 Blue Sisters
author: Coco Mellors
name: Cat
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> Colored Television 220572240 An alternative cover edition can be found here

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.]]> 288 Danzy Senna 0593544374 Cat 0 to-read 3.50 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Cat
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> 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 Cat 0 to-read 3.86 2024 Margo's Got Money Troubles
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Cat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> Orbital 123136728
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?]]> 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Cat 0 to-read 3.55 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Cat
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> Between Friends & Lovers 199532113 Talia Hibbert meets Carley Fortune in this swoon-worthy story of love and friendship in the age of social media—where what you see might not be all you get.

To her countless Instagram followers Josephine Boateng is the dazzling Dr. Jojo—and her opinions on health, growth, and self-love matter. Her message: be smart (she has a medical degree after all), be significant, and do not put up with foolish men.

But behind the camera, Jo’s story is more complicated—she finds her influencer career underwhelming; her potential career in medicine overwhelming, and she’s hung up on her best friend, nepo-baby and romcom heartthrob Ezra Adelman. When Ezra shows up to his thirtieth birthday party with her childhood bully on his arm, however, Josephine realizes that it’s time to take her own advice and prioritize herself for once.

No one is more shocked than Malcolm Waters when his debut novel turns him into a critic’s darling. When he’s invited to a swanky penthouse party to discuss turning his book into a film, he knows rubbing elbows with the elites of entertainment will be great for his career. The only problem: he’s not good with people, and even worse at networking.

Just when he’s about to throw in the towel, he’s rescued by none other than Dr. Jojo. He’s been following her on social media for years, and she’s even more impressive in real life. And to his bewilderment, the feeling is mutual.

But in a world where the lines between private and public are as blurred as those between friendship and love, can they risk it all for something real?]]> 368 Shirlene Obuobi 0063307316 Cat 0 to-read 3.82 2024 Between Friends & Lovers
author: Shirlene Obuobi
name: Cat
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/05
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]]> 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 Cat 0 to-read 3.71 2024 Lifeform
author: Jenny Slate
name: Cat
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame 150246174
Nothing could be more out of character, but after fifty-nine years of marriage, as her husband Bernard’s health declines, and her friends' lives become focused on their grandchildren—which Jenny never had—Jenny decides she wants a little something for herself. So she secretly applies to be a contestant on the prime-time TV show Britain Bakes.

Whisked into an unfamiliar world of cameras and timed challenges, Jenny delights in a new-found independence. But that independence, and the stress of the competition, starts to unearth memories buried decades ago. Chocolate teacakes remind her of a furtive errand involving a wedding ring; sugared doughnuts call up a stranger’s kind act; a simple cottage loaf brings back the moment her life changed forever.

With her baking star rising, Jenny struggles to keep a lid on that first secret—a long-concealed deceit that threatens to shatter the very foundations of her marriage. It’s the only time in six decades that she’s kept something from Bernard. By putting herself in the limelight, has Jenny created a recipe for disaster?]]> 384 Olivia Ford 0593656415 Cat 5 2024 4.05 2024 Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame
author: Olivia Ford
name: Cat
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: 2024
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]]> Someone Else's Bucket List 62593654 After the untimely death of her outgoing, hugely successful influencer sister, an introverted woman takes on the terrifying challenge of completing her sister’s bucket list as the world watches, in a bid to save her family—and others—from the crippling medical debt her cancer battle left behind.

My dying wish is for you to finish my bucket list. I refuse to die without knowing this list will be completed. And I refuse to die without knowing my family will be okay . . .

Jodie Boyd is a shy and anxious twenty-something, completely unsure what to do with her life. Her older sister, Bree, is an adventurous, globe-trotting, hugely successful Instagram influencer with more than a million followers. She’s the most alive person Jodie knows—up until Bree’s unfathomable, untimely death from Leukemia. The Boyds are devastated, not to mention overwhelmed with medical debt. But Bree thought of everything—and soon, Jodie is shocked by a new post on her sister’s Instagram feed.

The first of many Bree recorded in secret, the post foretells a jaw-dropping challenge for Jodie: to complete Bree’s very public bucket list. From “Fly over Antarctica,� to “Perform a walk-on cameo in a Broadway musical,� if Jodie does it—and keeps all Bree’s followers—a corporate sponsor will pay off the staggering medical debt. If she gains followers, the Boyds won’t be the only ones to benefit. It’s crazy. It’s terrifying. It’s impossible, immoral even, to refuse. So, despite the whole world watching, Jodie plunges in, never imagining that in death, her sister will teach her how to live, and that the last item on the list—“Fall in love”—may just prove to be the easiest.]]> 400 Amy T. Matthews 1496742087 Cat 0 to-read 3.93 2023 Someone Else's Bucket List
author: Amy T. Matthews
name: Cat
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/25
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]]> The Unsinkable Greta James 58265135 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Greta James's meteoric rise to indie stardom was hard-won. Before she graced magazine covers and sold out venues, she spent her girlhood strumming her guitar in the family garage. Her first fan was her mother, Helen, whose face shone bright in the dusty downtown bars where she got her start—but not everyone encouraged Greta to follow her dreams. While many daydream about a crowd chanting their name, her father, Conrad, saw only a precarious life ahead for his daughter.

Greta has spent her life trying to prove him wrong, but three months after Helen's sudden death, and weeks before the launch of her high-stakes sophomore album, Greta has an onstage meltdown that goes viral. Attempting to outrun the humiliation and heartbreak, she reluctantly agrees to accompany her father on a week-long Alaskan cruise, the very one that her parents had booked to celebrate their fortieth anniversary.

This could be the James family's last chance to heal old wounds and will prove to be a voyage of discovery for them, as well as for Ben Wilder, a historian also struggling with a major upheaval in his life. Ben is on board to lecture about Jack London's The Call of the Wild, the adventure story Greta's mother adored, and he captures Greta's attention after her streak of dating hanger-ons. As Greta works to build up her confidence and heal, and Ben confronts his uncertain future, they must rely on one another to make sense of life’s difficult choices. In the end, Greta must make the most challenging decision of all: to listen to the song within her or make peace with those who love her.

An indie musician reeling from tragedy reconnects with her estranged father on a week-long cruise in this tale of grief, fame, and love from bestselling author Jennifer E. Smith.]]> 320 Jennifer E. Smith 0593358279 Cat 0 to-read 3.82 2022 The Unsinkable Greta James
author: Jennifer E. Smith
name: Cat
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/25
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]]> Great Big Beautiful Life 218559595 Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.

Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years--or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.

When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.

One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.

Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication

Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.

But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.

And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.]]> 432 Emily Henry Cat 0 to-read 4.15 2025 Great Big Beautiful Life
author: Emily Henry
name: Cat
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/16
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]]> 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 Cat 4 2024 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Cat
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/12
date added: 2024/10/12
shelves: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids (from Friluftsliv to Hygge)]]> 34466962
Bringing Up Bébé meets Last Child in the Woods in this lively, insightful memoir about a mother who sets out to discover if the nature-centric parenting philosophy of her native Scandinavia holds the key to healthier, happier lives for her American children.

When Swedish-born Linda McGurk moved to small-town Indiana with her American husband to start a family, she quickly realized that her outdoorsy ways were not the norm. In Sweden children play outside all year round, regardless of the weather, and letting young babies nap outside in freezing temperatures is not only common—it is a practice recommended by physicians. In the US, on the other hand, she found that the playgrounds, which she had expected to find teeming with children, were mostly deserted. In preschool, children were getting drilled to learn academic skills, while their Scandinavian counterparts were climbing trees, catching frogs, and learning how to compost. Worse, she realized that giving her daughters the same freedom to play outside that she had enjoyed as a child in Sweden could quickly lead to a visit by Child Protective Services.

The brewing culture clash finally came to a head when McGurk was fined for letting her children play in a local creek, setting off an online firestorm when she expressed her anger and confusion on her blog. The rules and parenting philosophies of her native country and her adopted homeland were worlds apart.

Struggling to fit in and to decide what was best for her children, McGurk turned to her own childhood for answers. Could the Scandinavian philosophy of “there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes� be the key to better lives for her American children? And how would her children’s relationships with nature change by introducing them to Scandinavian concepts like friluftsliv (“open-air living�) and hygge (the coziness and the simple pleasures of home)? McGurk embarked on a six-month-long journey to Sweden to find out. There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather is a fascinating personal narrative that highlights the importance of spending time outdoors, and illustrates how the Scandinavian culture could hold the key to raising healthier, resilient, and confident children in America.]]> 304 Linda Åkeson McGurk 150114362X Cat 0 to-read 4.10 2017 There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids (from Friluftsliv to Hygge)
author: Linda Åkeson McGurk
name: Cat
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> <![CDATA[A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother]]> 35039827 A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother, Anna Prushinskaya explores the deep life shifts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood in the United States, a world away from the author’s Soviet homeland. Drawing from inspirations as various as midwife Ina May Gaskin, writer and activist Alice Walker, filmmaker Sophia Kruz and frontierswoman Caroline Henderson, Prushinskaya captures the inherent togetherness of motherhood alongside its accompanying estrangement. She plumbs the deeper waters of compassion, memory and identity, as well as the humorous streams of motherhood as they run up against the daily realities of work and the ever-present eye of social media. How will I return to my life? Prushinskaya asks, and answers by returning us to our own ordinary, extraordinary lives a little softer, a little wiser, and a little less certain of unascertainable things.]]> 118 Anna Prushinskaya 1944850066 Cat 0 to-read 3.00 2017 A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother
author: Anna Prushinskaya
name: Cat
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2)]]> 199347538 Somewhere Beyond the Sea is the hugely anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, one of the best-loved and best-selling fantasy novels of the past decade. Featuring gorgeous orange sprayed edges!

A magical house. A secret past. A summons that could change everything.

Arthur Parnassus lives a good life built on the ashes of a bad one.

He’s the master of a strange orphanage on a distant and peculiar island, and he hopes to soon be the adoptive father to the six dangerous and magical children who live there.

Arthur works hard and loves with his whole heart so none of the children ever feel the neglect and pain that he once felt as an orphan on that very same island so long ago. He is not alone: joining him is the love of his life, Linus Baker, a former caseworker in the Department In Charge of Magical Youth. And there’s the island’s sprite, Zoe Chapelwhite, and her girlfriend, Mayor Helen Webb. Together, they will do anything to protect the children.

But when Arthur is summoned to make a public statement about his dark past, he finds himself at the helm of a fight for the future that his family, and all magical people, deserve.

And when a new magical child hopes to join them on their island home—one who finds power in calling himself monster, a name that Arthur worked so hard to protect his children from—Arthur knows they’re at a breaking point: their family will either grow stronger than ever or fall apart.

Welcome back to Marsyas Island. This is Arthur’s story.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea is a story of resistance, lovingly told, about the daunting experience of fighting for the life you want to live and doing the work to keep it.]]> 416 T.J. Klune 125088120X Cat 0 to-read 4.17 2024 Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2)
author: T.J. Klune
name: Cat
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/03
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]]>