Emily's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 27 Apr 2025 18:02:48 -0700 60 Emily's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Foundation and Empire (Foundation, #2)]]> 1408090 224 Isaac Asimov 0380007746 Emily 0 3.99 1952 Foundation and Empire (Foundation, #2)
author: Isaac Asimov
name: Emily
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: currently-reading, science-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everything Indicates: Selected Poems]]> 230090192 Petr Hruška 1915108152 Emily 0 in-translation, poetry 0.0 Everything Indicates: Selected Poems
author: Petr Hruška
name: Emily
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: in-translation, poetry
review:

]]> The Anthropologists 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,� chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.� Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 192 Aysegül Savas 163973306X Emily 0 to-read 3.88 2024 The Anthropologists
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Emily
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute]]> 58490216
Commuting between English and French, Lauren Elkin chronicles a life in transit. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to her first impressions in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, to the discovery of her ectopic pregnancy, her diary sketches a portrait of the author, not as an artist, but as a pregnant woman on a Parisian bus. In the troubling intimacy of public transport, Elkin queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, registering the ordinary makings of a city and its people..]]> 123 Lauren Elkin 1838014187 Emily 0 travel 3.83 2021 No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute
author: Lauren Elkin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: travel
review:

]]> Agatha of Little Neon 54785502 Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don't), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self.

Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life.

But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They head up a halfway house, where they live alongside castoffs like the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone, to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she will have to reckon with what she sees and feels all on her own. Who will she be if she isn't with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home--or has she just been hiding?

Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette's Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make. It is a novel about female friendship and devotion, the roles made available to us, and how we become ourselves.]]> 273 Claire Luchette 0374265267 Emily 0 adult-fic 3.94 2021 Agatha of Little Neon
author: Claire Luchette
name: Emily
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: adult-fic
review:

]]> Co-Wives, Co-Widows 59697205 128 Adrienne Yabouza 1912868776 Emily 0 3.89 2015 Co-Wives, Co-Widows
author: Adrienne Yabouza
name: Emily
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/22
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: adult-fic, in-translation, read-around-the-world
review:

]]> Cleaner 222274959 Luster, like reading a painting. She's an incredible talent' Julia Raeside, author of Don't Make Me Laugh

'Shannon's debut is a tremendous display of talent. Contemporary in its composition and fearless to experiment, the book elegantly makes bold thematic suggestions which avoid heavy-handedness' Gonzalo Ceron Garcia, author of We Are The End

A woman in her mid-twenties moves back home to live with her parents, where her listlessness fuels an obsession with cleaning, and sets in motion a series of events that lead to her posing as a model in a nude gallery where she encounters a woman whose life will intertwine with her own.

'An utterly unflinching debut novel about becoming a rare and profound book about loneliness, self-expression and disillusionment, featuring sex, love, drugs � and cleaning' Ian Sansom]]> Jess Shannon 1835012655 Emily 0 adult-fic 5.00 Cleaner
author: Jess Shannon
name: Emily
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: adult-fic
review:

]]> The Corrected Version 129656342 68 Rosanna Young Oh 1939728592 Emily 0 signed, poetry 4.33 The Corrected Version
author: Rosanna Young Oh
name: Emily
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: signed, poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption]]> 60835840 Part memoir, part speculative fiction, The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be explores the often surreal experience of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee.

Dream Country author Shannon Gibney returns with The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, a book woven from her true story of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee and fictional story of Erin Powers, the name Shannon was given at birth, a child raised by a white, closeted lesbian.

At its core, the novel is a tale of two girls on two different timelines occasionally bridged by a mysterious portal and their shared search for a complete picture of their origins. Gibney surrounds that story with reproductions of her own adoption documents, letters, family photographs, interviews, medical records, and brief essays on the surreal absurdities of the adoptee experience.

The end result is a remarkable portrait of an American experience rarely depicted in any form.]]> 256 Shannon Gibney 0593111990 Emily 0 memoir, ya 3.86 2023 The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption
author: Shannon Gibney
name: Emily
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: memoir, ya
review:

]]> Nortada, the North Wind 1699577 M. Y. Valladares 1887369171 Emily 0 poetry 0.0 2005 Nortada, the North Wind
author: M. Y. Valladares
name: Emily
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> I'm Always so Serious 86453586 Karisma Price’s stunning debut collection is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone “Autocorrects ‘Nigga� to Night,'� If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence—“We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood.”—but there is also immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, a book “so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious.”]]> 92 Karisma Price 1956046046 Emily 0 poetry 4.28 2023 I'm Always so Serious
author: Karisma Price
name: Emily
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/14
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled]]> 60563720
To fill in the literary gaps and quench her own sense of adventure, Roberson quits her day job and sets off on a Great American Road Trip to visit America’s national parks.

America the Beautiful? is a hilarious trip into the mind of one of the Millennial generation’s funniest writers. Borrowing her Midwestern stepfather’s Prius, she heads west to the Loop of mega-popular parks, over to the ocean and down the Pacific Coast Highway, and, in a feat of spectacularly bad timing, through the southwestern desert in the middle of July. Along the way she meets new friends on their own personal quests, learns to cope with abstinence while missing the comforts of home, and comes to understand the limits—and possibilities—of going to nature to prove to yourself and your Instagram followers that you are, in fact, free.

The result is a laugh-out-loud-while-occasionally-raging-inside travelogue, filled with meditations and many, many jokes on ecotourism, conservation, freedom, traffic, climate change, and the structural and financial inequalities that limit so many Americans� movement. Ultimately, Roberson ponders the question: Is quitting society and going on the road about enlightenment and liberty—or is it just selfish escapism?]]> 304 Blythe Roberson 0063115514 Emily 0 travel 3.74 2023 America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled
author: Blythe Roberson
name: Emily
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: travel
review:
"My book would answer: What if Bill Bryson got his period?" Blythe delivers us reflections on a Bryson-esque, Millennial solo female road trip through America's National Parks. Love the self-awareness of "the road most traveled" and the realizations she has on the way. I did, admittedly, expect a little more menstruation content after that killer line in the beginning!
]]> Youth 15836839
Forced to leave school early, Tove embarks on a chequered career in a string of low-paid, menial jobs. But she is hungry: for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As Europe slides into war, she must navigate exploitative bosses, a Nazi landlady and unwelcome sexual encounters on the road to hard-won independence. Yet she remains ruthlessly determined in the pursuit of her poetic vocation - until at last the miracle she has always dreamed of appears to be within reach.

Youth, the second volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a strikingly honest and immersive portrait of adolescence, filled with biting humour, vulnerability and poeticism.]]> 132 Tove Ditlevsen 0241405556 Emily 0 to-read 4.23 1967 Youth
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Emily
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)]]> 256008 Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.]]> 960 Larry McMurtry 067168390X Emily 0 to-read 4.53 1985 Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Emily
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts]]> 30852 204 Maxine Hong Kingston 0679721886 Emily 0 ccny, memoir 3.74 1976 The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
author: Maxine Hong Kingston
name: Emily
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: ccny, memoir
review:

]]> The River Has Roots 211665070 Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.

“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.�

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.

There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.

But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters� bond but also their lives will be at risk…]]> 144 Amal El-Mohtar 1250341094 Emily 0 did-not-finish 4.20 2025 The River Has Roots
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: Emily
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> The Novices of Lerna 192631581 200 Ángel Bonomini 1945492856 Emily 0 to-read 3.66 2024 The Novices of Lerna
author: Ángel Bonomini
name: Emily
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.]]> 59713003
Noor Hindi’s poems explore colonialism, religion, patriarchy and everything in between with sharp wit and innovative precision. Layered to reflect the intersections of her identity, while constantly interrogating this identity itself, her writing combines lyrical beauty with political urgency.

This collection is ultimately a provocation―on trauma, on art, on what it takes to change the world.]]> 80 Noor Hindi 1642596965 Emily 0 to-read 4.52 2022 Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.
author: Noor Hindi
name: Emily
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Another Country 38474
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.]]> 448 James Baldwin 0141186372 Emily 0 adult-fic, classics 4.32 1962 Another Country
author: James Baldwin
name: Emily
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: adult-fic, classics
review:

]]> I Who Have Never Known Men 60457992 Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.


As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.


Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.]]> 175 Jacqueline Harpman 1945492627 Emily 0 adult-fic 4.10 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Emily
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: adult-fic
review:
Another one for the "I don't know if I enjoyed it, but I won't be able to stop thinking about it for a long time" shelf. Had been reading a little each night on my kindle before falling asleep, but last night I stayed up till nearly 2am reading the last 2/3rds because I couldn't shake the feeling of dread and foreboding and emptiness it would leave me with if I tried to stop. Spent a long time this morning on reddit reading fan theories, and my conclusion is, while it doesn't matter what it all meant, it matters that we think about it. In the end, engaging in this kind of search for meaning is what kept the narrator going, what made her human when everything else had been stripped from her.
]]> Hunchback 214986269 A bombshell bestseller in Japan, a provocative, defiant debut novel about a young woman in a care home seeking autonomy and the full possibilities of her life.

Born with a congenital muscle disorder,Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka's physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“If I were to live again, I’d want to be a high-class prostitute�). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To her surprise, her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka's sense of herself as a woman in the world.

Hunchback has shaken Japanese literary culture with its skillful depiction of the physical body andunrepentant humor. Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, it's a feminist story about the dignity of an individual who insists on her right to make choices for herself, no matter the consequences. Formally creative and refreshingly unsentimental, Hunchback depicts the joy, anger, and desires of a woman demanding autonomy in a world that doesn't aways grant it to people like her. Full of wit, bite, and heart, this unforgettable novel reminds us all of the full potentialof our lives, no matter the limitations we experience.]]> 112 Saou Ichikawa 0593734718 Emily 0 adult-fic, in-translation 3.51 2023 Hunchback
author: Saou Ichikawa
name: Emily
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: adult-fic, in-translation
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Want to Burn This Place Down: Essays]]> 219838785 A debut essay collection by the inimitable cultural critic Maris Kreizman—an introspective, searing account of the life experiences that have pushed this former “good Democrat� even further to the political left

At the heart of this funny, acerbic, and bravely honest book of essays is Maris Kreizman, a former rule follower and ambition monster who once believed the following truths to be that working very hard would lead to admission to a good college, which would lead to a good job at a good company, which would then lead to personal fulfillment and a sense of purpose, along with adequate health care and eventual home ownership and plenty of money waiting in a retirement account. Like any good Democrat and feminist, she believed that if she just worked hard and played by the rules, she was guaranteed a safe and comfortable life.

Now in her forties, the only thing Maris Kreizman knows for sure is that she no longer has faith in American institutions or any of their hollow promises. Now she knows that the rules are meant to serve some folks better than others; and, actually, they serve no one all that well—not even Kreizman. Disturbed by the depth and scope of the liberal myths in which she once so fervently believed, Kreizman takes readers on an intimate journey that revisits some of her most profound revelations, demonstrating that it’s never too late to become radicalized.

With Kreizman’s signature wit and blunt self-reflection, and more than a little transformative rage, I Want to Burn This Place Down is a book for anyone who wishes they could go back in time to give their younger selves the real truth about the fractured country they have inherited—and the encouragement to rebuild something better in its place.]]> 176 Maris Kreizman 0063305828 Emily 0 to-read 3.67 2025 I Want to Burn This Place Down: Essays
author: Maris Kreizman
name: Emily
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad]]> 17573700 112 Alice Oswald 0393347273 Emily 0 poetry 4.29 2011 Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad
author: Alice Oswald
name: Emily
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2)]]> 531509
When three American men discover a community of women, living in perfect isolation in the Amazon, they decide there simply must be men somewhere. How could these women survive without man's knowledge, experience and strength, not to mention reproductive power? In fact, what they have found is a civilisation free from disease, poverty and the weight of tradition. All alone, the women have created a society of calm and prosperity, a feminist utopia that dares to threaten the very concept of male superiority.]]> 147 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0394736656 Emily 0 to-read 3.46 1915 Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2)
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Emily
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1915
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Modern Poetry: Poems 127282577
In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time’s deep isolation and divisiveness and What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean ? “It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem,� Seuss writes. “You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made.� What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.]]> 112 Diane Seuss 1644452758 Emily 0 poetry 4.29 Modern Poetry: Poems
author: Diane Seuss
name: Emily
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead]]> 42983724 WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .

A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk 0525541330 Emily 0 to-read 3.92 2009 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Emily
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sucker Punch: Essays 211003937 The long-awaited follow-up from one of the most original and hilarious voices writing today.

Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her signature humor and fierce intelligence to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she’s had—with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself—all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.]]> 272 Scaachi Koul 1250270502 Emily 0 to-read 4.04 2025 Sucker Punch: Essays
author: Scaachi Koul
name: Emily
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Stag Dance 215362032 In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones� imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,� a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,� a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.]]> 304 Torrey Peters 0593595645 Emily 0 to-read 4.05 2025 Stag Dance
author: Torrey Peters
name: Emily
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mona 56427586
When she is nominated for “the most important literary award in Europe,� Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, so she trades the temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. Now she is stuck in the company of all her jet-lagged—and mostly male—competitors, arriving from Japan, France, Armenia, Iran, and Colombia. Isolated as they are, the writers do what writers do: exchange compliments, nurse envy and private resentments, stab rivals in the back, and hop in bed together. All the while, Mona keeps stumbling across the mysterious traces of a violence she cannot explain.

As her adventures in Scandinavia unfold, Mona finds that she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up with them in the middle of nowhere. In Mona, Pola Oloixarac paints a hypnotic, scabrous, and ultimately jaw-dropping portrait of a woman facing down a hipster elite to which she does and does not belong. A survivor of both patronization and bizarre sexual encounters, Mona is a new kind of feminist. But her past won’t stay past, and strange forces are working to deliver her the test of a lifetime.]]> 194 Pola Oloixarac 0374722080 Emily 0 did-not-finish 3.44 2019 Mona
author: Pola Oloixarac
name: Emily
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> The Writing of Fiction 61242865
The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton contains brilliant advice on writing from the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize -- for her novel The Age of Innocence. In The Writing of Fiction, Wharton provides general comments on the roots of modern fiction, the various approaches to writing a piece of fiction, and the development of form and style. She also devotes entire chapters to the telling of a short story, the construction of a novel, and the importance of character and situation in the novel. Not only a valuable treatise on the art of writing, The Writing of Fiction also allows readers to experience the inimitable but seldom heard voice of one of America's most important and beloved writers, and includes a final chapter on the pros and cons of Marcel Proust.]]> 128 Edith Wharton 0684845318 Emily 0 scribner, craft 3.57 1925 The Writing of Fiction
author: Edith Wharton
name: Emily
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1925
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: scribner, craft
review:

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

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

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

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Emily 0 to-read 3.53 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Emily
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy]]> 196600406 “Today it hit me when he hit me, blood shaking in my brain. Maybe there wasn’t a savior coming. Maybe it was up to me to save me.�

Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles—a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, “keepers of the home.�

Tia knew that to their neighbors her family was strange, but she also couldn't risk exposing their secret lifestyle to police, doctors, teachers, or anyone outside of their church. Christians were called in scripture to be “in the world, not of it.� So, she hid in plain sight as years of abuse and pain followed. When Tia realized she was the only one who could protect her children from becoming the next generation of patriarchal men and submissive women, she began to resist and question how they lived. But in the patriarchy, a woman with opinions is in danger, and eventually, Tia faced an urgent and extreme choice: stay and face dire consequences, or flee with her children.

Told in a beautiful, honest, and sometimes harrowing voice, A Well-Trained Wife is an unforgettable and timely memoir about a woman's race to save herself and her family and details the ways that extreme views can manifest in a marriage.]]> 304 Tia Levings Emily 0 4.36 2024 A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy
author: Tia Levings
name: Emily
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves:
review:

]]> Blob: A Love Story 212994452 'A modern-day Mrs. Caliban, BLOB is a book that looks at identity and desire in profoundly interesting ways'
Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here

A hilarious and moving debut novel about a young woman who decides to turn a sentient blob into her perfect boyfriend...

The daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, Vi Liu has never quite fit into her Midwestern college town. Now at twenty-three, after getting dumped and dropping out of college, Vi works as a front desk attendant at a hotel where she refills cucumber water samovars and fends off overtures of friendship from her bubbly blond coworker, Rachel. But when Vi decides to accompany Rachel to a local drag show, her life changes forever. In the alley outside the bar, next to a trash can, is a blob with beady black eyes. Unable to leave it behind, Vi picks up the creature and, in a moment of drunken desperation, takes it home with her.

As her pet blob becomes sentient, Vi realizes it obeys her commands and she decides to mold the blob into her ideal partner. She feeds it sugary cereal and a stream of pop culture, and soon the creature transforms into a movie-star handsome white man. But as Vi's desire to be loved unconditionally threatens to spiral out of control, she is forced to confront her lonely childhood, the ex-boyfriend who has unfriended her, and the racial marginalization that has defined her relationships. Ultimately, Vi embarks on a journey of self-discovery and learns that it's impossible to control those you love.

Blending the familiar with the fantastical, BLOB tells a witty, heartfelt story of what it means to be human.

'An inventive, utterly unique debut'
Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light]]> 256 Maggie Su 0063358646 Emily 0 to-read 3.39 2025 Blob: A Love Story
author: Maggie Su
name: Emily
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Theme Park of Women's Bodies]]> 214350780 The Theme Park of Women's Bodies takes readers on a tour of worlds built by, for, or around women. By turns darkly satirical and almost utopian, Cooper's fierce, fabulist stories explore the power and promise of these spaces as sanctuaries and strongholds, places of connection and creation. Yet at the same time, they point to the ways that a narrowly defined femininity feeds exploitation and violence, inviting readers to consider the breadth of "woman" as a category with a wide-ranging history, present, and future. Grappling with the role of gender and the body in creating and maintaining communities, these stories dream of worlds where we can all escape our narrow orbits.]]> 49 Maggie Cooper 1949344428 Emily 5 4.38 2024 The Theme Park of Women's Bodies
author: Maggie Cooper
name: Emily
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: short-stories, speculative-fiction
review:
I loved visiting the worlds of these stories! It's a chapbook of short short fiction, but each one is worthy of being savored so I took my time. Not a wasted word.
]]> The Employees 75615791

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award


Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.
Olga Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity. It was shortlisted for the the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.]]> 139 Olga Ravn Emily 0 3.47 2018 The Employees
author: Olga Ravn
name: Emily
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Eurotrash 205478791
From “the great German-language writer of his generation� (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian� (the first was his best-selling 1995 debut, Faserland). Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has arrived to care for his eighty-year-old mother after her discharge from a mental institution. Reckoning with his family’s dark history—his long-dead grandfather was intimately associated with and unapologetically supportive of the Nazis—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, Christian sets off on a road-trip with her. As they traverse Switzerland in a hired cab, mother and son attempt to give away her vast fortune, which they’re carrying in a large plastic bag, to random strangers. By turns disturbing, disorienting, hilarious, and poignant, Eurotrash tells an intensely personal and unsparingly critical story of contemporary culture; a story that shows us a writer at the pinnacle of his powers of insight and observation.]]> 192 Christian Kracht 1324094567 Emily 0 to-read 3.66 2021 Eurotrash
author: Christian Kracht
name: Emily
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar]]> 220160852 A Chinese American woman spins tragedy into comedy when her life falls apart in a taut, wry debut novel that grapples with grief, motherhood, and myths—perfect for fans of Joan Is Okay and Crying in H Mart.

A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie.

A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie.

Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation. She starts talking to Maggie (the tumor), getting acquainted with her body’s new inhabitant. She overgenerously creates a “Guide to My A User’s Manual� for Maggie (the other woman), hoping to ease the process of discovering her ex-husband’s whims and quirks. She turns her children’s bedtime stories into retellings of Chinese folklore passed down by her own mother, in an attempt to make them fall in love with their shared culture—and to maybe save herself in the process.

In the style of Jenny Offill and the tradition of Nora Ephron’s hilarious and devastating writing on heartbreak and womanhood, Maggie is a master class in transforming personal tragedy into a form of defiant comedy.]]> 208 Katie Yee 166808421X Emily 0 adult-fic 4.20 2025 Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
author: Katie Yee
name: Emily
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: adult-fic
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole]]> 205435940 Join Cecilia Blomdahl in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the world’s northernmost town.

Located in the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole, Svalbard is a unique archipelago that boasts stunning wintry landscapes, endangered Arctic animals, and awe-inspiring natural phenomena. Since 2015, Cecilia has called this beautiful and remote location home. Along with her partner, Christoffer, and her dog, Grim, she has adjusted to life at the top of the world—where polar bears roam free and northern lights shine bright.

With evocative text and spectacular photography, Cecilia shares the joys and challenges of adapting to an inhospitable climate. Her story begins in the darkness of polar night, and the allure of her remote location is revealed gradually as sunlight returns months later. Through personal stories and firsthand advice, Cecilia offers insight for anyone seeking to thrive in unusual living conditions.

Whatever your location, Life on Svalbard will give you a deeper understanding of why people choose to live in extreme environments and perhaps help you find the hidden magic of where you live too.]]> 256 Cecilia Blomdahl 0744095093 Emily 0 4.46 Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole
author: Cecilia Blomdahl
name: Emily
average rating: 4.46
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip]]> 212426504 A delightfully insightful exploration of our obsession with gossip that weaves together journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, from the host of the massively popular Normal Gossip podcast.

Can you keep a secret? As the pandemic forced us to socialize at a distance, Kelsey McKinney was mourning the juicy updates, jaw-dropping stories, and idle chatter that she’d typically collect over drinks with friends.She realized she wasn’t the only one missing these little morsels and her hunger for this aspect of normalcy took on a life of its ownandthe blockbuster Normal Gossip podcast was born.With listenership in the millions and gossip quickly becoming her day job, Kelsey found herself with the urge to think more critically about gossip as a form, to better understand the role that it plays in our culture.

In YOU DIDN'T HEAR THIS FROM ME, McKinney explores the murkiness of everyday storytelling. Why is gossip considered a sin and how can we better recognize when gossip is being weaponized against the oppressed? Why do we think we’re entitled to every detail of a celebrity’s personal life because they are a public figure? And how do we even define “gossip,� anyway? She dishes on the art of eavesdropping and dives deep into how pop culture has changed the way that we look at hearsay. But as much as the book aims to treat gossip as a subject worthy of rigor, it also hopes to capture the heart of how enchanting and fun it can be to lean over and whisper something a little salacious into your friend’s ear. With wit and honesty, McKinney unmasks what we're actually searching for when we demand to know the truth � and how much the truth really matters in the first place. ]]> 288 Kelsey McKinney 1538757400 Emily 0 audiobooks, essays 3.86 2025 You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip
author: Kelsey McKinney
name: Emily
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: audiobooks, essays
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource]]> 217869789 An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller

From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

“An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.� �New York Times

“Brilliant book� Reading it has made me change the way I work and think.”—Rachel Maddow

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.� Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens� Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.� The Sirens� Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.]]> 336 Christopher L. Hayes 0593653114 Emily 0 to-read 4.04 2025 The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
author: Christopher L. Hayes
name: Emily
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy]]> 193782049
Raised in the Christian patriarchy movement, Cait West was homeschooled and could only wear clothes her father deemed modest. She was five years old the first time she was told her swimsuit was too revealing, to go change. There would be no college in her future, no career. She was a stay-at-home daughter and would move out only when her father allowed her to become a wife. She was trained to serve men, and her life would never be her own.

Until she escaped.

In Rift , Cait West tells a harrowing story of chaos and control hidden beneath the facade of a happy family. Weaving together lyrical meditations on the geology of the places her family lived with her story of spiritual and emotional manipulation as a stay-at-home daughter, Cait creates a stirring portrait of one young woman’s growing awareness that she is experiencing abuse. With the ground shifting beneath her feet, Cait mustered the courage to break free from all she’d ever known and choose a future of her own making.

Rift is a story of survival. It’s also a story about what happens after you survive. With compassion and clarity, Cait explores the complex legacy of patriarchal religious trauma in her life, including the ways she has also been complicit in systems of oppression. A remarkable literary debut, Rift offers an essential personal perspective on the fraught legacy of purity culture and recent reckonings with abuse in Christian communities.]]> 252 Cait West 0802883583 Emily 0 to-read 4.07 2024 Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy
author: Cait West
name: Emily
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cuentos de buenas noches para niñas rebeldes]]> 37782572 224 Elena Favilli 6070743490 Emily 0 4.27 2016 Cuentos de buenas noches para niñas rebeldes
author: Elena Favilli
name: Emily
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: audiobooks, en-español, read-in-part
review:

]]> Bluff: Poems 196674628
Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of “ars poetica� gives way to “anti poetica� and “ars america� to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of American acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem―part map, part annotation, part visual argument―offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after the city decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love―those given and made―are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.]]> 160 Danez Smith 1644452987 Emily 0 lgbtq, poetry 4.42 2024 Bluff: Poems
author: Danez Smith
name: Emily
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: lgbtq, poetry
review:

]]> Rejection: Fiction 204079049
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

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

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337894 Emily 0 3.87 2024 Rejection: Fiction
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Emily
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves:
review:
Essential reading for the DOGE era.
]]> Stone Yard Devotional 219430717 Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, a novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be good, from the award-winning author of The Weekend.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.

Meditative, moving, and finely observed, Stone Yard Devotional is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power, exploring what it means to retreat from the world, the true nature of forgiveness, and the sustained effect of grief on the human soul.]]> 304 Charlotte Wood Emily 0 to-read 3.89 2023 Stone Yard Devotional
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Emily
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Peter Pan: Peter and Wendy and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens]]> 153853 Peter Pan is edited with an introduction by Jack Zipes in Penguin Classics.

When Peter Pan and his fairy companion Tinker Bell fly in through the window of Wendy's nursery one night, it is the beginning of an adventure that whisks Wendy and her brothers Michael and John off to Neverland. There they will find mermaids, fairies, pirates led by the sinister Captain Hook, and the crocodile who bit off his leg - and still pursues him in hope of the rest! Peter Pan originally appeared as a baby living a magical life among birds and fairies in J.M. Barrie's sequence of stories, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. His adventures capture the spirit of childhood - and of rebellion against the role of adulthood in conventional society.

This edition includes the novel and the stories, and reproduces the original illustrations by Francis Donkin Bedford and Arthur Rackham. In his introduction, Jack Zipes sifts through the psychological interpretations that have engaged critics, explores the cultural and literary contexts in which we can appreciate Barrie's enduring creation, and shows why Peter Pan is fundamentally a work that urges adults to reconnect with their own imagination.]]> 234 J.M. Barrie 014243793X Emily 5 classics 3.85 2005 Peter Pan: Peter and Wendy and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
author: J.M. Barrie
name: Emily
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2013/08/14
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: classics
review:

]]> The Ha-Ha 40746330
‘A very fine first novel. Dawson writes very well, with a tender awareness of the ironies of her theme and a poetic perception of how tremulous is the distinction between the mad world and the sane.� - Glasgow Herald

‘A remarkably talented first novel ... Miss Dawson is neither sentimental nor sensational ... Her heroine is a convincing and sympathetic character, and when her mind begins to shift into the nightmare perspective of schizophrenia the writing creates an atmosphere of quiet terror.� - Observer


‘Cool, short, tender and occasionally as prettily ruthless as the impact of a stiletto heel . . . twice as alarming because everything is implied rather than explicit.� - Tatler

‘A cool, clever, well-constructed novel about � smoothly speaking � the nature of reality. . . . Miss Dawson writes very well indeed, with remarkable calmness and detachment . . . [B]rilliant.� - Penelope Mortimer, Sunday Times

‘A little masterpiece.� - Bookman

‘A novel about madness which succeeds completely.� - Daily Telegraph

‘I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules.� So says Josephine, the heroine of Jennifer Dawson’s remarkable novel, an exploration of a young woman’s mental illness that met with universal critical acclaim and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize as the best novel of the year. After suffering a breakdown following the death of her mother, Josephine finds herself confined to an institution where patients are ‘treated� by such means as electroshock therapy and lobotomies. But when she falls in love with Alasdair, a fellow patient she meets on the grassy bank of the ha-ha, she decides that her recovery will be on her own defiant terms. Inspired by the author’s personal experiences, The Ha-Ha (1961) remains a moving and powerful examination of mental illness and the treatment of those who suffer from it. This new edition includes an afterword by the author and an introduction by John Sutherland.]]> Jennifer Dawson Emily 0 to-read 4.33 1961 The Ha-Ha
author: Jennifer Dawson
name: Emily
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Vanishing World 219300660 From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.

Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre and troubling effect. Her depictions of a happily unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman convinced she is an alien in Earthlings have endeared her to millions of readers worldwide. Vanishing World takes Murata’s universe to a bold new level, imagining an alternative Japan where attitudes to sex and procreation are wildly different to our own.

As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated� in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system� by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage—sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest—Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only “Kodomo-chan.� Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?]]> 240 Sayaka Murata 0802164668 Emily 0 to-read 3.52 2015 Vanishing World
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Emily
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Emily 0 4.51 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Emily
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: general-nonfiction, audiobooks
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea]]> 33891726 The Accusation is a deeply moving and eye-opening work of fiction that paints a powerful portrait of life under the North Korean regime. Set during the period of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il’s leadership, the seven stories that make up The Accusation give voice to people living under this most bizarre and horrifying of dictatorships. The characters of these compelling stories come from a wide variety of backgrounds, from a young mother living among the elite in Pyongyang whose son misbehaves during a political rally, to a former Communist war hero who is deeply disillusioned with the intrusion of the Party into everything he holds dear, to a husband and father who is denied a travel permit and sneaks onto a train in order to visit his critically ill mother. Written with deep emotion and writing talent, The Accusation is a vivid depiction of life in a closed-off one-party state, and also a hopeful testament to the humanity and rich internal life that persists even in such inhumane conditions.]]> 257 Bandi 0802189342 Emily 0 4.03 2014 The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea
author: Bandi
name: Emily
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/07
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves:
review:

]]> All My Bicycles 200352506 In this nonlinear graphic memoir, Powerpaola uses bicycles she’s owned as a vehicle to explore the world, her relationships, her memories � and herself.

“A bicycle is a machine that you power yourself. You decide where you want to go,� writes cartoonist Powerpaola, as the guiding principle of this graphic memoir. All My Bicycles is a story that never really begins, existing all at once in Paola’s memory. The book illustrates Powerpaola’s relationships through her many in fragments, it takes her back to her great loves and losses, friendships, and disappointments.

In remembering a bicycle, a manhole, an alligator, or a necklace, Powerpaola reflects upon these items in her consciousness without finding a concrete solution. Paola’s memories arrive abruptly and leave just as fast, creating a pathway through herself she can only find in moving forward. All My Bicycles is a glimpse into how exploring these fleeting tangible moments―of physical objects, of traveling and seeing a new city, of even the end of a relationship―is an exploration of self.]]> 108 Powerpaola 1683969502 Emily 0 3.54 2022 All My Bicycles
author: Powerpaola
name: Emily
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/06
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: graphic-novels-or-comics, memoir, in-translation
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma]]> 58214328 A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life.

"Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bones know."

By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.

Both of Foo's parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don't move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it.

Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman's ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.]]> 352 Stephanie Foo 0593238109 Emily 0 to-read 4.50 2022 What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
author: Stephanie Foo
name: Emily
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Good Girl 195644142
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.]]> 368 Aria Aber Emily 0 to-read 3.72 2025 Good Girl
author: Aria Aber
name: Emily
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Poetry Handbook 71652 Poetry Handbook was written with writers of poetry most vividly in my mind; their needs and problems and increase have most directly been my concerns. But I am hopeful that readers of poetry will feel welcome here, too, and will gain from these chapters an insight into the thoughtful machinery of the poem, as well as some possibly useful ideas about its history, and, if you please, some ideas also of the long work and intense effort that goes into the making of a poem. The final three chapters are especially directed towards issues important to the writer of poems, but here too the reader of poems is heartily welcome. (...)"

[Text taken from the final part of the Introduction written by Mary Oliver]]]> 130 Mary Oliver 0156724006 Emily 5 craft, ccny 4.23 1994 A Poetry Handbook
author: Mary Oliver
name: Emily
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: craft, ccny
review:

]]> Foundation (Foundation, #1) 332040 The first novel in Isaac Asimov's classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series

For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future--to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save humankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire--both scientists and scholars--and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.]]> 200 Isaac Asimov 0380440652 Emily 0 science-fiction 3.89 1951 Foundation (Foundation, #1)
author: Isaac Asimov
name: Emily
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1951
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: science-fiction
review:

]]> Jesus' Son 6150891
Denis Johnson's now classic story collection Jesus' Son chronicles a wild netherworld of addicts and lost souls, a violent and disordered landscape that encompasses every extreme of American culture. These are stories of transcendence and spiraling grief, of hallucinations and glories, of getting lost and found and lost again. The insights and careening energy in Jesus' Son have earned the book a place of its own among the classics of twentieth-century American literature. It was adapted into a critically-praised film in 1999.]]> 133 Denis Johnson 031242874X Emily 0 adult-fic, short-stories 4.01 1992 Jesus' Son
author: Denis Johnson
name: Emily
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: adult-fic, short-stories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone]]> 53241562 A deeply-reported examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.

You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.

In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth -- the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries -- from the unpaid intern, to the overworked nurse, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete -- Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work.
As Jaffe argues, understanding the trap of the labor of love will empower us to work less and demand what our work is worth. And once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.]]> 432 Sarah Jaffe 1568589395 Emily 0 to-read 3.97 2021 Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
author: Sarah Jaffe
name: Emily
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry]]> 17707469
Recipient of the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Award (Dove)

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, introduces readers to the most significant and compelling poems of the past hundred years in The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry . Now available in paperback, this indispensable volume represents the full spectrum of aesthetic sensibilities—with varying styles, voices, themes, and cultures—while balancing important poems with vital periods of each poet. Featuring works by Mary Oliver, Derek Walcott, John Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kevin Young, Terrance Hayes, Li-Young Lee, Joanna Klink and A.E. Stallings, Dove’s selections paint a dynamic and cohesive portrait of modern American poetry.]]> 599 Rita Dove 0143121480 Emily 0 4.17 2011 The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry
author: Rita Dove
name: Emily
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: currently-reading, ccny, poetry
review:

]]> [...]: Poems 205312834 From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

FadyJoudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,� articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land.


Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,� Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.� These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time.…] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”]]> 82 Fady Joudah 1639551298 Emily 0 poetry 4.49 2024 [...]: Poems
author: Fady Joudah
name: Emily
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation]]> 215119205 Excavating a sometimes wacky, and equally harmful, part of white Evangelical culture

Roasted marshmallows, campfire stories, shaving cream battles--for some of us, Christian summer camp is where we felt most at home, where we could be the most authentic versions of ourselves. But for white Evangelical campers in particular, camp was also often the place to inherit a toxic image of God and of each other. From purity-motivated admonitions not to "make purple," to the emotional manipulation of "Cry Night," to the utter lack of diversity among campers and staff, the culture of white Evangelical camps has too often betrayed a generation.

In Church Camp, longtime camp speaker Cara Meredith exposes the ways in which white Evangelical camps sold individualized versions of Jesus to impressionable youth. Campers were forced to "sit with their sin" so they could fully understand God's conditional love. Camp life emotionally coaxed campers into making a formative commitment to Christ (and therefore to white Evangelical subculture). Further, camps commodified the faith of these young people to bolster their own funding and power.

Along the way, Meredith weaves in notable history of the camping movement, revivalism, and white Evangelicalism. She asks profound questions about who God is and what it means to be human. Following the progression of a typical week at camp, Church Camp weaves together Meredith's own story and the powerful stories of dozens of other former campers and camp staff members. Along the way, she invites us into the tension of accounting for our past while moving toward a better future.

Whether you went to church camp or not, whether you loved camp or hated it, Church Camp will peel back the layers, hold the powerful accountable, and help you envision a more vibrant, loving, and inclusive faith.]]> 226 Cara Meredith Emily 0 to-read 4.15 2025 Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation
author: Cara Meredith
name: Emily
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Skunks 199056181
Dear Skunks, I wrote. Then I got stuck. What was there to say about the skunks? Of course there was the smell—the spraying. Everyone’s mind jumped to the spraying. I often forgot about the spraying entirely, which was nice because it made me feel that I wasn’t like other people.

From the outside, Isabel doesn’t seem to have much going on. It’s the summer after college graduation and she’s moved back to her hometown, where she spends her days house-sitting, babysitting, working the front desk at a yoga studio, and hanging out with her childhood friend Ellie. But on the inside, Isabel’s mind is always running, always analyzing, and right now, she’s trying hard to not let her thoughts give weight to boys. So when Isabel spots three baby skunks in the yard, their presence is not only a strangely thrilling break from the expected, it feels like a fortuitous sign from the universe. Skunks. That’s what she should be thinking about.

As the summer unfolds, Isabel becomes increasingly preoccupied with the skunks, while also navigating her various jobs and an ambiguous relationship with Eli, the son of the couple she’s house-sitting for. In her own life and in the imagined inner lives of the skunks, Isabel ponders the nature of existence, love vs. infatuation, and the many small moments that make us animal, make us human. The Skunks is an unforgettable coming-of-age story about the complexities of crushes, desire, friendship, and modern life.]]> 240 Fiona Warnick 1959030612 Emily 0 adult-fic 3.64 2024 The Skunks
author: Fiona Warnick
name: Emily
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: adult-fic
review:

]]> <![CDATA[In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space]]> 211025435 A stirring journey into the soul of a fractured America that confronts the enduring specter of white supremacy in our art, monuments, and public spaces, from a captivating new literary voiceAmid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces andcontemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces in which we can pay tribute to our nation’s true history.]]> 256 Irvin Weathersby Jr. 0593299159 Emily 0 4.15 2025 In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space
author: Irvin Weathersby Jr.
name: Emily
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Vita Nostra (Vita Nostra, #1) 39090430
Our life is brief . . .

Sasha Samokhina has been accepted to the Institute of Special Technologies.

Or, more precisely, she’s been chosen.

Situated in a tiny village, she finds the students are bizarre, and the curriculum even more so. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their transgressions and failures; instead, it is their families that pay a terrible price. Yet despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that defy the dictates of matter and time; experiences which are nothing she has ever dreamed of . . . and suddenly all she could ever want.

A complex blend of adventure, magic, science, and philosophy that probes the mysteries of existence, filtered through a distinct Russian sensibility, this astonishing work of speculative fiction—brilliantly translated by Julia Meitov Hersey—is reminiscent of modern classics such as Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Max Barry’s Lexicon, and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, but will transport them to a place far beyond those fantastical worlds.]]> 417 Marina Dyachenko Emily 0 to-read 3.98 2007 Vita Nostra (Vita Nostra, #1)
author: Marina Dyachenko
name: Emily
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Vertigo & Ghost: Poems 55298342
Winner of the 2019 Forward and Roehampton Prizes, Vertigo & Ghost offers a searing reimagining of Greek myths of sexual violence that crackles with rage, energy, and empathy. Beginning with a poem about the teenage dawning of sexuality, Vertigo & Ghost pitches quickly into a fierce, electrifying, riveting sequence that exposes Zeus as a serial rapist, for whom women are prey and sex is weaponized. As unflinching, devastating poems of vulnerability and anger confront Zeus with aggressions both personal and historical, his house comes crumbling down. In its place, acclaimed poet Fiona Benson reveals a disturbing contemporary world in which violent acts against women continue to be perpetrated on a daily, even hourly, basis. In the volume’s second half, Benson shifts to an intimate and lyrical document of depression and family life. These moving poems probe the ambivalent terrain of early motherhood―its anxieties and claustrophobias as well as its gifts of tenderness and love―reclaiming the sanctuary of domestic private life and the right to raise children in peace and safety. Together, these two halves form a complex portrait of modern womanhood. Dynamic in its range and risk, Vertigo & Ghost introduces an important British voice to an American audience, a voice that speaks out with clarity, grace, and bravery against abuse of power.]]> 112 Fiona Benson 039354186X Emily 0 poetry 4.42 2019 Vertigo & Ghost: Poems
author: Fiona Benson
name: Emily
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Love You, Bunny (Bunny, #2)]]> 223478303
When We Love You, Bunny opens, Sam has just published her first novel to critical acclaim. But at a New England stop on her book tour, her one-time frenemies, furious at the way they’ve been portrayed, kidnap her. Now a captive audience, it’s her (and our) turn to hear the Bunnies� side of the story. One by one, they take turns holding the axe, and recount the birth throes of their unholy alliance, their discovery of their unusual creative powers—and the phantasmagoric adventure of conjuring their first creation. With a bound and gagged Sam, we embark on a wickedly intoxicating journey into the heart of dark academia: a fairy tale slasher that explores the wonder and horror of creation itself. Not to mention the transformative powers of love and friendship, Bunny.

Frankenstein by way of Heathers, We Love You, Bunny is both a prequel and a sequel, and an unabashedly wild and totally complete stand-alone novel. Open your hearts, Bunny, to another dazzlingly original and darkly hilarious romp in the Bunny-verse from the queen of the fever-dream, Mona Awad.]]> Mona Awad Emily 0 to-read 4.57 2025 We Love You, Bunny (Bunny, #2)
author: Mona Awad
name: Emily
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Hundred Years� War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917�2017]]> 41812831
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.� Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.]]> 336 Rashid Khalidi 1627798552 Emily 0 currently-reading, history 4.50 2020 The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017
author: Rashid Khalidi
name: Emily
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: currently-reading, history
review:

]]> Lifeform 208209822
What happened was this: Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and in that period there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on the xylophone, but also she was rabid with fear of losing this love, because of past injury. And then what happened was that she became a wild-pregnant-mammal-thing and then she exploded herself by having a whole baby blast through her vagina during a global plague and then she was expected to carry on like everything was normal—but was this normal, and had she or anything ever been normal? Herein lies an account of this journey, told in five phases—Single, True Love, Pregnancy, Baby, and Ongoing—through luminous, laugh-out-loud funny, unclassifiable essays that take the form of letters to a doctor, dreams of a stork, fantasy therapy sessions, gossip between racoons, excerpts from an imaginary olden timey play, obituaries, theories about post-partum hair loss, graduation speeches, and more. No one writes like Jenny Slate.]]> 240 Jenny Slate 0316263931 Emily 0 audiobooks 3.72 2024 Lifeform
author: Jenny Slate
name: Emily
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> Efectos personales 61239844 Este libro es una exploración literaria y a la vez visceral de ese suicidio. Más que preguntarse por qué, la hija y narradora recrea el antes y el después, las reacciones dentro y fuera de la familia, la trama de las relaciones, la noción del amor, el trauma y las estrategias para lidiar con él. En un mundo donde las apariencias priman, las convenciones son ampliamente aceptadas y parece haber amplias posibilidades, las mujeres viven y sufren mientras los hombres parecen circular como fantasmas. Es un mundo en el cual lo que se veía de un modo se ve de otro a través del prisma de ese pasaje al acto prolijo y planificado, que nadie podía imaginar.
Efectos personales ensaya con materiales autobiográficos la manera de componer una novela para lo que no tiene palabras.
Como una detective en carne viva, como una poeta del absurdo, Marina Mariasch recurre a una escritura bella y filosa para unir los fragmentos dislocados de una historia que es, en gran medida, un grito ante una tumba mal cerrada.]]> 192 Marina Mariasch 9500441497 Emily 5 en-español, adult-fic 3.88 Efectos personales
author: Marina Mariasch
name: Emily
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: en-español, adult-fic
review:

]]> Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems 214152128 Part myth retelling, part character study, this sharp, visceral debut poetry collection reimagines Helen of Troy from Homer’s Iliad as a disgruntled housewife in 1990s Tennessee.

In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn’t the same thing as staying gone�

Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the �if you never owned a bone-sharp biography� / i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.�

Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she’s never been seen before.]]> 96 Maria Zoccola 1668046334 Emily 5 //
1/20/25: Amazing on audio! Almost like getting to read these poems for the first time. ]]> 4.13 2025 Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems
author: Maria Zoccola
name: Emily
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: poetry, scribner, books-i-edited, audiobooks
review:
Meet Helen of Troy—a disaffected Southern housewife ready to reclaim her story and give you a piece of her mind! Debut poet Maria Zoccola imbues the archetypal narratives of Greek mythology with the lush, muddy landscape of 1990s Tennessee, complete with the judgmental small-town personalities who frequent football games, church potlucks, and Piggly Wiggly. You don’t have to be a mythology buff to enjoy this collection, but it’s littered with Easter eggs for those who are. I have never been so riveted by poetry as when Zoccola’s Helen came roaring onto the page in a four-wheeler demanding my attention. I followed her, gladly, from Sparta to Troy and back again.
//
1/20/25: Amazing on audio! Almost like getting to read these poems for the first time.
]]> <![CDATA[Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson]]> 217927404 Black transgender luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQIA+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy.

“She is the preeminent and foremost scholar on Marsha P. Johnson. . . . To us, Tourmaline is the expert.”—Janet Mock, Allure

“Thank god the revolution has begun, honey.� Rumor has it that after Marsha P. Johnson threw the first brick in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, she picked up a shard of broken mirror to fix her makeup. Marsha, a legendary Black transgender activist, embodied both the beauty and the struggle of the early gay rights movement. Her work sparked the progress we see today, yet there has never been a definitive record of her life. Until now.

Written with sparkling prose,Tourmaline’s richly researched biography Marsha finally brings this iconic figure to life, in full color. We vividly meet Marsha as both an activist and She performed with RuPaul and with the internationally renowned drag troupe The Hot Peaches. She was a muse to countless artists from Andy Warhol to the band Earth, Wind & Fire. And she continues to inspire people today.

Marsha didn’t wait to be freed; she declared herself free and told the world to catch up.Her story promises to inspire readers to live as their most liberated, unruly, vibrant, and whole selves.]]> 320 Tourmaline 0593185668 Emily 0 to-read 4.71 2025 Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson
author: Tourmaline
name: Emily
average rating: 4.71
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes]]> 173494648 A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country and her family during Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother's kitchen. With over 20 Khmer recipes included, Slow Noodles will resonate with readers who loved the food and emotional truth of Michelle Zauner'sCrying in H Mart, and it has the staying power of Loung Ung'sFirst They Killed My Father.“I’ve never read a book that made me weep, wince, laugh out loud, and rejoice likeSlow Noodles.In Chantha Nguon’s harrowing, wise, and fiercely feminist memoir, cooking is a language—of love, remembrance, and rebellion—and stories are nourishment."—Maggie Smith,New York Timesbestselling author ofYou Could Make This Place BeautifulTake a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and one wholesale extermination. Subtract a reliable source of food, life savings, and family members, until all are gone. Shave down childhood dreams for approximately two decades, until only subsistence remains. In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodia refugee who lost everything and everyone—her house, her country, her parents, her siblings, her friends—everything but the memories of her mother’s kitchen, the tastes and aromas of the foods her mother made before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart in the 1970s, killing millions of her compatriots. Nguon’s irrepressible spirit and determination come through in this emotional and poignantbut also lyrical and magical memoir that includes over 20 recipes for Khmer dishes like chicken lime soup, banh sung noodles, pâté de foie, curries, spring rolls, and stir-fries. For Nguon, recreating these dishes becomes an act of resistance, of reclaiming her place in the world, of upholding the values the Khmer Rouge sought to destroy, and of honoring the memory of her beloved mother. From her idyllic early years in Battambang to hiding as a young girl in Phnom Penh as the country purges ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family, from her escape to Saigon to the deaths of mother and sister there, from the poverty and devastation she experiences in a war-ravaged Vietnam to her decision to flee the country. We follow Chantha on a harrowing river crossing into Thailand—part of the exodus that gave rise to the name “boat people”—and her decades in a refugee camp there, until finally, denied passage to the West, she returns to a forever changed Cambodia. Nguon survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture-nurse treating refugees abused by Thai authorities, and weaving silk. Through it all, Nguonrelies on her mother’s “slow noodles� approach to healing and to cooking, one that prioritizes time and care over expediency.Haunting and evocative, Slow Noodles is a testament to the power of culinary heritage to spark the rebirth of a young woman’s hopes for a beautiful life.]]> 300 Chantha Nguon Emily 5 memoir 4.49 2024 Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes
author: Chantha Nguon
name: Emily
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: memoir
review:

]]> Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel 216461256 A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.

Soon a Taiwanese woman—who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name—is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something� is.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.]]> 317 Yáng Shuāng-zǐ 1644453169 Emily 0 lgbtq, in-translation 4.27 2020 Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel
author: Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
name: Emily
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: lgbtq, in-translation
review:
Wow. What a delightfully layered text. Going through the various afterwords/notes in the back was honestly the most satisfying part. Definitely deserving of the National Book Award win!
]]> Book of Mutter 31862023 Writing is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. When I am brave enough I am never brave enough I unravel the tapestry of my life, my childhood. I take things away. I smash things, relations are broken. I am the bad mother. -- from Book of Mutter

Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes -- and dead calm -- of grief. Book of Mutter is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother's death. The text spirals out into a kind of fractured anatomy of melancholy that comes to contain critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha , Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modeled the book's formless form on Bourgeois's Cells sculptures -- at once channeling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorizable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem/postmodern theater.]]> 216 Kate Zambreno 1584351969 Emily 0 memoir 4.23 2017 Book of Mutter
author: Kate Zambreno
name: Emily
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: memoir
review:

]]> The Emperor of Gladness 219848315 Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing � formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness � are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 416 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Emily 0 to-read 4.34 2025 The Emperor of Gladness
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Emily
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Emily 0 to-read 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Emily
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> La distancia entre nosotros 20706581 Across a Hundred Mountains.

Cuando el padre de Reyna Grande deja a su esposa y sus tres hijos atrás en un pueblo de México para hacer el peligroso viaje a través de la frontera a los Estados Unidos, promete que pronto regresará con el dinero suficiente para construir la casa de sus sueños. Sus promesas se vuelven más difíciles de creer cuando los meses de espera se convierten en años. Cuando se lleva a su esposa para reunirse con él, Reyna y sus hermanos son depositados en el hogar ya sobrecargado de su abuela paterna, Evila, una mujer endurecida por la vida.

Los tres hermanos se ven obligados a cuidar de sí mismos. En los juegos infantiles encuentran una manera de olvidar el dolor del abandono y a resolver problemas de adultos. Cuando su madre regresa, la reunión sienta las bases para un capítulo nuevo y dramático en la vida de Reyna: su propio viaje a El otro lado para vivir con el hombre que ha poseído su imaginación durante años� su padre ausente.

En esta memoria extraordinaria, la galardonada escritora Reyna Grande le da vida a sus años tumultuosos, capturando la confusión y las contradicciones de una infancia divida entre dos padres y dos países. Sólo en los libros, en la música y en su rica imaginación ella encontrará consuelo, un refugio momentáneo de un mundo en el que cada lugar se siente como El otro lado. La distancia entre nosotros capta el paso de una niña de la infancia a la adolescencia y más allá. Una divertida, lírica, pero desgarradora historia, nos recuerda que las alegrías y las tristezas de la infancia están siempre con nosotros, impresas en el corazón, recordándonos de ese lugar que fue nuestro primer hogar.]]> 382 Reyna Grande Emily 0 memoir, en-español, to-read 4.53 2012 La distancia entre nosotros
author: Reyna Grande
name: Emily
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: memoir, en-español, to-read
review:

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

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

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

With her “wry, wise, and simply spectacular� style (People) and “hilarious deadpan that recalls Gish Jen and Nora Ephron� (O, The Oprah Magazine), Weike Wang offers a portrait of family that is equally witty, incisive, and tender.]]> 224 Weike Wang 0593545540 Emily 0 adult-fic 3.30 2024 Rental House
author: Weike Wang
name: Emily
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: adult-fic
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology]]> 75293507
Norris Black, Amber Blaeser-Wardzala, Phoenix Boudreau, Cherie Dimaline, Carson Faust, Kelli Jo Ford, Kate Hart, Shane Hawk, Brandon Hobson, Darcie Little Badger, Conley Lyons, Nick Medina, Tiffany Morris, Tommy Orange, Mona Susan Power, Marcie R. Rendon, Waubgeshig Rice, Rebecca Roanhorse, Andrea L. Rogers, Morgan Talty, D.H. Trujillo, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., Richard Van Camp, David Heska, Wanbli Weiden, Royce Young, Wolf Mathilda Zeller.

Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear—and even follow you home.

These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce listeners to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples� survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.]]> 400 Shane Hawk 0593468465 Emily 0 horror, native-authors 3.90 2023 Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology
author: Shane Hawk
name: Emily
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: horror, native-authors
review:

]]> Sink: A Memoir 61237136
Stranded within an ever-shifting family’s desperate but volatile attempts to love, saddled with a mercurial mother mired in crack addiction, and demeaned daily for his perceived weakness, Joseph Earl Thomas grew up feeling he was under constant threat. Roaches fell from the ceiling, colonizing bowls of noodles and cereal boxes. Fists and palms pounded down at school and at home, leaving welts that ached long after they disappeared. An inescapable hunger gnawed at his frequently empty stomach, and requests for food were often met with indifference if not open hostility. Deemed too unlike the other boys to ever gain the acceptance he so desperately desired, he began to escape into fantasy and virtual worlds, wells of happiness in a childhood assailed on all sides.

In a series of exacting and fierce vignettes, Thomas guides readers through the unceasing cruelty that defined his circumstances, laying bare the depths of his loneliness and illuminating the vital reprieve geek culture offered him. With remarkable tenderness and devastating clarity, he explores how lessons of toxic masculinity were drilled into his body and the way the cycle of violence permeated the very fabric of his environment. Even in the depths of isolation, there were unexpected moments of joy carved out, from summers where he was freed from the injurious structures of his surroundings to the first glimpses of kinship he caught on his journey to becoming a Pokémon master. SINK follows Thomas's coming-of-age towards an understanding of what it means to lose the desire to fit in—with his immediate peers, turbulent family, or the world—and how good it feels to build community, love, and salvation on your own terms.]]> 256 Joseph Earl Thomas 1538706172 Emily 0 to-read 3.66 2023 Sink: A Memoir
author: Joseph Earl Thomas
name: Emily
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer]]> 201666323 A stirring, unsparing debut novel about black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student, from the "extraordinary [and] insightful" author of Sink (New York Times Book Review). After a deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a MD/PhD student at The University of Pennsylvania, and an emergency department tech at a hospital in North Philly, he becomes interested in the Holmesburg Prison Experiments, in which the prison conducted scientific trials on their inmates. Through this curiosity he comes to know his estranged father, who is serving time for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, his best friend Murray, a fellow vet, judges the journey he sets out upon, while simultaneously pushing him towards a ruinous self-discovery. Balancing single fatherhood, his studies, and long shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his more storied friends and colleagues. GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.]]> 236 Joseph Earl Thomas Emily 5 3.67 2024 God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer
author: Joseph Earl Thomas
name: Emily
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:
A writing voice I've never heard before. Floored.
]]> Casualties of Truth 214339549 From the author of Book of the Little Axe, nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller about the abuses of history and the costs of revenge, set between Washington, DC, and Johannesburg, South Africa

Prudence Wright seems to have
it a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, DC; and the
past glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enables her to
dedicate her days to her autistic son Roland. When she and Davis head out for
dinner with one of Davis’s new colleagues on a stormy summer evening filled
with startling and unwelcome interruptions, Prudence has little reason to think
that certain details of her history might arise sometime between cocktails and
the appetizer course.

Yet when Davis’s colleague turns out to be Matshediso, a man from Prudence’s past, she is transported back to the formative months she spent as a law student in South Africa in 1996. As an intern at a Johannesburg law firm, Prudence attended sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, which uncovered the many horrors and human rights abuses of the Apartheid state, and which fundamentally shaped her sense of righteousness and justice. But Prudence experienced personal horrors in South Africa as well, ones she long resolved to keep carefully hidden and ones which Matshediso threatens now to expose. When Matshediso finally reveals the real reason behind his sudden reappearance, he will force Prudence to examine her most deeply held beliefs and to excavate inner reserves of resilience and strength.

Lauren Francis-Sharma’s previous two novels have established her as a deft chronicler of history and its intersections with flawed humans struggling to find peace in unjust circumstances. With keen insight and gripping tension, Casualties of Truth explosively mines questions of whether we are ever truly able to remove the stains of our past and how we may attempt to reconcile with unquestionable wrongs.]]> 272 Lauren Francis-Sharma 0802163785 Emily 0 adult-fic 4.06 2025 Casualties of Truth
author: Lauren Francis-Sharma
name: Emily
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/24
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: adult-fic
review:

]]> Headshot 174137119 An electrifying debut novel from an “unusually gifted writer� (Lorrie Moore) about the radical intimacy of physical competition

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors� pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.]]> 223 Rita Bullwinkel Emily 0 adult-fic 3.54 2024 Headshot
author: Rita Bullwinkel
name: Emily
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: adult-fic
review:

]]> The Discomfort of Evening 53713830 I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough ... and I asked God if he please couldn't take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. 'Amen.'

Jas lives with her devout farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter's day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip; resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a darkness that threatens to derail them all.

A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands by a prize-winning young poet, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's debut novel lays everything bare. It is a world of language unlike any other, which Michele Hutchison's striking translation captures in all its wild, violent beauty. Studded with unforgettable images - visceral, raw, surreal - The Discomfort of the Evening is a radical reading experience that will leave you changed forever.]]> 298 Lucas Rijneveld Emily 0 adult-fic, in-translation 3.48 2018 The Discomfort of Evening
author: Lucas Rijneveld
name: Emily
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/24
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: adult-fic, in-translation
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky]]> 31522415
In “Who Will Greet You at Home,� a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In “Wild,� a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person" - with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.

Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.]]> 232 Lesley Nneka Arimah 0735211027 Emily 0 4.10 2017 What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
author: Lesley Nneka Arimah
name: Emily
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: adult-fic, short-stories, speculative-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Emily 0 essays "What does it mean to live in a world where you have the power to end species by the thousands, but you can also be brought to your knees, or to your end, by a single strand of RNA? I have tried here to map some of the places where my little life brushes up against the big forces shaping contemporary human experience, but the only conclusion I can draw is a simple one: We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary."]]> 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Emily
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2021/07/31
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: essays
review:
From the Postscript:
"What does it mean to live in a world where you have the power to end species by the thousands, but you can also be brought to your knees, or to your end, by a single strand of RNA? I have tried here to map some of the places where my little life brushes up against the big forces shaping contemporary human experience, but the only conclusion I can draw is a simple one: We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary."
]]> <![CDATA[Wound Is the Origin of Wonder: Poems]]> 60165416 96 Maya C. Popa 1324021365 Emily 0 poetry 4.34 2022 Wound Is the Origin of Wonder: Poems
author: Maya C. Popa
name: Emily
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: poetry
review:
"We were never / loved by anything // the way tomorrow loved us then." --"In the Museum of Childhood"
]]> <![CDATA[Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses]]> 87040 Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. Robin Wall Kimmerer's book is not an identification guide, nor is it a scientific treatise. Rather, it is a series of linked personal essays that will lead general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings, from salmon and hummingbirds to redwoods and rednecks. Kimmerer clearly and artfully explains the biology of mosses, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us.

Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

Gathering Moss will appeal to a wide range of readers, from bryologists to those interested in natural history and the environment, Native Americans, and contemporary nature and science writing.

]]> 168 Robin Wall Kimmerer 0870714996 Emily 0 to-read 4.39 2003 Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Emily
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Love Hearing Your Dreams: Poems]]> 207294331 From one of contemporary poetry's most playful and original minds, an enchanting and harrowing journey through the landscape of dreams and twenty-first century disillusions.“Your dreams have no hidden agenda to be wise they are made to be forgotten so something can be known� I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a book of reveries, of failed elegies, of “the last time that things were real� and the moments that come afterward. These are dream songs for an age of insomnia, where the poet is always awake “at that oddest hour / that does not end, / the crooked, unnumbered one� and the future seems to be “just the past in a suit / that will never be in style.� Yet dreams in Matthew Zapruder’s poems are also a place of possibility, of reality envisioned anew—sleep shows us not merely what the world is, but what it could be. From a poet celebrated for his “razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture� (The New York Times), I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a startlingly beautiful and deeply vulnerable book where lives journey into a mystifying place and emerge transformed.]]> 128 Matthew Zapruder 1668059800 Emily 0 poetry, audiobooks, scribner 3.60 I Love Hearing Your Dreams: Poems
author: Matthew Zapruder
name: Emily
average rating: 3.60
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: poetry, audiobooks, scribner
review:

]]> 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 Emily 0 adult-fic 4.11 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Emily
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: adult-fic
review:

]]> This Hostel Life 40175331 83 Melatu Uche Okorie 1788084918 Emily 0 to-read 3.98 2018 This Hostel Life
author: Melatu Uche Okorie
name: Emily
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse]]> 58730685 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse dazzles as Karyna McGlynn's third collection.]]> 84 Karyna McGlynn 1946448958 Emily 0 poetry 4.02 2022 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse
author: Karyna McGlynn
name: Emily
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> Notes of a Crocodile 31395589 Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin's cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.

Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.

Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.]]> 242 Qiu Miaojin 168137076X Emily 0 to-read 3.84 1994 Notes of a Crocodile
author: Qiu Miaojin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing]]> 33926 The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing maps the progress of Jane Rosenal as she sets out on a personal and spirited expedition through the perilous terrain of sex, love, and relationships as well as the treacherous waters of the workplace. With an unforgettable comic touch, Melissa Bank skillfully teases out issues of the heart; puts a new spin on the mating dance; and captures what it's like to be a young woman coming of age in America today.]]> 274 Melissa Bank 0143035479 Emily 0 to-read 3.36 1998 The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
author: Melissa Bank
name: Emily
average rating: 3.36
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Idea of an Entire Life: Poems (Raised Voices)]]> 222590406 A poetry collection that combines lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine 21st-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility for Indigenous life and resistance

In The Idea of an Entire Life, queer Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt offers up a powerful meditation on the present as a space where the past and a still-possible utopia collide.

Belcourt's collection is both rigorous in research and thought and accessible in language and imagery. He contends with the afterlife of he calls "the long twentieth century," a century marked by assaults on Indigenous life and his peoples� enduring resistance to them. Through lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments, Belcourt delivers a poignant examination of anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking, other times sly and humorous, put to use the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt’s body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of both grief and awe.

His third book of poetry and sixth across genres, Billy-Ray Belcourt's The Idea of an Entire Life leaves readers with a vision for queer Indigenous life as it is shaped by a violent history and pulled toward a more flourishing future.]]> 80 Billy-Ray Belcourt 0807022403 Emily 5 native-authors, poetry 4.50 The Idea of an Entire Life: Poems (Raised Voices)
author: Billy-Ray Belcourt
name: Emily
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/01
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: native-authors, poetry
review:

]]> A Family Matter 220161203 An exquisite and revelatory debut novel about the devastating consequences of one woman’s affair.

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.

2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about his diagnosis, just as he can’t reveal all the other secrets he’s been keeping from her for so many years.

A Family Matter is a heartbreaking and hopeful exploration of love and loss, intimacy and injustice, custody and care, and whether it is possible to heal from the wounds of the past in the changed world of today.]]> 240 Claire Lynch 1668078899 Emily 0 4.28 A Family Matter
author: Claire Lynch
name: Emily
average rating: 4.28
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/01
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: adult-fic, historical-fiction, lgbtq, scribner
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West]]> 220160930 In the exhilarating spirit of Wild and A Walk in the Park, an adventure-filled memoir of one woman’s struggle to succeed as a wildland firefighter on an elite, male-dominated crew as they battle some of the fiercest wildfires in the West.

When Kelly Ramsey drives over a California mountain pass to join an elite firefighting crew, she’s terrified that she won’t be able to keep up with the intense demands of the job. Not only will she be the only woman on this hotshot crew and their first in ten years, she’ll also be among the oldest. As she trains relentlessly to overcome the crew’s skepticism and gain their respect, megafires erupt across the West, posing an increasing danger both on the job and back home. In vivid prose that evokes the majesty of Northern California’s forests, Kelly takes us on the ground to see how major wildfires are fought and to lay bare the psychological toll, the bone-deep weariness, and the unbreakable camaraderie that emerge in the face of nature’s fury.

Despite the wear and tear of her rookie year in fire, Kelly gears up for a second season, determined to prove that not only can a woman survive this work, she can excel. But when her plans to marry her partner start to crumble and sparks fly with a fellow crew member, Kelly wrestles with whether she’s truly outgrown the self-destructive patterns she’s learned from her father, whose drinking and itinerant ways haunt her. And as the season wears on, she discovers how tenuous “belonging� can be amid ever-changing crew dynamics.

In this vivid, visceral, and intimate memoir, Kelly wrestles with the immense power of fire for both destruction and renewal, confronted with the Which fires do you fight, and which do you let burn you clean?]]> 352 Kelly Ramsey 1668031477 Emily 0 memoir, scribner 4.69 Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West
author: Kelly Ramsey
name: Emily
average rating: 4.69
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: memoir, scribner
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Late to the Search Party: Poems]]> 220161321 A raw, crystalline debut poetry collection exploring themes of family, addiction, belonging, and loss—a searching elegy of the fissures that have come to define contemporary American life.

The unsettled border between absence and presence haunts this stunning collection, in which poet laureate Steven Espada Dawson contemplates belonging, identity, family, and grief in poems about his own half-immigrant Mexican American his dying mother who raised him, his addict brother who has been missing for more than a decade, and his absent father.

Chronicled in four parts, shifting restlessly between childhood memories, the sudden disappearance of his brother, and the inevitable loss of his ailing mother, Late to the Search Party explores what it means to be a family of one—to be orphaned, whether by fate or by circumstance. In language that is both grounded and ethereal, Dawson tallies the losses and looks at what the frustration and anger, the bewilderment and sadness—and the affection and humor that makes itself felt in spite of everything.

A vivid and thoughtful meditation on love and loss, Late to the Search Party is an ode to the families that inspire and confound us all.]]> 96 Steven Espada Dawson 1668081563 Emily 5 poetry, scribner 4.70 Late to the Search Party: Poems
author: Steven Espada Dawson
name: Emily
average rating: 4.70
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/01
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: poetry, scribner
review:

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

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

Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts through time and perspective, illuminating an argument between a father and his daughter that, with impeccable nuance, examines the fraught inheritances each generation is left to contend with, and the struggle to nurture empathy in a world changing at lightning-speed.]]> 240 Jo Hamya 0593701038 Emily 0 adult-fic 3.42 2024 The Hypocrite
author: Jo Hamya
name: Emily
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: adult-fic
review:

]]> Open City 8526694
But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.]]> 259 Teju Cole 1400068096 Emily 0 adult-fic, ccny 3.50 2011 Open City
author: Teju Cole
name: Emily
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: adult-fic, ccny
review:

]]> Vacation 3188842 216 Deb Olin Unferth 1934781096 Emily 0 to-read 3.65 2008 Vacation
author: Deb Olin Unferth
name: Emily
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>