en-US Sun, 06 Apr 2025 17:29:11 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 209330233 A novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.]]> 288 Rumaan Alam 0593718461 Tony 3 2025-reads, audiobook 3.00 2024
author: Rumaan Alam
name: Tony
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: 2025-reads, audiobook
review:

]]> 213395487 A fast-moving, heartbreaking collection of linked stories that evokes the joy and alienation between generations and classes in the era of mass overwhelm.

From Lydia Millet—“the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves�� (Chicago Tribune)—comes an inventive new collection of short fiction. Atavists follows a group of families, couples, and loners in their collisions, confessions, and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses, and medieval role-playing festivals.

The various ��-ists�� who people these linked stories—from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists—include a professor who’s morbidly fixated on an old friend’s Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel’s fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbors after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner dad obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his backyard.]]> 240 Lydia Millet 1324074418 Tony 0 to-read 4.02
author: Lydia Millet
name: Tony
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213870133 A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with a one-of-a-kind job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.

When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.

In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. The UN is a mess of competing interests, and her team consists of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr. But then Nadia meets Sara, a hilarious, foul-mouthed East Londoner who was pulled into radicalism at just fifteen. The two are kindred spirits, and Nadia vows to get Sara home.

As the rehabilitation program picks up traction, Sara reveals a secret that upends everything, forcing Nadia to make a drastic choice. In the fallout, Nadia’s brown-savior fantasies crumble, leaving her to wonder if she can save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.

A fierce, wildly funny, and razor-sharp exploration of radicalism, family, and the quest for belonging, Fundamentally boldly inspects one of the defining controversies of our age and introduces a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 352 Nussaibah Younis 0593851382 Tony 0 to-read 3.84 2025
author: Nussaibah Younis
name: Tony
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201626978
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most is an epic story in one single day, masterly breaching the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath.]]> 144 Jessica Anthony 0316576379 Tony 0 currently-reading 3.32 2024
author: Jessica Anthony
name: Tony
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 200196202 A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties.

’Pemi Aguda opens her collection of twelve stories with the chilling tale of a woman who uncannily resembles her sinister, deceased grandmother. When the woman shows a capacity for deadly violence, she wonders—can evil be genetic, passed from generation to generation?

Set in Lagos, Nigeria, Aguda’s stories unfold against a spectral cityscape where the everyday business of living—the birth of a baby, a market visit, a conversation between mothers and daughters—is charged with an air of supernatural menace. In “Breastmilk�� a new mother’s inability to lactate takes on preternatural overtones. In ��24, Alhaji Williams Street�� a mysterious disease wreaks havoc with frightening precision. In “The Hollow,�� an architect stumbles on a vengeful house.

Evocative, strange, and yet familiar, “the speculative conceits of these stories are elegantly balanced with the gorgeous fullness of human emotion, all the hunger and longing and fear and delight of being a human in the world�� (Lauren Groff).]]> 224 Pemi Aguda 1324065850 Tony 0 currently-reading 4.05 2024
author: Pemi Aguda
name: Tony
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 199531878 240 Ruben Reyes Jr. 0063336278 Tony 4 4.10 2024
author: Ruben Reyes Jr.
name: Tony
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: 2025-faves, 2025-reads, audiobook, short-stories
review:

]]> 61272660 Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Oprah Daily, Glamour, USA TODAY, Parade, Bustle, San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, Tampa Bay Times, BuzzFeed, and Vulture

“A compelling read that showcases Egan’s masterful storytelling.�� ��Time
“Dazzling.�� ��Vogue
“Radiant, exhilarating.�� ��Slate
“Mesmerizing…A thought-provoking examination of how and why we change.�� ��People

From one of the most celebrated writers of our time comes an “inventive, effervescent�� (Oprah Daily) novel about the memory and quest for authenticity and human connection.

The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.�� Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing�� memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious”—which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes.

In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters�� who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,�� those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also a moving testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for connection, family, privacy, and love.

“A beautiful exploration of loss, memory, and history�� (San Francisco Chronicle), “this is minimalist maximalism. It’s as if Egan compressed a big 19th-century novel onto a flash drive�� (The New York Times).]]> 368 Jennifer Egan 1476716773 Tony 0 own-physically, to-read 3.52 2022
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Tony
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: own-physically, to-read
review:

]]> 62929342 Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

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

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

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

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? ]]> 399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 Tony 5 3.94 2024
author: Rachel Khong
name: Tony
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: 2025-faves, 2025-reads, audiobook
review:

]]> 195474144 From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility, a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories set in New York and Los Angeles. The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter six stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of compromise which operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novel, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September, 1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood�� describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age. Throughout the stories, two characters often find themselves sitting across a table for two where the direction of their futures may hinge upon what they say to each other next. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting historical fiction.]]> 451 Amor Towles 0593296370 Tony 0 to-read 4.15 2024
author: Amor Towles
name: Tony
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216684507 Pitlaw is itching for change. Enter the Freakslaw �� a travelling funfair populated by deviant queers, a contortionist witch, the most powerful fortune teller, and other architects of mayhem. It doesn’t take long for the Freakslaw folk to infiltrate Pitlaw’s grey world, where the town’s teenagers �� none more so than Ruth and Derek �� are seduced by neon charms and the possibility of escape. But beneath it all, these newcomers are harbouring a darker revenge. And as tensions reach fever pitch between the stoic locals and the dazzling intruders, a violence that’s been simmering for centuries is about to be unleashed…]]> 368 Jane Flett 1638932662 Tony 1 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025 geek hate 3.66 2024
author: Jane Flett
name: Tony
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025
review:
geek hate
]]> 208453879
This book underscores with wit, humour, wisdom, and sensitivity the perils of trying to find lasting love and companionship in Africa’s craziest city that will prove universal and illuminating.]]> Damilare Kuku Tony 5 4.00 2024
author: Damilare Kuku
name: Tony
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: 2025-faves, 2025-reads, short-stories
review:

]]> 211003884 Armed with a terminal diagnosis, a grudge, and a rental car, Hester sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of killing her father in this brilliantly subversive and bleakly funny novel.

When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and starts driving west. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two slowly make their way across the country. But will the revelations they make along the way dissuade Hester from her goal?

Ragingly singular and surprisingly moving, Bad Nature is a story of stunning detours and twists until its final destination. Part road-trip novel, part revenge tale, part lament of our ongoing ecological crisis, it’s ultimately a deft examination of the indulgence of holding grudges, moral ambivalence, and the eternal possibility of redemption.]]> 304 Ariel Courage 1250360889 Tony 0 to-read 3.81 2025
author: Ariel Courage
name: Tony
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15983331 The Middle Stories and Ticknor comes a bold interrogation into the possibility of a beautiful life. How Should a Person Be? is a novel of many identities: an autobiography of the mind, a postmodern self-help book, and a fictionalized portrait of the artist as a young woman �� of two such artists, in fact.

For reasons multiple and mysterious, Sheila finds herself in a quandary of self-doubt, questioning how a person should be in the world. Inspired by her friend Margaux, a painter, and her seemingly untortured ability to live and create, Sheila casts Margaux as material, embarking on a series of recordings in which nothing is too personal, too ugly, or too banal to be turned into art. Along the way, Sheila confronts a cast of painters who are equally blocked in an age in which the blow job is the ultimate art form. She begins questioning her desire to be Important, her quest to be both a leader and a pupil, and her unwillingness to sacrifice herself.

Searching, uncompromising and yet mordantly funny, How Should a Person Be? is a brilliant portrait of art-making and friendship from the psychic underground of Canada's most fiercely original writer.]]> 320 Sheila Heti 125003244X Tony 0 to-read 3.36 2010
author: Sheila Heti
name: Tony
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215363519 A disturbing examination of toxic masculinity and the darkest pits of the Internet, Alex Gonzalez’s rekt traces a young man’s algorithmic descent into depravity in a future that’s nearly here.

> be me, 26
> about to end it all
> feels good, man
��
Once, Sammy Dominguez thought he knew how the world worked. The ugly things in his head—his uncle’s pathetic death, his parents�� mistrust, the twisted horrors he writes for the Internet—didn’t matter, because he and his girl, Ellery, were on track for the good life in this messed-up world.
��
Then a car accident changed everything.
��
Spiraling with grief and guilt, Sammy scrambles for distraction. He finds it in shock-value videos of gore and violence that terrified him as a child. When someone messages him a dark web link to footage of Ellery dying, he watches—first the car crash that killed her, then hundreds of other deaths, even for people still alive. Accidents. Diseases. Suicides. Murders.
��
The host site, chinsky, is sadistic, vicious, impossible. It even seems to read his mind, manipulate his searches. But is chinsky even real? And who is Haruspx, the web handle who led him into this virtual nightmare? As Sammy watches compulsively, the darkness in his mind blooms, driving him down a twisted path to find the roots of chinsky, even if he must become a nightmare himself . . .
��
Not for the faint of heart, rekt combines the cautionary warnings of Black Mirror with the seedy rawness of Chuck Palahniuk in its unrelentless examination of the emotional holes we fill with content.]]> 368 Alex Gonzalez 1645661598 Tony 2 4.01 2025
author: Alex Gonzalez
name: Tony
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: 2025-reads, new-in-2025, mixed-feelings, transgressive-lit, two-point-five
review:

]]> 214986234 A thrilling historical mystery about a young woman searching for her father, a young man trying to solve an impossible problem, and the quest for the power to transcend time.

In Half Moon Bay, California, 2016, a young woman waits for her father's sailboat to arrive at port. They have agreed to meet on this day and time. Yet he never shows.

He has told her this event might come. And if it did, she was ready. Go to the library in Berkeley, find a certain book, follow the instructions. But what if the instructions lead to more questions than answers?

In 1933, a young man arrives in Vienna to begin a new post as a professor of mathematics at the university. There he finds himself part of the Engelhardt Circle, a group of intellectuals that have recently been targeted by a growing, anti-academic mob. The circle includes the preeminent minds of their time and a cast of characters desperate to get invited into their midst, many of whom will stop at nothing to get there. As fascism rises, and polarization increases, moderate voices are drowned out.

There are whispers of a machine, a music box, which can transport someone through time. But no one can confirm if it's a rumor or true. And the only people who know firsthand are not talking.

Between the young woman, who lives off the grid and spends her free time editing Wikipedia entries and picking fights with people online, and the circle of intellectuals debating space and time in Vienna on the eve of World War II, lie years of history that might easily be erased—unless old secrets are unraveled. Kirsten Menger-Anderson's beautiful meditation on time, love, and obsession shows us how we never truly know what happened in the past, and often how the past eerily mirrors the future.]]> 256 Kirsten Menger-Anderson 0593798309 Tony 5 4.08 2025
author: Kirsten Menger-Anderson
name: Tony
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: 2025-reads, 2025-faves, best-releases-2025, new-in-2025
review:

]]> 218671812 From the��New York Times��bestselling author of��The Kind Worth Killing��and��Eight Perfect Murders��comes an inventive, utterly propulsive murder-mystery in reverse, tracing a marriage back in time to uncover the dark secret at its heart.

Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for over twenty-five years. They live in a beautiful Victorian on the north shore of Massachusetts. Wendy is a published poet and Thom teaches English literature at a nearby university. Their son, Jason, is all grown up. All is well…except that Wendy wants to murder her husband.

What happens next has everything to do with what happened before. The story of Wendy and Thom’s marriage is told in reverse, moving backward through time to witness key moments from the couple’s lives—their fiftieth birthday party, buying their home, Jason’s birth, the mysterious death of a work colleague—all painting a portrait of a marriage defined by a single terrible act they plotted together many years ago.

Eventually we learn the details of what Thom and Wendy did in their early twenties, a secret that has kept them bound together through the length of their marriage. But its power over them is fraying, and each of them begins to wonder if they would be better off making sure their spouse carries their secrets to the grave.]]> 288 Peter Swanson 0063433621 Tony 4 The Kind Worth Killing 2.0 but this was surprisingly really good!!! what if The Last Five Years was about a suspicious murdery couple?]]> 3.60 2025
author: Peter Swanson
name: Tony
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: 2025-reads, 2025-faves, arc, new-in-2025
review:
basically The Kind Worth Killing 2.0 but this was surprisingly really good!!! what if The Last Five Years was about a suspicious murdery couple?
]]> 213618149 A journalist investigates a seductive and mysterious cult and its leader, an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran, in this not-to-be-missed novel.

Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist reeling from the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed in a cult called The Nameless. Based in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic Vietnam War-veteran named Odo, The Nameless adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as “THERE IS NO GOD BUT THE NAMELESS,�� “ALL SUFFERING IS DISTORTION,�� and “SEE ONLY BEAUTY.�� Faruq, skeptical but committed to unraveling the mystery of The Nameless, extends his stay over months, as he gets deeper into the cult's inner workings, compassionate teachings, and closer to Odo. Faruq himself begins to unravel, forced to come-to-terms with the memories he has been running from while trying to resist Odo's spell.��

Told in three seamlessly interwoven threads between Faruq’s present-day investigation, Odo’s time before the formation of the movement as a Black infantryman during the Vietnam War, alongside three other Black soldiers, and a documentary script that recounts The Nameless�� clash with a Texan fundamentalist church, O SINNERS! examines both longing and belonging. Ultimately the novel What is it that we seek from cults and, inevitably, from each other?]]> 464 Nicole Cuffy 0593597443 Tony 3 3.71 2025
author: Nicole Cuffy
name: Tony
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: audiobook, new-in-2025, 2025-reads
review:

]]> 219603177 One train. No stops. A deadly game of survival and revenge.

In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family.��Twelve years later, she’s ready for retribution.

Under false pretenses, Anna has lured those responsible for her family’s downfall onto��a luxury��train from Philadelphia to Chicago,��an overnight��journey of fourteen hours. Her goal? Confront the people who’ve wronged her, get them to confess their crimes, and deliver them into the hands of authorities waiting at the end of the line. Justice will at last be served.

But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. As the train barrels through the night, it becomes clear that someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge—and that they won’t stop until everyone else is dead.

With time running out before the train reaches its destination, Anna is forced to hunt the killer in their midst while protecting the people she hates the most. In order to destroy her enemies, she must first save them—even though it means putting her own life at risk.]]> 400 Riley Sager 0593472403 Tony 2 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025 3.66 2025
author: Riley Sager
name: Tony
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025
review:
cheesy in ways i can't even begin to articulate
]]> 60094018 ARE YOU THE WORLD'S TOP EGOIST?

After a disastrous defeat at the 2018 World Cup, Japan's team struggles to regroup. But what's missing? An absolute ace striker. The Football Union is hell-bent on creating a striker who hungers for goals and thirsts for victory, so Blue Lock—a rigorous training ground for 300 of Japan's best and brightest youth players—is created. To survive this battle royale, the last striker standing will have to out-muscle and out-ego everyone who stands in his way!]]> 214 Muneyuki Kaneshiro 1646516540 Tony 0 manga, z-2024-reads 4.09 2018
author: Muneyuki Kaneshiro
name: Tony
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: manga, z-2024-reads
review:

]]> 217006044 In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize, a master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global change.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.

]]> 296 Abdulrazak Gurnah 0593852605 Tony 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
name: Tony
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 Tony 0 to-read 3.53 2015
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Tony
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213395442 A young woman’s seasonal job takes a dark, surreal turn in this vivid and surprising debut.

When Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, all she knows about harvesting sugar beets (Beta vulgaris) is that her paycheck will cover a few months�� rent on their Brooklyn apartment. She’ll try anything to escape the incessant debt collection calls—and chronic anxieties about her body and her relationship. But as the grueling graveyard shifts set in, Elise notices strange threatening texts, a mysterious rash, a string of disappearances from the workers�� campsite, and snatches of a hypnotic voice coming from the beet pile itself.

As crewmembers vanish, Elise obsesses over Tom’s closeness with their charismatic coworker Cee and falls back on self-destructive patterns of disordered eating and dissociation. Against the horrors of her uncertain future, is the siren song of the beet pile almost . . . appealing? Biting and eerie, Beta Vulgaris harnesses an audacious premise to undermine straightforward narratives of class, trauma, consumption, and redemption.]]> 296 Margie Sarsfield 1324078731 Tony 0 to-read, own-physically 3.58 2025
author: Margie Sarsfield
name: Tony
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read, own-physically
review:

]]> 211178725 The woman never goes by the same name.
She never stays in the same place too long.
She never ages. She never dies.
But those around her do.

When two grieving strangers meet by chance in Osaka airport they uncover a disturbing connection. Jake's best friend and Mariko's twin brother each died, 6,000 miles apart, in brutal and unfathomable circumstances.

Each encountered a mesmerising, dark-haired woman in the days before their deaths. A woman who came looking for Mariko - and then disappeared.

Jake, who has carried his loss and guilt for a decade, finds himself compelled to follow the trail set by Mariko's revelations. It's a trail that weaves across continents and centuries, leading back to the many who have died - in strange and terrifying and eerily similar ways - and those they left behind: bewildered, disbelieved, yet resolutely sure of what they saw.

And, at the centre of it all, there is the same beguiling woman. Her name may have changed, but her purpose has never wavered, and as Jake races to discover who, or what she is, she has already made her next choice.

But will knowing her secret be enough to stop her?]]> 352 Susan Barker 0593718291 Tony 0 to-read 3.78 2025
author: Susan Barker
name: Tony
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205482574 From the shocking surreal twists of 'Street of the Beggars' to the Escher-like grammatical maze of 'The Boarding House' to the pseudo-fairy tale classic 'The Basement', this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility.]]> 176 Mario Levrero 1916751067 Tony 3 4.10
author: Mario Levrero
name: Tony
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: 2025-reads, short-stories, translated-lit
review:

]]> 214339575
It’s just a puff piece about a farmer’s market, I said to myself. It’s not going to kill anyone.

It started out like any other morning for the Fact Checker. The piece, “Mandeville/Green,�� didn’t raise any red flags. There were more pressing stories that week—it being 2004 New York City and all.

“Mandeville/Green�� was a light, breezy look at a local farm called New Egypt, whose Ramapo tomatoes were quickly becoming the summer’s hottest produce. At first glance, the story seemed straightforward, but one line made the Fact Checker pause: a stray quote from a New Egypt volunteer named Sylvia making a cryptic reference to “nefarious business�� at the farmer’s market. “People sell everything here,�� she’s alleged to have said. “It ain’t all green.��

When Sylvia abruptly disappears the morning after an unexpectedly long night with the Fact Checker, he becomes obsessed with finding her. Did Sylvia discover something unsavory about New Egypt or its messianic owner? Is it possible she had some reason to fear for her safety? Or was it simply something the Fact Checker said?

Striking the perfect balance of humor, wonder, sadness, and poignancy, Austin Kelley’s debut novel takes readers on a quixotic quest from one hidden corner of New York City to another—from an underground supper club in the Financial District to an abandoned-boat-turned-anarchist-community-space on the Gowanus Canal. As the story develops, the Fact Checker begins to question his perception of what’s real and what’s not. Facts can be deceiving, after all, and if you aren’t careful, you might miss the truth right in front of your eyes.]]> 256 Austin Kelley 0802164102 Tony 0 to-read 3.40
author: Austin Kelley
name: Tony
average rating: 3.40
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214986266 A joyfully unhinged story of money, marriage, sex, and revenge unspools when a billionaire crashes his hot air balloon into the middle of a post-pandemic first date.

Joannie hasn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash lands his hot air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.��

Soon she finds herself alighting on a lost weekend with Johnny the bad kisser, Jonathan the billionaire, and Julia his smart, stunning wife. Does Joannie want Jonathan? Does Julia want her husband? Or Joannie? Or Joannie’s beautiful little girl? Does Johnny want Julia? Does Jonathan want Joannie, or Julia, or maybe, his much younger personal assistant, Vivian, who is tasked to fix it all? A tale of lust and money and lust for money, Hot Air is as astonishing as it is blisteringly funny, a delirious, delicious story for our billionaire era.]]> 208 Marcy Dermansky 0593320905 Tony 3 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025 3.50 2025
author: Marcy Dermansky
name: Tony
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025
review:

]]> 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 Tony 4 2025-reads, translated-lit 3.61 2021
author: Christian Kracht
name: Tony
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: 2025-reads, translated-lit
review:

]]> 227871604 Coming soon from Pantheon, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.]]> 1232 Mark Z. Danielewski 1524747718 Tony 0 to-read 5.00
author: Mark Z. Danielewski
name: Tony
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 42921509 What if all Palestinians vanished from their homeland overnight?

Alaa, a young Palestinian, is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance; that search, and his reaction to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.

Critically acclaimed in Arabic, spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine.]]> 256 Ibtisam Azem 0815611110 Tony 0 to-read 4.16 2014
author: Ibtisam Azem
name: Tony
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210678433
Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.

In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.]]> 160 Dahlia de la Cerda 1761385992 Tony 0 to-read 4.13 2019
author: Dahlia de la Cerda
name: Tony
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199534788
On a Woman’s Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her own choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America's tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo.��Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society’s expectations.
Strikingly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid��Roemer’s classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the��cruelties we inflict on those who disobey.��Roemer, the��first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments.�� Who is Noenka? ��Roemer asks us. “I’m Noenka,�� she responds resolutely, “which means Never Again.”]]> 265 Astrid H. Roemer 1949641643 Tony 0 to-read 2.88 1982
author: Astrid H. Roemer
name: Tony
average rating: 2.88
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 193388022
When we meet Amy Shone, she is a young parent struggling to raise Kate, a precocious eight-year-old. Amy is an enigma-a brilliant scholar who has forgotten how to read. She is estranged from her wealthy English parents and lives a nomadic life in Scotland, dragging Kate from one school to the next, barely scraping by.

And then there is Ash, a fiery Scottish actresss who cannot shake her demons-chief among them an unrequited passion for Amy that has obsessed her ever since they met as teenagers. Like is the story of two parallel lives that intersect briefly, then diverge. It is also a timeless evocation of adolescence and its agonizing anticipations, its contradictory yearnings for freedom and safety, its blind quest for mastery over pleasure and pain. Deftly constructed, passionately imagined, Like is a remarkable debut from a powerful talent.]]> 320 Ali Smith 0593687981 Tony 0 to-read 3.88 1997
author: Ali Smith
name: Tony
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40847246 164 Ali Smith 1786892472 Tony 0 to-read 3.84
author: Ali Smith
name: Tony
average rating: 3.84
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211934939 An intimate, captivating first novel that tells the story of a family in southern France whose lives are intertwined with the history of the AIDS crisis—and with the forgotten French doctors who are among the first to detect the virus.

Forty years after the death of his uncle Désiré, Anthony Passeron decided to investigate his family’s past. Evoking the social climbing of his grandparents who became the local butchers during the period of great economic growth in France from 1945 to 1975, and the gulf that opened between them and their children’s generation, Sleeping Children weaves two stories: that of the appearance of AIDS in the early 1980s in a family living in the countryside near Nice, and that of the fight against the illness that was undertaken in a French hospital. Passeron focuses on the experts in retrovirology—Luc Montagnier, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, and their colleagues—who discovered evidence of a retrovirus that was eventually named human immunodeficiency virus.]]> 208 Anthony Passeron 0374612269 Tony 0 to-read 3.97 2022
author: Anthony Passeron
name: Tony
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 88564033 122 Anne Serre 0811234517 Tony 0 to-read 3.60
author: Anne Serre
name: Tony
average rating: 3.60
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 203164415 From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing.

An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.

Add two children. And a horse.

From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.]]> 288 Ali Smith 0593701569 Tony 5 3.96 2024
author: Ali Smith
name: Tony
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: 2025-faves, 2025-reads, best-releases-2025, new-in-2025, audiobook, marked-up, own-physically
review:

]]> 5485 Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order–all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine�� (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New Worldd likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.

"Aldous Huxley is the greatest 20th century writer in English." —Chicago Tribune]]> 288 Aldous Huxley 0060850523 Tony 3 2025-reads, classics 3.86 1932
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Tony
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1932
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: 2025-reads, classics
review:

]]> 214151232 A highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea that tells the story of three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—as they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.

Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.

On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he’s unlike anything she’s seen before.

While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun’s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.]]> 400 Silvia Park 1668021668 Tony 5 super good. & sad!! 4.02 2025
author: Silvia Park
name: Tony
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025-faves, 2025-reads, arc, best-releases-2025, four-point-five
review:
super good. & sad!!
]]> 214565614 A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.]]> 448 Stephen Graham Jones 1668075083 Tony 4 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025 4.30 2025
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Tony
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025
review:

]]> 4397 The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America.
��
The Grapes of Wrath��summed up its era in the way that��Uncle Tom’s Cabin��summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that “The Battle Hymn of the Republic�� be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book—which takes its title from the first verse: “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.�� At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

This edition contains an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Robert Demott.]]> 464 John Steinbeck 0143039431 Tony 0 3.99 1939
author: John Steinbeck
name: Tony
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: classics, pulitzer-winner, own-physically, immediate-tbr, to-read
review:

]]> 203579062 144 Roberto Bolaño 1250321743 Tony 0 to-read 4.16 2000
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Tony
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 203579028 96 Roberto Bolaño 1250898161 Tony 0 to-read 3.37 2002
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Tony
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212808296 Eagerly awaited debut fiction from one of Canada's most exciting and admired young writers. A daring and inventive reimagining of the infamous set of laws, the Code Noir, that once governed Black lives.

Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art: a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple and ingenious: it is modeled on the infamous real-life "Code Noir," a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. In other words, the Code that contained and restricted the activities of Black people in the Caribbean.
The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine short, linked fictions that present vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments of Black life as it really existed and still exists, winding in and around, over and under the official decrees, refusing to be contained or ruled. Ranging in style from contemporary realism to dystopia, from fantasy to historical fiction, this loosely linked stream of 59 irrepressible stories comments on, underscores, undermines, mocks, breaks and redefines the Code's intent. An original, timely, culturally daring, virtuoso performance by a rising literary star.]]> 416 Canisia Lubrin 159376796X Tony 0 to-read 3.85 2025
author: Canisia Lubrin
name: Tony
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210223811 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 400 R.F. Kuang Tony 2 4.12 2025
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Tony
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, two-point-five
review:

]]> 158014 With its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, Hesse’s best-known and most autobiographical work is one of literature’s most poetic evocations of the soul’s journey to liberation

Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. The tale of the Steppenwolf culminates in the surreal Magic Theater—For Madmen Only!

Originally published in English in 1929, Steppenwolf ’s wisdom continues to speak to our souls and marks it as a classic of modern literature.
]]> 218 Hermann Hesse 0312278675 Tony 0 to-read 4.00 1927
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Tony
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 228394781 160 Vincent Delecroix 1913109372 Tony 0 to-read 4.08
author: Vincent Delecroix
name: Tony
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211934965 All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.

As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.

Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.]]> 336 Ray Nayler 0374615365 Tony 0 to-read 4.33 2025
author: Ray Nayler
name: Tony
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218153678 An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity.

“Dinan writes like some kind of demigod. Her fictions make thinkable new realities for how we live and what we might expect from each other.”�� Torrey Peters, author of Detransition Baby

“I don’t know why I feel like I’ve been caught doing something dirty. Cheating on queerness. Fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife.��
Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.]]> 320 Nicola Dinan 0593977874 Tony 0 to-read 4.17 2025
author: Nicola Dinan
name: Tony
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61193172
Like Junji Ito's Uzumaki , PTSD Radio takes something everyday and weaves it into a series of chilling, cryptic, twisted, repellant, and alluring manga stories that become more than what they first seem.

The hit digital series finally comes to print in three 400-page compilations!

Contains volumes 5-6 of PTSD Radio.

An unseen hand tugs at your braid. You find an old box with only a tangled mess of dark hair inside. You open a door in your home only to witness a river of curls slinking away, an ominous lump at its heart.

Ogushi preys on the unprepared. Before it's too late, tune into PTSD Radio.

These episodes and more await in this acclaimed horror series, coming to print after a successful digital run in double-length omnibus editions featuring sickeningly-textured covers. From the gleefully-twisted mind that created Fuan no Tane , PTSD Radio is a necessity for fans of the masters of manga scares such as Junji Ito, Kazuo Umezz, Shintaro Kago, and Suehiro Maruo.]]> 368 Masaaki Nakayama 1646516524 Tony 2 2025-reads, manga 3.94
author: Masaaki Nakayama
name: Tony
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: 2025-reads, manga
review:

]]> 63102737
Like Junji Ito's Uzumaki , PTSD Radio takes something everyday and weaves it into a series of chilling, cryptic, twisted, repellant, and alluring manga stories that become more than what they first seem.

The hit digital series finally comes to print in three 400-page compilations!

When you bend over the bathroom sink, you can't see what's behind you in the mirror. A gaping maw with too many teeth drags itself toward you up the stairs.

Skit skit skit. What's that crawling in your mouth while you sleep? Next, it wriggles its way into your ears, your nose, your brain...

Learning the origin of Ogushi-sama may help you find the answers you seek.

New horrors await in PTSD Radio 2.]]> 320 Masaaki Nakayama 1646516338 Tony 3 2025-reads, manga 4.07
author: Masaaki Nakayama
name: Tony
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: 2025-reads, manga
review:
the horror in this be like "what if a woman was scary looking"
]]> 213870651 208 Muneyuki Kaneshiro 1646516745 Tony 0 2025-reads, manga 4.50 2021
author: Muneyuki Kaneshiro
name: Tony
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: 2025-reads, manga
review:

]]> 210595420 WOULD YOU DEVOUR YOUR OWN?

Thanks to Ryusei Shidou’s explosive entrance, the U-20 Japan team has seized the initiative in the second half. Just when things are looking dire for the Blue Lock Eleven, Ego produces his trump card, Shouei Barou. “King Barou�� proceeds to rampage across the field, consuming friend and foe alike, but Rin and Isagi won’t settle for supporting roles. Let the clash of leading actors begin!]]> 208 Muneyuki Kaneshiro 1646516737 Tony 0 2025-reads, manga 4.48 2021
author: Muneyuki Kaneshiro
name: Tony
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: 2025-reads, manga
review:

]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]> 160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 Tony 0 to-read 3.90 2020
author: Solvej Balle
name: Tony
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214203940 A mega best-seller in Sweden, with rights sold to over a dozen countries and a TV adaptation underway, Annika Norlin’s debut novel The Colony is the biggest Swedish literary phenomenon since Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove. ��

Winner of the Vi Literature Award and Swedish Radio’s Novel Prize, two of Sweden’s biggest literary awards, The Colony is a gripping portrayal of contemporary society and its alternatives.��

Burnt-out from a demanding job and a bustling life in the city, Emelie has left town to spend a few days in the country. Once there, in the peaceful, verdant hills, down by the river she encounters a mysterious group of seven people, each with personal stories full of pain, alienation, and the longing to live differently. They are misfits, each in their own way, and all led by the enigmatic and charismatic Sara.��

How did they end up there? Are they content with the rigid roles they’ve been assigned? And what happens when an outsider appears and is initially drawn to their alternative lifestyle but cannot help but stir things up?��

A masterful blend of humor, emotion, unforgettable characters, and sharp social commentary, The Colony is a magnetic and deeply touching story about love, community, and the unfathomable power we other others and that others have over us.��]]> 464 Annika Norlin Tony 0 to-read 3.99 2023
author: Annika Norlin
name: Tony
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217387701 An addictively entertaining, internationally bestselling family saga by a National Book Award finalist.

Meet the Mikkola Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger.

Ina meets her future husband when she’s dragged to a New Year’s rave by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress. And Anastasia runs off to Tunisia, where she falls in love with a woman who, years later, will transform her life.

Following the sisters from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. Over the course of three decades, his life intersects with the sisters, from a chance encounter in Tunis to the scene of a fighter jet crash in Stockholm. When Evelyn disappears on a trip to New York, Jonas manages to track her down—and helps her to break the curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for decades. In the process, a shocking revelation changes everything about who they think they are.

Narrated in six parts, each spanning a period ranging from a year to a day to a single minute, Jonas Hassen Khemiri's The Sisters is a big, vivid family saga of the highest order and an addictively entertaining tour de force.]]> 656 Jonas Hassen Khemiri 0374618895 Tony 0 to-read 4.25 2023
author: Jonas Hassen Khemiri
name: Tony
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60543010
Like Junji Ito's Uzumaki, PTSD Radio takes something everyday and weaves it into a series of chilling, cryptic, twisted, repellant, and alluring manga stories that become more than what they first seem.

The hit digital series finally comes to print in three 400-page compilations!

An unseen hand tugs at your braid. You find an old box with only a tangled mess of dark hair inside. You open a door in your home only to witness a river of curls slinking away, an ominous lump at its heart.

Ogushi preys on the unprepared. Before it's too late, tune into PTSD Radio.

These episodes and more await in this acclaimed horror series, coming to print after a successful digital run in double-length omnibus editions featuring sickeningly-textured covers. From the gleefully-twisted mind that created Fuan no Tane, PTSD Radio is a necessity for fans of the masters of manga scares such as Junji Ito, Kazuo Umezz, Shintaro Kago, and Suehiro Maruo.]]> 320 Masaaki Nakayama 164651632X Tony 4 manga, 2025-reads 3.97
author: Masaaki Nakayama
name: Tony
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: manga, 2025-reads
review:

]]> 214151534 A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.

It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly.

When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,�� Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest.

At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.]]> 256 Sophie Kemp 1668057034 Tony 1 3.99
author: Sophie Kemp
name: Tony
average rating: 3.99
book published:
rating: 1
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025, not-for-me, satire, transgressive-lit
review:
an orgasm is described as, and i quote, "then he immediately became Mr. Firehose about the whole thing."
]]> 19385482 A poetic novel of despair, hope, and the redemptive power of work deepens an award-winning author's grand Port Williams literary project.

After losing his hand in an accident, Andy Catlett confronts an agronomist whose surreal vision can see only industrial farming. This vision is powerfully contrasted with that of modest Amish farmers content to live outside the pressures brought by capitalist postindustrial progress, and by working the land to keep away the three great evils of boredom, vice, and need.

As Andy's perspective filters through his anger over his loss and the harsh city of San Francisco surrounding him, he begins to the people and places that wait 2,000 miles away in his Kentucky home, the comfort he knew as a farmer, and his symbiotic relationship to the soil. Andy laments the modern shift away from the love of the land, even as he begins to accept his own changed relationship to the world. Wendell Berry's continued fascination with the power of memory continues in this treasured novel set in 1976.

"[Berry's] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America's agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal." --Publishers Weekly

"Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life." --The Bloomsbury Review]]> 119 Wendell Berry 1582439575 Tony 0 to-read 4.09 1988
author: Wendell Berry
name: Tony
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61391802 Seven ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers--characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers--or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.

Twisting and winding in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable--these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the art of short fiction.]]> 272 Kelly Link 0593449959 Tony 4 2025-reads, short-stories 3.79 2023
author: Kelly Link
name: Tony
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: 2025-reads, short-stories
review:

]]> 31277759 In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his 50-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities

Wendell Berry began his life in post-war America as the old times and the last of the old-time people were dying out, and continues to this day in the old ways: a team of work horses and a pencil are his preferred working tools. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home.

With grace and conviction, he shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy—the natural world will not survive it.

Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care. As Berry urges, we must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.]]> 352 Wendell Berry 0241279208 Tony 0 to-read 4.43 2017
author: Wendell Berry
name: Tony
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 19821063 For the centennial of its original publication, an irresistible Graphic Deluxe Edition of one of the most beloved books of the 20th century

Perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language, James Joyce’s Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin�� at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as “Araby,�� “Grace,�� and “The Dead,�� delve into the heart of the city of Joyce’s birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners�� speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s original wishes.

]]> 275 James Joyce 0143107453 Tony 0 to-read 3.94 1914
author: James Joyce
name: Tony
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1914
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217311813 An unforgettable and heartwarming book-club debut following a trans high school teacher from a small town in South Dakota who befriends the only other trans woman she knows: one of her students.

Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced—and trans. Not that she's told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn't exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit.

Abigail is seventeen, Mitchell High’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. It’s a role she plays faultlessly, albeit a little reluctantly. She's also annoyed by the idea of spending her senior year secretly guiding her English teacher through her transition. But Abigail remembers the uncertainty—and loneliness—that comes with it. Besides, Erica isn’t the only one struggling to shed the weight of others�� expectations.

As their unlikely friendship evolves under the increasing scrutiny of their community, both women—and those closest to them—will come to realize that sometimes there is nothing more radical than letting the world see who you really are.

Detransition Baby meets Fleishman is in Trouble in this remarkable debut novel from an incisive contemporary voice. A story about the awkwardness of growing up and the greatest love story of all, that between us and our friends, Woodworking is a tonic for the moment and a celebration of womanhood in all its multifaceted joy.]]> 368 Emily St. James 163893147X Tony 0 to-read 4.47 2025
author: Emily St. James
name: Tony
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56251712 After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season.

Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history.

With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.]]> 417 N.K. Jemisin Tony 0 to-read 4.14 2010
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Tony
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207847302 The Book of Love showcases Kelly Link at the height of her powers, channeling potent magic and attuned to all varieties of love—from friendship to romance to abiding family ties—with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary derring-do. Readers will find joy (and a little terror) and an affirmation that love goes on, even when we cannot.

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

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

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.]]> 640 Kelly Link 0593732243 Tony 0 to-read 3.27 2024
author: Kelly Link
name: Tony
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 and��unrepentant 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 potential��of our lives, no matter the limitations we experience.]]> 112 Saou Ichikawa 0593734718 Tony 0 to-read 3.57 2023
author: Saou Ichikawa
name: Tony
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213870084 From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.�� This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.��

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.��

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.�� It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order,�� a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.��

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 Tony 0 to-read 4.68 2025
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Tony
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 154488337 A powerful, heartrending debut novel about ambition, survival, and our responsibilities to one another

Dixon was once an Olympic-level runner, but he missed the team by two-tenths of a second. Ever since that disappointment decades ago, he hasn’t allowed a goal to consume him. But when his charming older brother, Nate, suggests they attempt to be the first Black American men to summit Mount Everest, Dixon can’t refuse. The brothers are determined to prove something—to themselves and to each other. Dixon, Descending is a captivating, shattering portrait of the ways we’re reshaped by our decisions—and what it takes to angle ourselves, once again, toward hope.]]> 336 Karen Outen 0593473450 Tony 0 to-read 3.93 2024
author: Karen Outen
name: Tony
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212808299 A journalist finds himself embroiled in a disastrous government campaign as well as a sweeping romance in this landmark English translation of Ethiopia’s most famous novel.

An engrossing political thriller and a tale of love and war for readers of John Le Carré and Philip Kerr.

December 1981, Ethiopia. Tsegaye Hailemaryam, a well-known journalist for the state-run media, has just landed in Asmara. He is on assignment as the head of propaganda for the Red Star campaign, a massive effort by the Ethiopian government to end the Eritrean insurgency. There, amid the city’s bars and coffeehouses buzzing with spies and government agents, he juggles the demands of his superiors while trying to reassure his fiancée back home that he’s not straying with Asmara’s famed beauties.

As Tsegaye falls in love with Asmara—and, in spite of his promises, with dazzling, enigmatic local woman Fiammetta—his misgivings about the campaign grow. Tsegaye confronts the horror of war when he is sent with an elite army unit to attack the insurgents�� mountain stronghold. In the aftermath, he encounters betrayals that shake his faith in both the regime and human nature.

Oromay became an instant sensation when first published in 1983 and was swiftly banned for its frank depiction of the regime. The author vanished soon thereafter; the consensus is that he was murdered in retaliation for Oromay. A sweeping and timeless story about power and betrayal in love and war, the novel remains Girma’s masterpiece.]]> 416 Baalu Girma 1641296666 Tony 0 to-read 3.90 1983
author: Baalu Girma
name: Tony
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214151601 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]> 192 Agustina Bazterrica 1668051885 Tony 4 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025 3.67 2023
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Tony
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025
review:

]]> 36495876
A hardcover, deluxe collector’s edition of one of the most beloved manga and anime of all time! Fully remastered with an updated translation and completely fresh lettering, and presented with color pages on large-trimmed archival-quality paper, this gorgeous hardcover edition presents the timeless dark adventures of the Elric brothers as they were truly meant to be seen. Includes brand-new cover art, color inserts and behind-the-scenes character sketches from author Hiromu Arakawa!

In an alchemical ritual gone wrong, Edward Elric lost his arm and his leg, and his brother Alphonse became nothing but a soul in a suit of armor. Equipped with mechanical “auto-mail�� limbs, Edward becomes a state alchemist, seeking the one thing that can restore his and his brother’s bodies�� the legendary Philosopher’s Stone!

The best-selling manga Fullmetal Alchemist finally available in a high-quality hardcover collectors' edition.]]> 280 Hiromu Arakawa 1421599775 Tony 0 to-read, manga 4.59 2011
author: Hiromu Arakawa
name: Tony
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read, manga
review:

]]> 215362651 “The story of relationships built and broken, mistakes inherited and repeated, and the beauty of trying again��.already one of the year’s best.”��People

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws�� lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, though Cece can’t imagine anyone more ill-suited for the task—an airport baggage handler haunted by a tragedy from his and Charlie’s shared past. But as Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. And why does Garrett, after meeting Cece, begin to feel, well, human again? As a contagious stomach flu threatens to scuttle the wedding, and Charlie and Garrett’s friendship is put to the ultimate test, Cece must decide between the life she’s dreamed of and a life she’s never imagined.

The events of that summer have long-lasting repercussions, not only on the three friends caught in its shadow but also on their children, who struggle to escape their parents�� story. Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past—both our own and the ones we’ve inherited.

Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.]]> 448 Eric Puchner 0385550669 Tony 0 to-read 3.66 2025
author: Eric Puchner
name: Tony
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61103016 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, this gloriously entertaining novel is "fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny ... about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel" (San Francisco Chronicle).

"Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home.

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his fa�ade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.

Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn't ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn't ask questions, either.

Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa--the "Waldorf of Harlem"--and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes.

Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?

Harlem Shuffle's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

But mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.]]> 336 Colson Whitehead 0525567275 Tony 0 to-read 3.74 2021
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Tony
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 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 Tony 3 4.09 2025
author: Torrey Peters
name: Tony
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, mixed-feelings, new-in-2025, two-point-five
review:

]]> 220161567 Euphoria meets Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke in this latest novel by the Bram Stoker Award–winning author Hailey Piper, following a couple whose search to spice up their sex life leads them down a path of madness.

A kink-fixated couple, Carmen and Blanca, have been in a rut. That is until Blanca discovers the enigmatic Smoke in an under-street drug den, who holds pages to a strange play, The King in Yellow. Read too much, and you’ll fall into madness. But read just a little and pull back, and it gives you the adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria, leading Carmen to fall into a game of lust at a nightmare’s edge.

As the line blurs between the world Carmen knows and the one that she visits after reading from the play, she begins to desire more time in this other world no matter what horrors she brings back with her.

Bram Stoker Award–winning author Hailey Piper masterfully blends horror, erotica, and psychological thriller in this captivating and chilling story.]]> 288 Hailey Piper 1668077086 Tony 0 to-read 3.70 2025
author: Hailey Piper
name: Tony
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212342605 Hungerstone��is a thrillingly seductive sapphic romance for fans of S.T. Gibson’s��A Dowry of Blood��and Emilia Hart’s��Weyward.

For what do you hunger, Lenore?

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day.

The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger.

Torn between regaining her husband's affection and Carmilla's ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .

Set against the violent wilderness of the moors and the uncontrolled appetite of the industrial revolution,��Hungerstone��is a compulsive feminist reworking of��Carmilla, the book that inspired��Dracula: a captivating story of appetite and desire.]]> 336 Kat Dunn 1638932166 Tony 0 to-read 4.03 2025
author: Kat Dunn
name: Tony
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 208430658 Magic has made the city of Tiran an industrial utopia, but magic has a cost—and the collectors have come calling.

An orphan since the age of four, Sciona has always had more to prove than her fellow students. For twenty years, she has devoted every waking moment to the study of magic, fueled by a mad desire to achieve the impossible: to be the first woman ever admitted to the High Magistry. When she finally claws her way up the ranks to become a highmage, however, she finds that her challenges have just begun. Her new colleagues will stop at nothing to let her know she is unwelcome, beginning with giving her a janitor instead of a qualified lab assistant.

What neither Sciona nor her peers realize is that her taciturn assistant was once more than a janitor; before he mopped floors for the mages, Thomil was a nomadic hunter from beyond Tiran’s magical barrier. Ten years have passed since he survived the perilous crossing that killed his family. But working for a highmage, he sees the opportunity to finally understand the forces that decimated his tribe, drove him from his homeland, and keep the Tiranish in power.

Through their fractious relationship, mage and outsider uncover an ancient secret that could change the course of magic forever—if it doesn’t get them killed first. Sciona has defined her life by the pursuit of truth, but how much is one truth worth with the fate of civilization in the balance?

A standalone dark academia brimming with mystery, tragedy, and the damning echoes of the past. For fans of Leigh Bardugo, V. E. Schwab, and Fullmetal Alchemist.

(Content warnings for gore, sexual assault, and suicidal ideation)]]> 430 M.L. Wang 0593873351 Tony 0 to-read 4.41 2023
author: M.L. Wang
name: Tony
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57693295
"This is top-drawer science writing." ―Publishers Weekly, starred review

In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black walks readers through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries, and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe. Life’s losses were sharp and deeply-felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now.

Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It’s a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana 66 million years ago. A Triceratops horridus ambles along the edge of the forest. In a matter of hours, everything here will be wiped away. Lush verdure will be replaced with fire. Tyrannosaurus rex will be toppled from their throne, along with every other species of non-avian dinosaur no matter their size, diet, or disposition. They just don’t know it yet.

The cause of this disaster was identified decades ago. An asteroid some seven miles across slammed into the Earth, leaving a geologic wound over 50 miles in diameter. In the terrible mass extinction that followed, more than half of known species vanished seemingly overnight. But this worst single day in the history of life on Earth was as critical for us as it was for the dinosaurs, as it allowed for evolutionary opportunities that were closed for the previous 100 million years.

"This is pop science that reads like a fantasy novel, but backed up by hard facts and the latest fossil discoveries. Black is pioneering a new narrative prehistorical nonfiction." �� Steve Brusatte, New York Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs]]> 287 Riley Black 1250271045 Tony 0 to-read 3.88 2022
author: Riley Black
name: Tony
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214151526 Discover the astonishingly powerful debut novel by the beloved feminist author of the “brilliant�� (The Wall Street Journal) Forbidden Notebook and the “courageous�� (The Washington Post) Her Side of the Story that was so subversive, it was banned by the Italian Fascist regime when it was first published in 1938.

A coming-of-age novel that is as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, There’s No Turning Back centers on eight women with radically different backgrounds who attend the same college in Rome. Some are there to study, others to escape a scandal, or keep a secret, and during their time there, they experience the challenges of love, work, and emancipation.

Considered experimental and revolutionary at the time, this novel established Alba de Céspedes as a powerful new voice in the 20th century. Translated by Ann Goldstein, There’s No Turning Back demonstrates why de Céspedes deserves “an important place in the canon of women’s literature�� (Chicago Review of Books).]]> 304 Alba de Céspedes 1668083639 Tony 0 to-read 3.92 1938
author: Alba de Céspedes
name: Tony
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1938
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214269394
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.]]> 277 Holly Brickley 0593799089 Tony 0 to-read 3.82 2025
author: Holly Brickley
name: Tony
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216247518 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.]]> 208 Katie Kitamura 059385232X Tony 5 3.88 2025
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Tony
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: 2025-reads, best-releases-2025, new-in-2025, reread-tbr, arc, transgressive-lit, 2025-faves
review:

]]> 212924015
After nearly losing the election to a geriatric but wildly popular donkey named Maurizio, newly installed Mayor Delizia Miccuci can’t help but feel like the sun has finally set on the rural Italian village of Lazzarini Boscarino. Tourists only stop by to ask for directions, Nonna Amara’s cherished ristorante is long shuttered, and the town hall is disgustingly overrun with glis glis poo—even Postman Duccio has been disgraced. All that’s left is Bar Celebrità, a rustic establishment where weary locals gather to quibble over decades-long disputes, submit their poor stomachs to bartender Giuseppina’s volcanic espresso, and wonder what will become of the place where together they’ve spent their entire lives.

Little do the villagers know that, mere miles away in the forest, local truffle hunter Giovanni Scarpazza has just happened upon something that could change everything. Swollen to massive proportions, soaking the atmosphere in its pungent fumes, potentially worth six figures in certain international circles, a truffle—un tartufo, that is—sits beneath the soil with the power to either be the greatest gift or the foulest curse the village has ever seen—they’re not completely sure which since Giuseppina’s psychic was a bit unclear on the matter.

Tartufo is much more than a charming romp through the foothills of Tuscany. Written in the same enchanting style and raucous humor that defines Hollow Kingdom and Feral Creatures, Buxton’s newest story is a reflection on the interconnectedness of life in all its manifestations—and how holding on to harmony in the face of hardship can grow something beautiful and rare beneath the surface.]]> 352 Kira Jane Buxton 1538770814 Tony 0 to-read 3.80 2025
author: Kira Jane Buxton
name: Tony
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216520661 I Love Shopping brings the specificities of relationships into relief, creating an expanse in which it is the things which assert that an orchid is different from a scientist or a ballerina are also the characteristics which underpin their commonality. Based in a fantastic world of speakers which could be anyone, Cook invites readers to place themselves inside the minds of the entire population of the world, be it an ancient rock, a child, a rose bush, honeysuckle, or the last of a particular type of orchid, eaten by a skunk in the night.]]> 88 Lauren Cook 1643622862 Tony 0 to-read 4.00 2019
author: Lauren Cook
name: Tony
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217223430 Daisy Jones and the Six meets Patricia Highsmith in this addictive, intense novel about the brutal and ferocious road to glory, from the award-winning author of My Husband.��

Ever since she was a child, Cléo, the French-American daughter of two academics, has had only one becoming a famous singer. Over the years, to everyone’s surprise but her own, she overcomes every obstacle and becomes a global superstar with millions of dollars, countless awards, and several Los Angeles villas to her name. But as any celebrity will tell you, getting to the top is one thing; staying there is another.

Now thirty-three years old, Cléo is taking her first real vacation in years, on a remote island with no one else in sight. With the never-ending spin cycle of her life finally on pause and no paparazzi peeking out from behind the coconut palms, she can work on her fourth album in peace. Except that with so much time to think, she can’t help but ruminate on her past—including how, just six months earlier, things started to go very, very wrong . . .

Taking place between New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and the South Pacific, How to Become a Celebrity is a brilliant sophomore novel from Maud Ventura that dives intoxicatingly deep into the machinations of one woman’s complicated mind, and her relentless pursuit of fame.


]]> 352 Maud Ventura 0063427516 Tony 4 3.85 2024
author: Maud Ventura
name: Tony
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025, translated-lit
review:

]]> 222139714 For fans of��Conversations with Friends��and��Vladimir��comes a magnetic, fresh take on marriage and when two married professors tiptoe toward infidelity, their transgressions are brought to light in a graduate student’s searing thesis project.

Simone is the star of Edwards University’s creative writing renowned Woolf scholar, grief memoirist, and campus sex icon. Her less glamorous and ostensibly devoted husband, Ethan, is a forgotten novelist and lecturer in the same department. But when Ethan and the department administrative assistant Abigail have sex, Simone and Ethan’s faith in their flawless marriage is rattled.

Simone has secrets of her own. While Ethan’s away for the summer, she becomes inordinately close with her advisee, graduate student Roberta “Robbie�� Green. In Robbie, Simone finds a new running partner, confidante, and disciple—or so she believes. Behind Simone’s back, Robbie fictionalizes her mentor’s marriage in a breathtakingly invasive MFA thesis. Determined to tell her version of the story, Robbie paints a revealing portrait of Simone, Ethan, Abigail, and even herself, scratching at the very surface of what may—or may not—be the truth.

Innovative, witty, and tender,��Seduction Theory��exposes the intoxicating nature of power and attraction, masterfully demonstrating how love and betrayal can coexist.]]> 224 Emily Adrian 0316584517 Tony 0 to-read 4.27 2025
author: Emily Adrian
name: Tony
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212806569 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey to��peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of��Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz �� just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy �� collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied ways��those of��other cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls��that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]> 224 Geraldine Brooks 059365398X Tony 0 to-read 4.36 2025
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Tony
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214151881 On a New England morning in the late 1980s, a group of young cousins wander deep into the woods on their family’s property, drawn in by uncanny visions and the disappearance of one of their own—but the farther they go, the stranger their surroundings become.

Lingering at the edge of a family party, a troop of cousins loses track of the youngest child among them. With their parents preoccupied with bickering about decades-old crises, the children decide they must set out to investigate themselves—to the rickety chicken coop, the barn and its two troublesome horses, and into the woods that once comprised their late grandmother’s property. The more the children search, and the deeper they walk, the more threatening the woods become and the more lost they are, caught between their aunt’s home in the present day, their parents�� childhood home just through the trees, and the memory of the house their grandmother grew up in. Soon, what began as a quest for answers gives way to a journey that undermines everything they’ve been told about who they are, where they came from, and what they deserve.

Disquieting and delightful, Idle Grounds is a rich exploration of the interior lives of children and a gripping meditation on birthright, decline, and weight of family history. A fable of the distortions of privilege and the impossibility of keeping secrets hidden, this is a novel about straying from home—only to come back unraveled, unsettled, and irrevocably changed.]]> 208 Krystelle Bamford 1668070456 Tony 3 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025 3.37 2025
author: Krystelle Bamford
name: Tony
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025
review:

]]> 2517 My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.

The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book celebrating the glories of his realm. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed. The ruling elite therefore mustn’t know the full scope or nature of the project, and panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears. The only clue to the mystery–or crime? –lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, My Name is Red is a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex and power.]]> 417 Orhan Pamuk Tony 0 to-read 3.87 1998
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: Tony
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

As only he can do, Joseph O'Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.]]> 288 Joseph O'Neill 0593701321 Tony 0 to-read 3.54 2024
author: Joseph O'Neill
name: Tony
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207079590 192 James Baldwin 0593688961 Tony 0 own-physically, to-read 4.53 1956
author: James Baldwin
name: Tony
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: own-physically, to-read
review:

]]> 214269374 Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature�� (The Sunday Times).

Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers, Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

The thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed and incisive young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.]]> 176 Natasha Brown 0593977300 Tony 1 3.48 2025
author: Natasha Brown
name: Tony
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: 2025-reads, arc, new-in-2025, satire
review:

]]> 214537774 For the first time ever, collected here are all three volumes of the diaries of Helen Garner—an Australian literary master, who famously pulled her greatest works straight from the pages of her own journals

The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of "ordinary people in difficult times" (New York Times). But the inspiration for it all was her extensive collection of diaries—fastidiously kept, intricately written, and delightfully dishy, unspooling the inner lives of her insular world in bohemian Melbourne.

Now, for the first time, all three volumes of Garner's inimitable diaries are collected into one book. Spanning more than two decades, each finely etched volume reveals Garner like never a fledgling author publishing her lightning-rod debut novel in the late 70s;��in the throes of a consuming affair in the late 80s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the late 90s. And all the while, they bear witness to one of the world's great writers hard at work.��

Devastatingly honest and disarmingly funny, How to End a Story is a portrait of loss, betrayal, and the sheer force of a woman’s anger—but also of resilience, quotidian moments of joy, the immutable ties of motherhood, and the regenerative power of a room of one’s own.]]> 832 Helen Garner 0553387499 Tony 0 to-read 4.78 2025
author: Helen Garner
name: Tony
average rating: 4.78
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 292327
A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.]]> 206 Toni Morrison 0307278441 Tony 0 to-read 4.18 1970
author: Toni Morrison
name: Tony
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199373354
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.

Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.]]> 320 Ben Shattuck 059349038X Tony 3 4.37 2024
author: Ben Shattuck
name: Tony
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: 2025-reads, audiobook, short-stories
review:
probably would've liked this more if i hadn't read north woods and known it could be done so much better
]]> 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 Tony 0 to-read 3.88 2024
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Tony
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217005303 A searing novel of love and betrayal as a young boy comes of age in the heart of England, from an exquisite new voice.

In a small village in England, in the shadow of an ancient abbey nestled between rivers, a young boy is growing up. Daniel is highly intelligent but little understood by his family, and so a secret passion burns inside him—for love, for certainty, and for recognition. His father is a man of grand gestures but few practical skills, and his beautiful mother is attentive but compromised by her own unhappiness and fading ideals.����

When Daniel’s father loses his job as the headmaster of the local school, the family is pulled beneath the undertow of his whims, stumbling into a rural life for which they are ill-prepared. The arrival of Philip, a new boy at school, whom Daniel worships with a confused intensity, is his sole solace. Before long, both boys fall under the spell of a charismatic art teacher, setting Daniel on a perilous course that could lead to the betrayal of all he loves. ��

Tender, brutal, and enthralling, The Boyhood of Cain is a remarkable portrait of a young boy caught between mother and father, between self and desire, and between obedience and freedom. It evokes the passions and private wounds of youth and plumbs the turning points in our lives that make us who we are.]]> 208 Michael Amherst 0593718526 Tony 0 to-read 3.42 2025
author: Michael Amherst
name: Tony
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205363956 With equal measures of wit and wisdom, the author of 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret draws a deeply original, hilarious, and telling portrait of the Queen herself.She was the most famous person on earth; she first appeared on the cover of Time magazine at the age of three. When she died, few people were old enough to recall a time when she was not alive.Her likeness has been reproduced—in photographs, on stamps, on the notes and coins of thirty different currencies—more than any since Jesus. It is probable that, over the course of her ninety-six years, she was introduced to a greater number of different people than anyone else who has ever lived—likely well over half a million. Yet this most closely observed of all women rarely left any real impression on those she encountered beyond vague notions of her "radiance" and "sense of duty." A high proportion of those she met can remember what they said to her, but not a word of what she said to them.Up until now, the curious tactic employed by biographers of the Queen has been to ignore what is interesting and to concentrate on what is not. Craig Brown, the author of 150 Glimpses of the Beatles and Hello Goodbye Hello, rejects this formula, bringing his kaleidoscopic approach to the most famous—and most guarded�� woman on earth, examining the Queen through a succession of interlocking prisms. With Q, this fantastically funny, marvelously insightful journalist gives us an unforgettable portrait of the omnipresent, elusive Queen Elizabeth II.]]> 672 Craig Brown 0374610924 Tony 0 to-read 3.95
author: Craig Brown
name: Tony
average rating: 3.95
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date added: 2025/02/12
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]]> 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 Tony 0 to-read 3.74 2025
author: Aria Aber
name: Tony
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> 217896248 From the nationally bestselling author of The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence, a transfixing, intensely atmospheric fever dream of medieval horror.

Aymar Castle has been under siege for six months. Food is running low and there has been no sign of rescue. But just as the survivors consider deliberately thinning their number, the castle stores are replenished. The sick are healed. And the divine figures of the Constant Lady and her Saints have arrived, despite the barricaded gates, offering succor in return for adoration.

Soon, the entire castle is under the sway of their saviors, partaking in intoxicating feasts of terrible origin. The war hero Ser Voyne gives her allegiance to the Constant Lady. Phosyne, a disorganized, paranoid nun-turned-sorceress, races to unravel the mystery of these new visitors and exonerate her experiments as their source. And in the bowels of the castle, a serving girl, Treila, is torn between her thirst for a secret vengeance against Voyne and the desperate need to escape from the horrors that are unfolding within Aymar’s walls.

As the castle descends into bacchanalian madness—forgetting the massed army beyond its walls in favor of hedonistic ecstasy—these three women are the only ones to still see their situation for what it is. But they are not immune from the temptations of the castle’s new masters�� or each other; and their shifting alliances and entangled pasts bring violence to the surface. To save the castle, and themselves, will take a reimagining of who they are, and a reorganization of the very world itself.]]> 352 Caitlin Starling 0063418819 Tony 0 to-read 4.02 2025
author: Caitlin Starling
name: Tony
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> 212808263 Close to Cronenberg and deeply indebted to Kafka, this gaucho-punk novel offers an explosive interpretation of an ultra-capitalistic society at the grips with climate collapse.

The protagonist of this story has no understanding of the words “winter��, "cold��, or "snow" because he has never experienced the phenomena they describe. We find ourselves in Victorica, a province of La Pampa, Argentina, some time after 2197 �� the year in which the last of the Antarctic icecaps melted and an unprecedented climate catastrophe ensued, radically transforming the landscape of the region into a Caribbean Pampas. It is here that the Dengue Child grows up, a mutant mix of child and mosquito, the result of crazy experimenting driven by ultra-capitalistic corporations racing against each other to own viruses and their cures, destroying even their very own children’s existence to cash in on the stock exchange.

Another of the surprising effects of the thaw is the appearance of powerful telepathic pebbles from the bowels of the earth that seem to encapsulate the world's original wisdom, and which are the subject of lucrative smuggling. Meanwhile, the wealthy of the region chose to cruise around on ships where they can experience ice-skating and hand carve ice from valuable remains of glaciers. In their ultra-air conditioned homes, their kids play Indians vs Christians, a brutal video game set in the historical 19th century.����

The future according to Michel Nieva looks frenetic and shocking. He counts among the rising voices of Argentina, packing punches in a deeply intelligent, informed, and humorful prose which takes root in Latin American storytelling and sci-fi tradition.]]> 224 Michel Nieva 1662602650 Tony 0 to-read 3.62 2023
author: Michel Nieva
name: Tony
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> 22125258
Link has won an ardent following for her ability to take readers deep into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe with each new story. In “The Summer People,�� a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In “I Can See Right Through You,�� a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In “The New Boyfriend,�� a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-size animated doll.

Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids...These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded in sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty—and the hidden strengths—of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.]]> 336 Kelly Link 0804179689 Tony 0 to-read 3.67 2015
author: Kelly Link
name: Tony
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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