Jennifer's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 09:18:47 -0700 60 Jennifer's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Glorious Exploits 127278133 An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.]]>
304 Ferdia Lennon 1250893690 Jennifer 0 currently-reading 4.15 2024 Glorious Exploits
author: Ferdia Lennon
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Himawari House 55780534
Living in a new country is no walk in the park.

When Nao returns to Tokyo to reconnect with her Japanese heritage, she books a yearlong stay at the Himawari sharehouse. There she meets Hyejung and Tina, two other girls who came to Japan to freely forge their own paths. The trio live together, share meals, and even attend the same Japanese-language school, which results in them becoming fast friends. But will they be able to hold one another up as life tests them with new loves, old heartbreaks, and the everyday challenges of being fish out of water?]]>
380 Harmony Becker 125023557X Jennifer 4 2025, comic, fiction 4.37 2021 Himawari House
author: Harmony Becker
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: 2025, comic, fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[What You Are Looking For Is in the Library]]> 91274427 For fans of The Midnight Library and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this charming Japanese novel shows how the perfect book recommendation can change a reader's life.

What are you looking for?

This is the famous question routinely asked by Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. Like most librarians, Komachi has read every book lining her shelves—but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of her library guests. For anyone who walks through her door, Komachi can sense exactly what they’re looking for in life and provide just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it.

Each visitor comes to her library from a different juncture in their careers and dreams, from the restless sales attendant who feels stuck at her job to the struggling working mother who longs to be a magazineeditor. The conversation that they have with Sayuri Komachi—and the surprise book she lends each of them—will have life-altering consequences.

With heartwarming charm and wisdom, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a paean to the magic of libraries, friendship and community, perfect for anyone who has ever found themselves at an impasse in their life and in need of a little inspiration.]]>
304 Michiko Aoyama 1335005625 Jennifer 0 currently-reading 4.07 2020 What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
author: Michiko Aoyama
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism]]> 223436601 An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.�

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]>
400 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Jennifer 0 currently-reading 4.30 2025 Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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

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

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

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

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Highway Thirteen: Stories 195791203
In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims� families, but its impact travels even into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.

Highway Thirteen , Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection, takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer’s childhood town to Texas, Rome, and tropical northern Australia, McFarlane presents an oblique, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without centering the killers? From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The High Places comes a captivating account of loss and its extended echoes in individual lives.]]>
272 Fiona McFarlane 0374606269 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 3.68 2024 Highway Thirteen: Stories
author: Fiona McFarlane
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds]]> 58065802 A stirring, eye-opening journey into deep time, from the Ice Age to the first appearance of microbial life 550 million years ago, by a brilliant young paleobiologist

The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life on the page.

This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt―or not. It takes us from the savannahs of Pliocene Kenya to watch a python chase a group of australopithecines into an acacia tree; to a cliff overlooking the salt pans of the empty basin of what will be the Mediterranean Sea just as water from the Miocene Atlantic Ocean spills in; into the tropical forests of Eocene Antarctica; and under the shallow pools of Ediacaran Australia, where we glimpse the first microbial life.

Otherlands also offers us a vast perspective on the current state of the planet. The thought that something as vast as the Great Barrier Reef, for example, with all its vibrant diversity, might one day soon be gone sounds improbable. But the fossil record shows us that this sort of wholesale change is not only possible but has repeatedly happened throughout Earth history.

Even as he operates on this broad canvas, Halliday brings us up close to the intricate relationships that defined these lost worlds. In novelistic prose that belies the breadth of his research, he illustrates how ecosystems are formed; how species die out and are replaced; and how species migrate, adapt, and collaborate. It is a breathtaking achievement: a surprisingly emotional narrative about the persistence of life, the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, and the scope of deep time, all of which have something to tell us about our current crisis.]]>
385 Thomas Halliday 0593132882 Jennifer 4 4.10 2022 Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds
author: Thomas Halliday
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: 2025, international, non-fiction, science
review:

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Swordheart 218624103 448 T. Kingfisher 1250400228 Jennifer 0 to-read-fantasy 4.08 2018 Swordheart
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read-fantasy
review:

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Matrix 56139516 Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies. Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie's vision be bulwark enough? Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff's new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.
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336 Lauren Groff 0593459652 Jennifer 0 currently-reading 3.74 2021 Matrix
author: Lauren Groff
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders]]> 40680114 A collection of newspaper stories by award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard--including “Dirty John,� the basis for the hit podcast and the upcoming Bravo scripted series starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana.

Since its release in fall 2017, the “Dirty John� podcast--about a conman who terrorizes a Southern California family--has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and will soon premiere as a scripted drama on Bravo starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. The story, which also ran as a print series in the Los Angeles Times, wasn’t unfamiliar terrain to its writer, Christopher Goffard. Over two decades at newspapers from Florida to California, Goffard has reported probingly on the shadowy, unseen corners of society. This book gathers together for the first time “Dirty John� and the rest of his very best work.

“The $40 Lawyer� provides an inside account of a young public defender’s rookie year in the legal trenches. “Framed� offers an unblinking chronicle of suburban mayhem (and is currently being developed by Netflix as a film starring Julia Roberts). A man wrongly imprisoned for rape, train-riding runaways in love, a Syrian mother forced to leave her children in order to save them, a boy who grows up to become a cop as a way of honoring his murdered sister, another boy who struggles with the knowledge that his father is on death row: these stories reveal the complexities of human nature, showing people at both their most courageous and their most flawed.

Goffard shared in the Los Angeles Times� Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2011 and has twice been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing. This collection—a must-read for fans of both true-crime and first-rate narrative nonfiction—underscores his reputation as one of today’s most original journalistic voices.]]>
368 Christopher Goffard 1982113251 Jennifer 1 3.5 3.59 2018 Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders
author: Christopher Goffard
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2019/08/19
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2019, bay-area-and-california, non-fiction
review:
3.5
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<![CDATA[Civil Disobedience and Other Essays]]> 13511730 Philosopher, naturalist, poet and rugged individualist, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) has inspired generations of readers to think for themselves, to follow the dictates of their own conscience and to make an art of their lives. This representative sampling of his thought includes five of his most frequently cited and read essays: "Civil Disobedience," his most powerful and influential political essay, exalts the law of conscience over civil law. "Life without Principle" distills the essence of Thoreau's philosophy of self-reliance and individualism. "Slavery in Massachusetts" is a searing attack on government condonation of slavery. "A Plea for Captain John Brown" is an eloquent defense of the radical abolitionist, while "Walking" celebrates the joys of that activity and pleads for conservation of the earth's wild places. The latter essay is recognized as one of the pioneer documents in the conservations and national park movement in America.

Original Dover (1993) selection of essays reprinted from original sources. New introductory Note.

Cover design by Paul E. Kennedy.


Description from back cover]]>
90 Henry David Thoreau Jennifer 0 currently-reading 3.77 1866 Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
author: Henry David Thoreau
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1866
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)]]> 35519101
And Murderbot would rather those questions went away. For good.

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158 Martha Wells 1250191785 Jennifer 4 2025, humor, science-fiction 3.7 4.21 2018 Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)
author: Martha Wells
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: 2025, humor, science-fiction
review:
3.7
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<![CDATA[Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story]]> 217305478 78 Emily Hyland 1736577778 Jennifer 0 to-read-poetry 4.36 Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story
author: Emily Hyland
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.36
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read-poetry
review:

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<![CDATA[You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads: Angelo Herndon's Fight for Free Speech]]> 213395514 The story of a young, Black Communist Party organizer and the landmark case that made him a civil rights hero.


In 1932, eighteen-year-old Black Communist Party organizer Angelo Herndon was arrested, had his rooms illegally searched, and his radical literature seized. He was charged with attempting to incite insurrection—a crime punishable by death. You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads chronicles Herndon’s five-year quest for freedom during a time when Blacks, white liberals, and the radical left joined forces to define the nation’s commitment to civil rights and civil liberties.


Herndon’s champions included the young, Black Harvard Law School–educated attorney Benjamin J. Davis Jr.; the future historian C. Vann Woodward, who joined the interracial Herndon defense committee; the white-shoe New York lawyer Whitney North Seymour, who argued Herndon’s appeals; and literary friends Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. With their support, Herndon reinvented himself as one of the most famous Black men in America and inspired a constitutional right to protest.]]>
336 Brad Snyder 1324036540 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 3.82 You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads: Angelo Herndon's Fight for Free Speech
author: Brad Snyder
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read-history
review:

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<![CDATA[The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: The Continuing Adventures of Judith Shakespeare]]> 212994454
For readers of Hilary Mantel and Madeline Miller, a deeply engrossing work of historical fiction—a tale about a woman of the Shakespeare family struggling to manage both her private grief and public danger.

At the age of sixty-one, Judith Shakespeare, a midwife-apothecary and twin of the long-dead Hamnet, must flee provincial Stratford on horseback to avoid arrest for witchcraft. Her traveling companions are a zealous Puritan woman and child who have been displaced by civil war—the bloody seventeenth-century strife between Royalists and Roundheads. Judith is also leaving her marriage, which has foundered since the wrenching loss of two adult sons to the plague.

The sequel to the author’s My Father Had a Daughter, a tale of Judith in her youth, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter revisits this character for the ages—Shakespeare’s sharp-tongued, witty youngest child, no less feisty in her maturity. Four-hundred years after Judith’s death, Grace Tiffany brings her back onto center stage. Judith’s latest tale offers profound insights—into friendship, motherhood, marriage, religious extremism, and war—which remain resoundingly true today.]]>
256 Grace Tiffany 0063380536 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 3.99 The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: The Continuing Adventures of Judith Shakespeare
author: Grace Tiffany
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.99
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Collection]]> 205478745
This celebratory anthology explores human connection through forty poems curated by Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of the On Being Project’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Along with each poem, Ó Tuama shares an enriching meditation, revealing the ways we relate to each other, the world around us, and ourselves. Among the selections, Ó Tuama examines the profundity of friendship through Langston Hughes� “I Miss My Friend,� the strength of familial bonds in Rita Dove’s “Eurydice Turning,� the power of self-love depicted in Lucille Clifton’s “Won’t You Celebrate with Me,� and the vitality of our connection to nature in Joy Harjo’s “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.� Blending humor with insight, tension with tenderness, and complication with care, 40 Poems on Being with Each Other clearly articulates what is at stake in reading it illuminates aspects of the human condition, particularly our connections with each other, and provides material for grounded and intelligent self-reflection.]]>
368 Pádraig Ó Tuama 1324086165 Jennifer 0 to-read-poetry 4.61 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Collection
author: Pádraig Ó Tuama
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.61
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read-poetry
review:

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Lessons in Magic and Disaster 217387772 All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic.

A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic--with very unexpected results--in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.

Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training--she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she's also a powerful witch.

Serena, Jamie's mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.

Jamie’s busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn't know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path.

Now it's up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives.]]>
320 Charlie Jane Anders 1250867320 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.42 2025 Lessons in Magic and Disaster
author: Charlie Jane Anders
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story]]> 112974865
When journalist Pagan Kennedy went looking for this forgotten pioneer, she discovered that even Marty Goddard's closest friends had lost track of her. As Pagan followed a trail of clues to solve the mystery of Marty, she also delved into the problematic history of forensics in America. The Secret History of the Rape Kit chronicles one journalist's mission to understand a crucial innovation in forensics and the woman who championed it. As Pagan Kennedy hunts for answers, she reflects on her own experiences with sexual assault and her own desire for justice.]]>
237 Pagan Kennedy 0593314727 Jennifer 5 3.91 2025 The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story
author: Pagan Kennedy
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: 2025, historical, non-fiction, science, the-american-experience
review:

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<![CDATA[A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Monk & Robot, #2)]]> 40864030
They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe.

Becky Chambers's new series continues to ask: in a world where people have what they want, does having more even matter?

They're going to need to ask it a lot.]]>
152 Becky Chambers Jennifer 4 4.40 2022 A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Monk & Robot, #2)
author: Becky Chambers
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: 2025, comfort-reads, science-fiction
review:

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The Fourth Consort 211003694 A new standalone sci-fi novel from Edward Ashton, author of Mickey7 (the inspiration for the major motion picture Mickey 17).

Dalton Greaves is a hero. He’s one of humankind’s first representatives to Unity, a pan-species confederation working to bring all sentient life into a single benevolent brotherhood.

That’s what they told him, anyway. The only actual members of Unity that he’s ever met are Boreau, a giant snail who seems more interested in plunder than spreading love and harmony, and Boreau’s human sidekick, Neera, who Dalton strongly suspects roped him into this gig so that she wouldn’t become the next one of Boreau’s crew to get eaten by locals while prospecting.

Funny thing, though—turns out there actually is a benevolent confederation out there, working for the good of all life. They call themselves the Assembly, and they really don’t like Unity. More to the point, they really, really don’t like Unity’s new human minions.

When an encounter between Boreau’s scout ship and an Assembly cruiser over a newly discovered world ends badly for both parties, Dalton finds himself marooned, caught between a stickman, one of the Assembly’s nightmarish shock troops, the planet’s natives, who aren’t winning any congeniality prizes themselves, and Neera, who might actually be the most dangerous of the three. To survive, he’ll need to navigate palace intrigue, alien morality, and a proposal that he literally cannot refuse, all while making sure Neera doesn’t come to the conclusion that he’s worth more to her dead than alive.

Part first contact story, part dark comedy, and part bizarre love triangle, The Fourth Consort asks an important how far would you go to survive? And more importantly, how many drinks would you need to go there?]]>
288 Edward Ashton 1250286336 Jennifer 0 to-read-science-fiction 3.92 2025 The Fourth Consort
author: Edward Ashton
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read-science-fiction
review:

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Book Lovers 58690308 One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming....

Nora Stephens� life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.

Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters� trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.

If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.]]>
377 Emily Henry 0593334833 Jennifer 0 currently-reading 4.09 2022 Book Lovers
author: Emily Henry
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Kitchen Hymns 205307169
Written by the engaging host of the popular show, Poetry Unbound,the poems ofKitchen Hymns are finely honed melodies of survival—shaped with both humor and anger, force and conviction.


Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Kitchen Hymns opens with a “Do You Believe in God?”—but the bee, “gone extinct,� cannot answer, and the grass calls believe “a poor verb.� This collection trades belief for language, and philosophy is grounded in form and narrative.Kitchen Hymns is structured like a ghost mass, where even if God is a “favorite emptiness,� longing still has things to Jesus and Persephone meet at Hell’s exit and discuss survival; someone believes more in birds than belief; hares carry messages from the overworld to the underworld. A study in lyric address, Kitchen Hymns speaks to a shifting “you�: an unknown you; the strange you; a lover, a hated other; the you of erotic desire; the you of creation and destruction. Large themes are informed by and contained in a poetics of observation, humor, trauma, dialogics, lament, rage and praise. Delivered in finely honed melodies, shaped with force and conviction, Kitchen Hymns “reckon[s] with the empty,� and becomes “busy with a body / not a question.�
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104 Pádraig Ó Tuama 155659710X Jennifer 0 to-read-poetry 4.50 Kitchen Hymns
author: Pádraig Ó Tuama
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read-poetry
review:

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<![CDATA[Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire]]> 63035237 Burnt is a captivating and “evocative� (Erin Brockovich) memoir of trailblazing and firefighting from California’s first—and only—female chief of fire protection, a pioneering woman in a male-dominated field.

Burnt is a book about finding your calling, even if it’s an unexpected one. It’s about finding your home, even if you aren’t immediately welcomed. And it’s about reaching the top and making a difference, even if you don’t look like you fit in.

When Clare Frank was 17 years old, she became a firefighter in Northern California. Clare was five-foot-two and officially too young to join the service—she left her birthdate blank on her paperwork, hoping no one would notice. And she didn’t look like her peers, who sported an Adam’s apple and a mustache. But her brother was a firefighter and loved it, so she thought she’d try it out, too. Very soon, she knew she had found her calling.

Burnt is Frank’s inspiring, richly detailed, and open-hearted account of an extraordinary life in fire. It chronicles the transformation of a young adult determined to prove her mettle into a scarred and sensitive veteran, grappling with the weight of her duties as chief of fire protection—one of the highest-ranking women in Cal Fire history—while record-setting fires engulf her home state. Mentors and mediocre managers, funerals and scandal, pickup basketball, car crashes, and always fire—no one has written about this world, from this perspective, like Clare Frank. She masterfully mixes irreverence and awe, taking readers inside firehouses, on daily calls, and along to gigantic wildfires where antics and dark humor balance terrifying risk, trauma, and a sense of almost holy responsibility. A Memoir of Fighting Fire is an unforgettable memoir from an American original.]]>
336 Clare Frank 1647007836 Jennifer 0 to-read-nature 4.57 2023 Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire
author: Clare Frank
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read-nature
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Not a River 195790859
A hot, motionless afternoon. Enero and El Negro are fishing with Tilo, their dead friend’s teenage son. After hours of struggling with a hooked stingray, Enero aims his revolver into the water and shoots it. They hang the ray’s enormous corpse from a tree at their campsite and let it go to rot, drawing the attention of some local islanders and igniting a long-simmering fury toward outsiders and their carelessness. It’s only the two sisters―the teenage nieces of one of the locals, Aguirre―with their hair black as cowbird feathers and giving off the scent of green grass, who are curious about the trio and invite them to a dance. But the girls are not quite as they seem. As night approaches and tensions rise, Enero and El Negro return to the charged memories of their friend who years ago drowned in this same river.

As uneasy and saturated as a prophetic dream, Not a River is another extraordinary novel by Selva Almada about masculinity, guilt, and irrepressible desire, written in a style that is spare and timeless.]]>
104 Selva Almada 1644452855 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.75 2020 Not a River
author: Selva Almada
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth]]> 127823173 261 Natalie Haynes 0063314673 Jennifer 0 currently-reading 4.08 2023 Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth
author: Natalie Haynes
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution]]> 75494215 THE REAL ORIGIN OF OUR SPECIES: a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today.

How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution?
� Why do women live longer than men?
� Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s?
� Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet?
� Is sexism useful for evolution?
� And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?

These questions are producing some truly exciting science—and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: "We need a kind of user's manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it's time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is."

Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.]]>
624 Cat Bohannon 0385350546 Jennifer 3 non-fiction, science, 2025 4.28 2023 Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
author: Cat Bohannon
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: non-fiction, science, 2025
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Water Moon 211479192 A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.

On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.

Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it.

Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds.

But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.]]>
384 Samantha Sotto Yambao 0593724992 Jennifer 0 to-read-fantasy 3.79 2025 Water Moon
author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read-fantasy
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<![CDATA[The Expert of Subtle Revisions]]> 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 Jennifer 0 to-read-mystery 4.01 2025 The Expert of Subtle Revisions
author: Kirsten Menger-Anderson
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read-mystery
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<![CDATA[Native Nations: A Millennium in North America]]> 186872416
In this magisterial history, Kathleen DuVal tells the story of Native nations, from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to the present, reframing North American history with Indigenous power and sovereignty at its center. Before and during European colonization, Indigenous North Americans built diverse civilizations and lived in history, adapting to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. As DuVal explains, no civilization came to a halt when a few wandering explorers arrived, even when the strangers came well-armed.

A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size, but following a period of climate change and instability DuVal shows how numerous smaller nations emerged from previously centralized civilizations, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, patterns of egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand, having developed differently from their own, and whose power they often underestimated. For centuries after these first encounters, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations , we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch--and influenced global markets--and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to control the majority of the continent. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created new institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their preponderance of power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory.

In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal uses these stories to show how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant and will continue far into the future.]]>
752 Kathleen DuVal 0525511032 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 4.44 2024 Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
author: Kathleen DuVal
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read-history
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<![CDATA[Reproductive Rites: The Real-Life Witches and Witch Hunts in the Centuries-Long Fight for Abortion]]> 204593615
“Not only fascinating and engaging but, in our current post-Roe climate, necessary . . . with wit, humor, and verve that make it an unputdownable read for every feminist.� —Jennifer Wright, author of Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist

For millennia, across cultures and continents, both providers and recipients of reproductive healthcare and abortions have been persecuted as witches (whether they actually practiced the craft or not). In this dauntless reassessment of that history, journalist Sophie Saint Thomas follows the tangled threads of witches and reproductive rights through the ages.

Along the way, she maintains an intersectional eye toward the communities most affected by reproductive oppression (including Native Americans, enslaved Black women, and trans people) and offers a scathing look at the hypocrisy of anti-choice crusaders (from eugenicists in the Church of Satan to an astrology-following Republican First Lady). With heart, humor, and deeply researched insights, Reproductive Rites brings new context to the urgency of our ongoing fight.]]>
288 Sophie Saint Thomas 0762485299 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 3.74 Reproductive Rites: The Real-Life Witches and Witch Hunts in the Centuries-Long Fight for Abortion
author: Sophie Saint Thomas
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.74
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read-history
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<![CDATA[Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance]]> 62124258 250 Nikki M. Taylor 1009276840 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 4.47 2023 Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance
author: Nikki M. Taylor
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read-history
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<![CDATA[The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors]]> 125092587 A masterful hybrid of nature writing and cultural studies that investigates our connection with deer and invites readers to contemplate the paradoxes of how humans interact with and shape the natural world

Deer have been an important part of the world that humans occupy for millennia. They’re one of the only large animals that can thrive in our presence. In the 21st century, our relationship is full of contradictions: We hunt and protect them; we cull them from suburbs while making them an icon of wilderness; we see them both as victims and as pests. But there is no doubt that we have a connection to deer: in mythology and story, in ecosystems biological and digital, in cities and in forests.

Delving into the historical roots of these tangled attitudes and how they play out in the present, Erika Howsare observes scientists capture and collar fawns; hunters show off their trophies; a museum interpreter teaching American history while tanning a deer hide; an animal-control officer collecting the carcasses of deer killed by sharpshooters; and a woman bottle-raising orphaned fawns in her backyard. As she reports these stories, Howsare’s eye is always on the bigger picture: Why do we look at deer in the ways we do, and what do these animals reveal about human involvement in the natural world?]]>
369 Erika Howsare 1646221354 Jennifer 0 to-read-nature 3.78 2024 The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors
author: Erika Howsare
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read-nature
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The Queen's Spade 211096559 In this riveting historical thriller that’s loosely inspired by true-life events, The Count of Monte Cristo meets Bridgerton as revenge, romance, and twisted secrets take center stage in Victorian England’s royal court when Sally, a kidnapped African princess and goddaughter to Queen Victoria, plots her way to take down the monarchy that stole her from her homeland.

A young lady can take only so many injuries before humiliation and insult forge a vow of revenge . . .

The year is 1862 and murderous desires are simmering in England. Nineteen-year-old Sarah Bonetta Forbes (Sally), once a princess of the Egbado Clan, desires one thing above all revenge against the British Crown and its system of colonial ‘humanitarianism,� which stole her dignity and transformed her into royal property. From military men to political leaders, she’s vowed to ruin all who’ve had a hand in her afflictions. The top of her list? Her godmother, Britain’s mighty monarch, Queen Victoria herself.

Taking down the Crown means entering into a twisted game of court politics and manipulating the Queen’s inner circle—even if that means aligning with a dangerous yet alluring crime lord in London’s underworld and exploiting the affections of Queen Victoria’s own son, Prince Albert, as a means to an end. Butwhen Queen Victoria begins to suspect Sally’s true intentions, she plays the only card in Victorian society that could possibly cage Sally once marriage. Because if there’s one thing Sally desires more than revenge, it’s her freedom. With time running out and her wedding day looming, Sally’s vengeful game of cat and mouse turns deadly as she’s faced with the striking revelation that the price for vengeanceisn’t just paid in blood. It means sacrificing your heart.

Loosely inspired by the true story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, Queen Victoria’s African goddaughter, The Queen’s Spade is a lush and riveting historical thriller perfect for fans of A Dowry of Blood and Grave Mercy.]]>
415 Sarah Raughley 0063344408 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 3.88 2025 The Queen's Spade
author: Sarah Raughley
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read-fiction
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Scattergood 211960906 In rural Iowa in 1941, twelve-year-old Peggy’s quiet life is turned upside down by refugee arrivals, first love, and a heartbreaking diagnosis.

Growing up a farm girl, Peggy’s life has never been particularly exciting. But a lot changes in 1941. Her friend Joe starts acting strange around her. The Quaker hostel nearby reopens to house Jewish refugees from Europe, including a handsome boy named Gunther and a troubled professor of nothing. And her cousin and best friend, Delia, is diagnosed with leukemia—and doesn’t even know it.

Peggy has always been rational. She may not be able to understand poetry and speak in metaphors like Delia, but she has to believe she can find a way out of this mess, for both of them. There has to be a cure. And yet the more she tries to control, the more powerless she feels. She can’t make Gunther see her the way she sees him. She can’t help the Professor find his missing daughter. She’s tired of feeling young and naive, but growing up is proving even worse.

A historical coming-of-age novel that feels as alive and present as today, Scattergood offers even readers familiar with World War II a fascinating new glimpse of history, far from the battlefields of Europe and the shores of New York City. H.M. Bouwman presents a raw and unapologetic snapshot of a girl battling her own shortcomings and the random nature of life.]]>
320 H.M. Bouwman 0823457753 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 4.10 Scattergood
author: H.M. Bouwman
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read-fiction
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What Fell from the Sky 208840715 An out-of-this-world middle grade adventure, based on true historical events. All Pineda Matlage wants is to get through the school year and maybe pull an epic prank or two with his friends Junior, Ernesto, and Patsy. But class is disrupted when a slew of American soldiers descends upon their rural Texan town of Lariat. They’ll be carrying out a training exercise and taking over everything, from Pineda’s school to the local government. But Pineda knows why they’re really here. For days he’s hidden the strange creature who fell from the sky in his parents� barn. He promised her he’d find her family and help them return home. But with soldiers now on every street corner and armed checkpoints across every road, reuniting his new friend with her missing parents seems an impossible task. Especially when they realize that the army’s presence is really a coverup for capturing his alien friends—being observed in a laboratory by the US government for reasons of their own. Enlisting the help of his friends, a Black soldier adjusting to a newly integrated army, and townspeople tired of the military’s destructive presence, Pineda and all of Lariat will embark on an adventure none of them could have ever expected.]]> 304 Adrianna Cuevas 0374390452 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 4.04 What Fell from the Sky
author: Adrianna Cuevas
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read-fiction
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<![CDATA[The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (The Ill-Mannered Ladies, #1)]]> 62313333
Lady Augusta Colebrook, “Gus,� is determinedly unmarried, bored by society life, and tired of being dismissed at the age of forty-two. She and her twin sister, Julia, who is grieving her dead betrothed, need a distraction. One soon presents to rescue their friend’s goddaughter, Caroline, from her violent husband.

The sisters set out to Caroline’s country estate with a plan, but their carriage is accosted by a highwayman. In the scuffle, Gus accidentally shoots and injures the ruffian, only to discover he is Lord Evan Belford, an acquaintance from their past who was charged with murder and exiled to Australia twenty years ago.What follows is a high adventure full of danger, clever improvisation, heart-racing near misses, and a little help from a revived and rather charming Lord Evan.

Back in London, Gus can’t stop thinking about her unlikely (not to mention handsome) comrade-in-arms. She is convinced Lord Evan was falsely accused of murder, and she is going to prove it. She persuades Julia to join her in a quest to help Lord Evan, and others in need—society be damned! And so begins the beguiling secret life and adventures of the Colebrook twins.]]>
452 Alison Goodman 0593440811 Jennifer 0 to-read-fantasy 4.14 2023 The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (The Ill-Mannered Ladies, #1)
author: Alison Goodman
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read-fantasy
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<![CDATA[A Sunny Place for Shady People]]> 203956643 A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “one of Latin America’s most exciting authors� (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.

Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.

Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”]]>
257 Mariana Enríquez 0593733258 Jennifer 0 3.80 2024 A Sunny Place for Shady People
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: just-could-not-finish-it, 2024
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<![CDATA[Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman]]> 203579088 A memoir of the author's journey from an office job to restoring a cabin in the Pacific Northwest, based on his wildly popular Outside Magazine piece.


Wit’s End isn’t just a state of mind. It’s the name of a gravel road, the address of a run-down off-the-grid cabin, 120 shabby square feet of fixer-upper Patrick Hutchison purchased on a whim in the mossy woods of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state.


To say Hutchison didn’t know what he was getting into is no more an exaggeration than to say he’s a man with nearly zero carpentry skills. Well, used to be. You can learn a lot over six years or renovations.


CABIN is the story of those renovations, but it's also a love story; of a place, of possibilities, and of the process of renovation, of seeing what could be instead of what is. It is a book for those who know what it’s like to bite off more than you can chew, or who desperately wish to.

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304 Patrick Hutchison 1250285704 Jennifer 0 to-read-humor 4.04 2024 Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman
author: Patrick Hutchison
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read-humor
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<![CDATA[When a Cat Faces West, Volume 1]]> 61016502 Flow—the phenomenon that occurs when matter falls out of balance and changes form. Flow creates oddities big and small that can be disruptive or delightful in equal measure, and it's up to Flow Disposal departments and independent contractors to shepherd the Flow back to its natural form. For Chima Kondo, a 35-year-old woman stuck in the body of a 12-year-old thanks to the effects of Flow, understanding how Flow works and how to disperse it has become critical. But when she joins Flow Disposal contractors Hirota and Shacho of Hirota Flow Inc., she finds that there's more to Flow than she once knew, and plenty more to find out... A supernatural story from the author of Mushishi!]]> 190 Yuki Urushibara 1684911710 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.93 2019 When a Cat Faces West, Volume 1
author: Yuki Urushibara
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[Tess of the Road (Tess of the Road, #1)]]> 35046472 Meet Tess, a brave new heroine from beloved epic fantasy author Rachel Hartman.

In the medieval kingdom of Goredd, women are expected to be ladies, men are their protectors, and dragons get to be whomever they want. Tess, stubbornly, is a troublemaker. You can’t make a scene at your sister’s wedding and break a relative’s nose with one punch (no matter how pompous he is) and not suffer the consequences. As her family plans to send her to a nunnery, Tess yanks on her boots and sets out on a journey across the Southlands, alone and pretending to be a boy.

Where Tess is headed is a mystery, even to her. So when she runs into an old friend, it’s a stroke of luck. This friend is a quigutl—a subspecies of dragon—who gives her both a purpose and protection on the road. But Tess is guarding a troubling secret. Her tumultuous past is a heavy burden to carry, and the memories she’s tried to forget threaten to expose her to the world in more ways than one.

Returning to the fascinating world she created in the award-winning and New York Times bestselling Seraphina, Rachel Hartman introduces readers to a new character and a new quest, pushing the boundaries of genre once again in this wholly original fantasy.]]>
544 Rachel Hartman 1101931280 Jennifer 0 currently-reading 3.88 2018 Tess of the Road (Tess of the Road, #1)
author: Rachel Hartman
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths]]> 51135393
Stories of gods and monsters are the mainstay of epic poetry and Greek tragedy, from Homer to Virgil to from Aeschylus to Sophocles and Euripides. And still, today, a wealth of novels, plays and films draw their inspiration from stories first told almost three thousand years ago. But modern tellers of Greek myth have usually been men, and have routinely shown little interest in telling women’s stories.

Now, in Pandora’s Jar, Natalie Haynes � broadcaster, writer and passionate classicist � redresses this imbalance. Taking Greek creation myths as her starting point and then retelling the four great mythic sagas: the Trojan War, the Royal House of Thebes, Jason and the Argonauts, Heracles, she puts the female characters on equal footing with their menfolk. The result is a vivid and powerful account of the deeds � and misdeeds - of Hera, Aphrodite, Athene and Circe. And away from the goddesses of Mount Olympus it is Helen, Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Antigone and Medea who sing from these pages, not Paris, Agamemnon, Orestes or Jason.]]>
320 Natalie Haynes 1509873112 Jennifer 4 4.23 2020 Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths
author: Natalie Haynes
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: 2024, historical, non-fiction, the-witching-hour
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<![CDATA[Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success]]> 220902134 A humorous collection of autobiographical essays from comedian and Somebody Somewhere actor Jeff Hiller, who shares his journey from growing up “profoundly gay� in 1980s Texas to his experiences as an inept social worker and how he clawed, scraped, and brawled to Hollywood’s lower middle-tier.

While struggling to find success as an actor and pay the bills, something accidentally happened to Jeff he aged. And while it’s one thing to get older and rest on the laurels of success from the blood, sweat, and tears of your youth, it’s quite another to be old and have no laurels. At forty, stuck in a temp job making spreadsheets, the dream of becoming a star seemed out of reach. But after twenty-five years of guest roles on TV and performing improv in a grocery store basement, he finally struck gold with a breakout role on HBO’s Somebody Somewhere, playing Joel—the kind of best friend everyone wishes they had.

In his book, Jeff dives into the grit and grind of climbing the Hollywood ladder. It’s a raw and often hilarious tale of the struggles, triumphs, and humiliations that shaped him into the wonderfully imperfect person he is today. With a mix of awkward charm and heartfelt honesty, Jeff shares his growing up very Lutheran in Texas, navigating bullying as a gay kid, working as a social worker for unhoused youth and HIV prevention, and the endless ups and downs of being a struggling actor. For every one of us who have a dream that we’re chasing—and chasing, and chasing—his is a funny, moving, and utterly relatable story.]]>
272 Jeff Hiller 166803185X Jennifer 0 to-read 4.27 Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success
author: Jeff Hiller
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.27
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines]]> 136342721 Fortune) explains how we’ve arrived at an era of AI harms and oppression, and what we can do to avoid its pitfalls.

“Dr. Joy Buolamwini has been an essential figure in bringing irresponsible, profit-hungry tech giants to their knees. If you’re going to read only one book about AI, this should be it.”—Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation

To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making.

After tinkering with robotics as a high school student in Memphis and then developing mobile apps in Zambia as a Fulbright fellow, Buolamwini followed her lifelong passion for computer science, engineering, and art to MIT in 2015. As a graduate student at the “Future Factory,� she did groundbreaking research that exposed widespread racial and gender bias in AI services from tech giants across the world.

Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products—and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded� and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them.

Encouraging experts and non-experts alike to join this fight, Buolamwini writes, “The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.�
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336 Joy Buolamwini 0593241835 Jennifer 5 2024, non-fiction, science 4.7 4.14 Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines
author: Joy Buolamwini
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: 2024, non-fiction, science
review:
4.7
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<![CDATA[If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution]]> 62315875 The story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world - and what comes next

From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. IF WE BURNis a stirring work of history built around a single, vital question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins provides a blow-by-blow account of street movements and their consequences, recounted in gripping detail. He draws on four years of research and hundreds of interviews conducted around the world, as well as his own strange experiences in Brazil, where a progressive-led protest explosion led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.

Careful investigation reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change is gravely misguided. In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, offering urgent lessons for the future.]]>
337 Vincent Bevins 1541788974 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.26 If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
author: Vincent Bevins
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results]]> 43309518 Emmy-Award winning writer and comedian Josh Gondelman’s collection of personal stories of best intentions and mixed results.

Josh Gondelman knows a thing or two about trying—and failing. The Emmy Award-winning stand-up comic—dubbed a “pathological sweetheart� by the New York Observer—is known throughout the industry as one of comedy’s true “nice guys.� Not surprisingly, he’s endured his share of last-place finishes. But he keeps on bouncing back.

In this collection of hilarious and poignant essays (including his acclaimed New York Times piece “What if I Bombed at My Own Wedding?�), Josh celebrates a life of good intentions—and mixed results. His true tales of romantic calamities, professional misfortunes, and eventual triumphs reinforce the notion: we get out of the world what we put into it. Whether he’s adopting a dog from a suspicious stranger, mitigating a disastrous road trip, or trying MDMA for the first (and only) time, Josh only wants the best for everyone—even as his attempts to do the right thing occasionally implode.

Full of the warm and relatable humor that’s made him a favorite on the comedy club circuit, Nice Try solidifies Josh Gondelman’s reputation as not just a good guy, but a skilled observer of the human condition.]]>
272 Josh Gondelman 0062852752 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.75 2019 Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results
author: Josh Gondelman
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

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

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

Crackling with laugh-out-loud dialogue and relatable observations, I Hope This Finds You Well is a fresh and surprisingly tender comedy about loneliness and love beyond our computer screens. This sparkling debut novel will open your heart to the everyday eccentricities of work culture and the undeniable human connection that comes with it.]]>
338 Natalie Sue 0063320363 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.74 2024 I Hope This Finds You Well
author: Natalie Sue
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
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The Bullet Swallower 123847255 A dazzling magical realism western in the vein of Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez, The Bullet Swallower follows a Mexican bandido as he sets off for Texas to save his family, only to encounter a mysterious figure who has come, finally, to collect a cosmic debt generations in the making.

In 1895, Antonio Sonoro is the latest in a long line of ruthless men. He’s good with his gun and is drawn to trouble but he’s also out of money and out of options. A drought has ravaged the town of Dorado, Mexico, where he lives with his wife and children, and so when he hears about a train laden with gold and other treasures, he sets off for Houston to rob it—with his younger brother Hugo in tow. But when the heist goes awry and Hugo is killed by the Texas Rangers, Antonio finds himself launched into a quest for revenge that endangers not only his life and his family, but his eternal soul.

In 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s most renowned actor and singer. But his comfortable life is disrupted when he discovers a book that purports to tell the entire history of his family beginning with Cain and Abel. In its ancient pages, Jaime learns about the multitude of horrific crimes committed by his ancestors. And when the same mysterious figure from Antonio’s timeline shows up in Mexico City, Jaime realizes that he may be the one who has to pay for his ancestors� crimes, unless he can discover the true story of his grandfather Antonio, the legendary bandido El Tragabalas, The Bullet Swallower.

A family saga that’s epic in scope and magical in its blood, and based loosely on the author’s own great-grandfather, The Bullet Swallower tackles border politics, intergenerational trauma, and the legacies of racism and colonialism in a lush setting and stunning prose that asks who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether it is possible to be better than our forebears.]]>
272 Elizabeth Gonzalez James 1668009323 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.75 2024 The Bullet Swallower
author: Elizabeth Gonzalez James
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

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Alias Emma (Alias Emma, #1) 59576067
Nothing about Emma Makepeace is real. Not even her name.

A newly minted secret agent, Emma's barely graduated from basic training when she gets the call for her first major assignment. Eager to serve her country and prove her worth, she dives in headfirst.

Emma must covertly travel across one of the world’s most watched cities to bring the reluctant—and handsome—son of Russian dissidents into protective custody, so long as the assassins from the Motherland don’t find him first. With London’s famous Ring of Steel hacked by the Russian government, the two must cross the city without being seen by the hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras that document every inch of the city’s streets, alleys, and gutters.

Buses, subways, cars, and trains are out of the question. Traveling on foot, and operating without phones or bank cards that could reveal their location or identity, they have twelve hours to make it to safety. This will take all of Emma’s skills of disguise and subterfuge. But when Emma’s handler goes dark, there’s no one left to trust. And just one wrong move will get them both killed.]]>
272 Ava Glass 0593496795 Jennifer 0 to-read-mystery 3.72 2022 Alias Emma (Alias Emma, #1)
author: Ava Glass
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read-mystery
review:

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

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

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

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

Empowering women to better understand ourselves and advocate for care that prioritizes healthy and joyful lives—for us and generations to come�All in Her Head is written with humor, wisdom, and deep scientific and cultural insight. Eye-opening, sometimes enraging, yet always captivating, this shared memoir of women’s medical history is an essential contribution to a holistic understanding and much-needed reclaiming of women’s history and bodies.]]>
368 Elizabeth Comen 0063293013 Jennifer 0 to-read-non-fiction 4.36 2024 All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today
author: Elizabeth Comen
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read-non-fiction
review:

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When Women Were Dragons 57033379 The Ogress and The Orphans, Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a trail of fiery destruction in their path; and took to the skies. Was it their choice? What will become of those left behind? Why did Alex’s beloved aunt Marla transform but her mother did not? Alex doesn’t know. It’s taboo to speak of.

Forced into silence, Alex nevertheless must face the consequences of this astonishing event: a mother more protective than ever; an absentee father; the upsetting insistence that her aunt never even existed; and
watching her beloved cousin Bea become dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.

In this timely and timeless speculative novel, award-winning author Kelly Barnhill boldly explores rage, memory, and the tyranny of forced limitations. When Women Were Dragons exposes a world that wants to keep women small—their lives and their prospects—and examines what happens when they rise en masse and take up the space they deserve.]]>
352 Kelly Barnhill 0385548230 Jennifer 0 to-read-fantasy 4.07 2022 When Women Were Dragons
author: Kelly Barnhill
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read-fantasy
review:

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<![CDATA[Trailer Park Psalms: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)]]> 63920570
Trailer Park Psalms traces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. Along the way, he searches for sources of awe that might inspire us, even in a compromised the everyday miracle of eyesight, the courage of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the “clumsy kindness� of family members trying to mend the damages of the past. In the end, what he finds isn’t faith but the hope that “if there’s a heaven, we will bend / to examine our old selves / and wonder how something so delicate / was ever allowed.”]]>
88 Ryler Dustin 082296712X Jennifer 5 4.36 Trailer Park Psalms: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)
author: Ryler Dustin
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.36
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: 2024, the-american-experience, poetry
review:
A lovely friend gave me this collection to read. This morning it absolutely was the succor my mind needed.
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<![CDATA[I'm Sorry for My Loss: An Urgent Examination of Reproductive Care in America]]> 203751764
More than a million women lose a pregnancy each year, whether through miscarriage, stillbirth, or termination for medical reasons. For most, the experience often casts a shadow of isolation, shame, and blame. In the aftermath of the 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, 25 million women of childbearing age live in states with laws that restrict access to abortion, including for those who never wanted to end their pregnancies. How did we get here?

Rebecca Little and Colleen Long, childhood friends who grew up to be journalists, both experienced late-term loss, and together they take an incisive, deeply reported look at the issue, working to shatter taboos that have made so many pregnant women feel ashamed and alone. They trace the experience of pregnancy loss and reproductive care from America's founding to the present day, exposing the deep impact made by a dangerous tangle of laws, politics, medicine, racism, and misogyny. Combining powerful personal narratives with exhaustive research, I'm Sorry for My Loss is a comprehensive examination on how pregnancy loss came to be so stigmatized and politicized, and why a system of more compassionate care is critical for everyone.]]>
496 1728292751 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.40 2024 I'm Sorry for My Loss: An Urgent Examination of Reproductive Care in America
author: Rebecca Little and Colleen Long
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/14
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women]]> 210451633 An invaluable reassessment of what we think we know about the daily lives of women in medieval Europe. Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife charts the life and times of four medieval women—Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a no-good wife—who all bucked convention and forged their own path. Largely forgotten by modern readers, these women have an astonishing amount to teach us about love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, and earning a living. Through these four writers, Hetta Howes engagingly reveals how everyday women lived, survived, and thrived in medieval times. Who did they marry and why? Were they expected to have children? Did they ever have extramarital affairs? Could they earn money and become self-sufficient? How did they make friends? Could they be leaders? What did they think about death—and what about life and their place in it? While in many ways the Middle Ages was a terrible time to be a woman, there were areas of life that were surprisingly progressive. Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife paints a vibrant portrait of these women, their world, and the ways they speak to us today.]]> 256 Hetta Howes 0520396588 Jennifer 0 to-read 4.04 2024 Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women
author: Hetta Howes
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

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

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]>
401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Jennifer 4 4.5 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: 2024, bay-area-and-california, fiction
review:
4.5
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<![CDATA[The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-up in Oakland]]> 101160649
No municipality has been under court oversight to reform its police department as long as the city of Oakland. It is, quite simply, the edge case in American law enforcement.

The Riders Come Out at Night is the culmination of over twenty-one years of fearless reporting. Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham shine a light on the jackbooted and sadistic cops known as “The Riders,� and the lack of political will and misguided leadership that have conspired to stymie meaningful reform. The authors trace the history of Oakland since its inception through the lens of the city’s police department, through the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights struggle, the Black Panthers and crack eras, to Oakland’s present-day revival.

Those who have fought for reform are also revealed, including Keith Batt, a wide-eyed rookie cop turned whistleblower, who was unwittingly partnered with the leader of the Riders, and Jim Chanin and John Burris, two dedicated civil rights attorneys. Meanwhile, Oakland’s deep history of law enforcement corruption, reactionary politics, and social movement organizing is retold through historical figures like Black Panther Huey Newton, drug kingpin Felix Mitchell, district attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, and Mayor Jerry Brown.

“As thrilling as the best noir fiction� (Whiting Foundation, 2021 Creative Nonfiction Grant Jury), The Riders Come Out at Night is the story of one city and its police department, but it’s also the story of American policing—and where it’s headed.]]>
480 Ali Winston 1982168609 Jennifer 0 to-read-non-fiction 4.18 The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-up in Oakland
author: Ali Winston
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read-non-fiction
review:

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Toward Eternity 199542548 What does it mean to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology?

In a near-future world, a new technological therapy is quickly eradicating cancer: The body’s cells are entirely replaced with nanites—robot or android cells that not only cure those afflicted but leave them virtually immortal. At the same time, literary researcher Yonghun teaches an AI how to understand poetry and creates a living, thinking machine he names Panit, meaning "Beloved," in honor of his husband. When Dr. Beeko, who holds the patent to the nano-therapy technology, learns of Panit, he transfers its consciousness into an android body, giving it freedom and life. As Yonghun, Panit, and other nano humans thrive—and begin to replicate—their development will lead them to a crossroads and a choice with existential consequences.]]>
247 Anton Hur 0063344505 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.90 2024 Toward Eternity
author: Anton Hur
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: to-read
review:

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Robot Dreams 377254 Robot Dreams follows an ill-fated friendship between a dog and robot. After a Labor Day jaunt to the beach leaves Robot rusty and immobilized in the sand, Dog, unsure what to do, abandons him. As the seasons pass, Dog tries to replace his friend, making and losing a series of new ones, from a melting snowman to epicurean anteaters. Meanwhile, Robot passes his time daydreaming, escaping to better places... Through interwoven journeys, the two characters long to recover from their day at the beach.

Although its adorable characters and playful charm will win over young readers, Robot Dreams speaks universally to the fragile nature of friendship, loss, and redemption.]]>
208 Sara Varon 1596431083 Jennifer 4 3.94 2007 Robot Dreams
author: Sara Varon
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: 2024, childrens, comic, science-fiction
review:
3.5. Technically for kids but frankly the gut punch of this wordless comic about friendship will be felt far more by an adult. Very much in line with the Futurama episode featuring Fry's dog.
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<![CDATA[The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn, Vol. 1: A Graphic Novel]]> 202468432 Follow the misadventures of the world's greatest paranormal investigator in this unearthly and heartwarming graphic novel, featuring extended artwork and exclusive behind-the-scenes content, from the creator of the popular webcomic The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn.

Oscar Zahn is just like any other paranormal investigator—he’s working hard to make the world a better place, one exorcism at a time. So what if he’s just a floating skull wearing a trench coat? He’s still got a heart of gold!

In this first installment of the online webcomic sensation The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn, join Oscar and his mysterious assistant Agnes as they embark on a terrifying yet heartwarming journey across ethereal realms, rescuing lost souls and solving creepy mysteries. Their travels take them across great distances and even through time, as Oscar sleuths out why the spirits he contends with are restless and malcontent. Yet the more mysteries he solves, the clearer it becomes that there's a greater game afoot, one that involves Oscar's own forgotten origin story.

Readers will love this beautifully illustrated paranormal graphic novel from Tri Vuong, the beloved creator of Webtoon’s The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn.

This volume collects episodes 1�65 of the Webtoon comic The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn.]]>
240 Trí Vương 1984863274 Jennifer 0 to-read-comic 4.14 2024 The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn, Vol. 1: A Graphic Novel
author: Trí Vương
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read-comic
review:

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<![CDATA[We'll Prescribe You a Cat (We'll Prescribe You a Cat, #1)]]> 209891170 A cat a day keeps the doctor away�.

Discover this utterly charming, vibrant celebration of the healing power of cats in the award-winning, bestselling Japanese novel that has become an international sensation.

Tucked away on the fifth floor of an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Nakagyō Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can be found only by people who are struggling in their lives and who genuinely need help. The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way there: it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take� their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, and occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.

Throughout these pages, the power of the human-animal bond is revealed as a disheartened businessman finds unexpected joy in physical labor, a middle-aged man struggles to stay relevant at work and home, a young girl navigates the complexities of elementary school cliques, a hardened handbag designer seeks emotional balance, and a geisha learns to move on from the memory of her lost cat. As the clinic’s patients grapple with their inner turmoil and seek resolution, their feline companions lead them toward healing, self-discovery, and newfound hope.]]>
297 Syou Ishida 0593818741 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 3.78 2023 We'll Prescribe You a Cat (We'll Prescribe You a Cat, #1)
author: Syou Ishida
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read-fiction
review:

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The Crane Husband 60784308 Award-winning author Kelly Barnhill brings her singular talents to The Crane Husband, a raw, powerful story of love, sacrifice, and family.

“Mothers fly away like migrating birds. This is why farmers have daughters.

A fifteen-year-old teenager is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mom, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it’s been just the three of them—her mom has brought home guests at times, but none have ever stayed.

Yet when her mom brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children’s lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mom abandons the world around her to weave the masterpiece the crane demands.

In this stunning contemporary retelling of “The Crane Wife� by the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, one fiercely pragmatic teen forced to grow up faster than was fair will do whatever it takes to protect her family—and change the story.]]>
118 Kelly Barnhill 1250850975 Jennifer 3 3.5 3.87 2023 The Crane Husband
author: Kelly Barnhill
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: 2024, fantasy, re-told-fairytale
review:
3.5
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<![CDATA[It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over]]> 177148776 128 Anne de Marcken 0811237850 Jennifer 0 to-read 3.70 2024 It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
author: Anne de Marcken
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
review:

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The Heartbeat Library 207003910 Nel sud-ovest del Giappone, in una pozza di mare condivisa da due province, Kagawa e Okayama, nuota un'isoletta unica al mondo: Teshima. Sulla punta orientale dell'isola, sorge un minuscolo edificio in cui sono catalogate le pulsazioni del cuore di decine di migliaia di persone, alcune vive altre già ombre, provenienti dai luoghi più disparati del pianeta. Si chiama Shinzō-on no Ākaibu, l'Archivio dei Battiti del Cuore.

Alle porte di Tōkyō, in una cittadina lambita dall'oceano e circondata dalle montagne, sorge la casa dove Shūichi ha trascorso l'infanzia e dove ha appena fatto ritorno. Shūichi è un noto illustratore, ha quarant'anni e una cicatrice in mezzo al petto. È ossessionato dal proprio cuore che si ausculta ogni sera e dalle memorie confuse che ha del passato. Sua madre, per proteggerlo dai dispiaceri, ne ha manipolato i ricordi d'infanzia: di tutti i suoi piccoli drammi gli ha sempre raccontato una versione migliore. Ma se non si ha la certezza di aver sofferto in passato e di avercela fatta, da dove si ricava il coraggio di tentare ancora? È allora che Shūichi si accorge di un misterioso bambino che si aggira intorno alla casa.

Questa strana presenza fa nascere in Shūichi molte domande: chi e quel bambino che lo osserva e perché ha scelto la sua casa? E soprattutto: come si pesca un pesce-bambino? Shūichi scopre che il pesce-bambino si chiama Kenta, ha otto anni e vive prodigiose avventure nella solitudine più assoluta. Ma il pesce-bambino che
è Kenta e il disegnatore surfista che è Shūichi, stringono giorno dopo giorno una straordinaria amicizia e quell'incontro cambierà per sempre la loro vita. Li porterà in un luogo che batte al ritmo del cuore, pronunciato in tutte le lingue del mondo. È Teshima, un'isoletta remota nel sud-ovest del Giappone, dove sorge l'Archivio dei Battiti del Cuore.

Dopo Quel che affidiamo al vento, Laura Imai Messina torna a un luogo incredibile eppure reale del Giappone. E, nel viaggio in cui ci conduce, ci permette di avvicinarci a un modo diverso di concepire la vita e i suoi smarrimenti. Ma soprattutto ci dona una delle chiavi essenziali per interpretare il presente: quella per ritrovare la felicita perduta.]]>
400 Laura Imai Messina 141977249X Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 3.99 2022 The Heartbeat Library
author: Laura Imai Messina
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves: to-read-fiction
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<![CDATA[How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?]]> 200229948
Most days, Magda is fine. She has her routines. She has her anxious therapy patients, who depend on her to cure their bad habits. She has her longtime colleagues, whose playful bickering she mediates. She’s mourning the recent loss of her best friend, Sara, but has brokered a tentative truce with Sara’s prickly widower as she helps him sort through the last of Sara’s possessions. She’sfine.

But in going through Sara’s old journal, Magda discovers her friend’s last plans for a road trip they would take together in celebration of Magda’s upcoming seventieth birthday. So, with Sara’s urn in tow, Magda decides to hit the road, crossing the country andencountering a cast of memorable characters—including her sister, from whom she’s been keeping secrets. Along the way she stumbles upon a jazz funeral in New Orleans and a hilarious women’s retreat meant to “unleash one’s divine feminine energy� in Texas, and meets a woman who challenges her conceptions of herself—and the hidden truths about her friendship with Sara.

As the trip shakes up her careful routines, Magda finally faces longings she locked away years ago and confronts questions about her sexuality and identity she thought she had long put to rest. And as she soon learns, it’s never too late to start your next journey.]]>
256 Anna Montague 0063353644 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 3.07 2024 How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?
author: Anna Montague
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/22
shelves: to-read-fiction
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<![CDATA[Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics]]> 199798813 This tour de force of investigative journalism—in the vein of The Next Civil War and Why We’re Polarized—depicts the United States of America as a country at a crossroads with the battle between the right and left spilling out from the darkest corners of the internet into the real world with often tragic consequences. Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and probing interviews under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups. At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right. This ongoing battle, long fought mainly on the internet, has spilled out into the real world with greater and greater frequency, culminating in the attempted coup on January 6th. Combining her years of on-the-ground reporting, Reeve clearly illustrates this shocking sweep of violence, where this cultural shift came from, and where it is going. She also introduces us to a shocking but powerful cast of characters, such as the creator of 8chan—an online hub for conspiracies and misogynistic rhetoric—and the white power leader who is still pulling the strings from a prison cell. Uncovering the hidden links between these events and how we can prevent further upheavals of this nature, Black Pill is a necessary read for any supporter of democracy.]]> 304 Elle Reeve 1982198885 Jennifer 0 to-read-non-fiction 4.18 2024 Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
author: Elle Reeve
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: to-read-non-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens]]> 152034931 A rollicking historyof England's earliest kings and queens, a story ofnarcissists, excessive beheadings, middle-management insurrection, uncivil wars,and more, fromaward-winning British actor and comedian David Mitchell

Think you know the kings and queens of England? Think again.

In Unruly , David Mitchell explores how early England’s monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects� destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky bastards who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear to us today in their portraits.

Taking us right back to King Arthur ( he didn’t exist), Mitchell tells the founding story of post-Roman England right up to the reign of Elizabeth I ( she dies), as the monarchy began to lose its power. It’s a tale of bizarre and curious ascensions, inadequate self-control, and at least one total Cnut, as the English evolved from having their crops stolen by the thug with the largest armed gang to bowing and paying taxes to a divinely anointed King.

How this happened, who it happened to, and why the hell it matters are all questions Mitchell answers with brilliance, wit, and the full erudition of a man who once studied history—and is damned if he’ll let it off the hook for the mess it’s made of everything.

A funny book that takes history seriously, Unruly is for anyone who has ever wondered how the monarchy came to be—and who is to blame.
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433 David Mitchell 0593728491 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 4.13 2023 Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens
author: David Mitchell
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: to-read-history
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<![CDATA[Goddess with a Thousand Faces: A one-of-a-kind exploration of goddesses from our ancient past]]> 204897504 Steeped in ancient magic, dark divinity and wild ways, Goddess with a Thousand Faces takes you on a historical journey like no other...

Blending mythological retellings with historical research, Goddess with a Thousand Faces traverses the world and transports through time to bring ten formidable and inspiring ancient goddesses to life. Meet Artemis, the Greek goddess of the wilderness, never without her bow and arrow; Sedna, Inuit goddess of the ocean, guarding the icy waters and all its creatures; Isis, Egyptian goddess of healing, who dwells by the River Nile, just to name a few...

Jasmine Elmer explores these goddesses of our past, uncovering their truths, their rebellion and their freedom. For too long, they have been written out of history; lost to the sands of time and stamped into silence. Goddess with a Thousand Faces restores these women to their glory.

Pour over this treasure trove of myths, legends and mighty goddesses. Hear the messages echoing through the ages and see yourself in the faces of these icons. For while their stories might ancient, today they are more important - and more powerful - than ever.

A treasure trove of beautiful storytelling and ancient wisdom, perfect for fans of Love in Colour by Bolu Babalola and Storyland by Amy Jeffs.]]>
223 Jasmine Elmer 1408748223 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 3.93 2024 Goddess with a Thousand Faces: A one-of-a-kind exploration of goddesses from our ancient past
author: Jasmine Elmer
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: to-read-history
review:

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<![CDATA[Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age]]> 204302350
Yet while such characters define the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. This is the history of all the other people - children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travellers, writers - who inhabited the medieval Nordic world. Encompassing not just Norway, Denmark and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia, this is a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, genders and ethnicities, as told through the traces that they left behind, from hairstyles to place names, love-notes to gravestones.

For the first time, you can immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of extraordinary culture which spanned centuries and spread from the edge of the North American continent to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic wastelands to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.]]>
392 Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough 1782837876 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 4.17 2024 Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
author: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: to-read-history
review:

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<![CDATA[That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America]]> 203579067 Part memoir, part manifesto, the inspiring story of a Louisiana librarian advocating for inclusivity on the front lines of our vicious culture wars. One of the things small town librarian Amanda Jones values most about books is how they can affirm a young person's sense of self. So in 2022, when she caught wind of a local public hearing that would discuss “book content,� she knew what was at stake. Schools and libraries nationwide have been bombarded by demands for books with LGTBQ+ references, discussions of racism, and more to be purged from the shelves. Amanda would be damned if her community were to ban stories representing minority groups. She spoke out that night at the meeting. Days later, she woke up to a nightmare that is still ongoing. Amanda Jones has been called a groomer, a pedo, and a porn-pusher; she has faced death threats and attacks from strangers and friends alike. Her decision to support a collection of books with diverse perspectives made her a target for extremists using book banning campaigns-funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians-in a crusade to make America more white, straight, and Christian. But Amanda Jones wouldn't give up without a she sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance. Mapping the book banning crisis occurring all across the nation, That Librarian draws the battle lines in the war against equity and inclusion, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.]]> 288 Amanda Jones 1639733531 Jennifer 4 3.81 2024 That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America
author: Amanda Jones
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/14
shelves: 2024, in-the-library, the-american-experience, non-fiction
review:
Required reading for understanding how censorship are being enacted and fight against those policies at the local personal level and the toll these fights are taking on librarians.
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<![CDATA[My Lady Jane (The Lady Janies, #1)]]> 22840421 This comical, fantastical, romantical, New York Times bestselling, (not) entirely true story of Lady Jane Grey is “an uproarious historical fantasy that’s not to be missed� (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

In My Lady Jane, coauthors Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows have created a one-of-a-kind YA fantasy in the tradition of The Princess Bride, featuring a reluctant king, an even more reluctant queen, a noble steed, and only a passing resemblance to actual history—because sometimes history needs a little help.

At sixteen, Lady Jane Grey is about to be married off to a stranger and caught up in a conspiracy to rob her cousin, King Edward, of his throne. But those trifling problems aren’t for Jane to worry about. Jane gets to be Queen of England.

Like that could go wrong.]]>
474 Cynthia Hand 0062391798 Jennifer 0 to-read-fantasy 4.00 2016 My Lady Jane (The Lady Janies, #1)
author: Cynthia Hand
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/13
shelves: to-read-fantasy
review:

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Burn Book: A Tech Love Story 195791688 From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

When tech titans crowed that they would “move fast and break things,� Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts� and prompted Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once observe: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’�

While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent Internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites.

Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovation that has both helped and hurt our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few whom Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in Zuckerberg’s case, literally.

Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.]]>
320 Kara Swisher 1982163895 Jennifer 4 3.7 3.88 2024 Burn Book: A Tech Love Story
author: Kara Swisher
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: 2024, bay-area-and-california, non-fiction
review:
3.7
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<![CDATA[Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir]]> 177772457 A spirited and timely exploration of group living that encourages readers to reconsider the meaning of family and home.


Lola Milholland grew up in the nineties, the child of iconoclastic hippies. Her mom—energetic and intense at work and at play, whether at her job marketing for an agricultural co-op or paddling down a river, fat spliff in hand—had spent her life revolting against the strictures of her American and Filipino upbringing. Her dad, a child of the eastern Oregon desert, was a jovial documentary filmmaker and historian who loved to collect ephemera. Both threw open the doors of the Holman House, their rambling home in Portland, Oregon, to long-term visitors and unusual guests in need of a place to stay. Years later, after college and after her parents� separation, Milholland returned home. There, she joined her brother and his housemates—an eccentric group of stop-motion animators and accomplished cooks—in choosing to further the experiment of communal living into a new generation.


Group Living and Other Recipes tells the story of the residents of the Holman House—of transcendent meals and ecstatic parties, of colorful characters coming together in moments of deep tenderness and inevitable irritation, of a shared life that is appealing, humorous, confounding, and, just maybe, utopian—with a wider exploration of group living as a way of life. From spending time at her aunt and uncle’s intentional community in Washington State to finding her footing as a student in Japan in the kitchen with her host family to mushroom hunting in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Milholland offers an expansive and vibrant reevaluation of the structures at the very center of our lives.


Thoughtful, quirky, candid, and wise, Group Living and Other Recipes introduces a gifted memoirist and thinker, making a convincing case that �now is always the right time to reimagine home and family.�

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320 Lola Milholland 1954118570 Jennifer 0 to-read-memoir 3.66 2024 Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir
author: Lola Milholland
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: to-read-memoir
review:

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<![CDATA[Peaches & Honey: These Immortal Truths (Peaches and Honey, #1)]]> 62691790 an immortality granting peach,
and a woman gifted with forever.

England, 1184: Anna is used to hunger and hardship. Ever since she was seventeen, when the pale shadows of her vitiligo were spotted, she has spent more than a decade struggling to survive alone and in exile. Then a single act of kindness towards a beautiful stranger and the taste of a divine peach changes Anna's life forever.

Suddenly, her body is as untouched by Time as it by harm. As she watches the world change around her, knowing every human connection is only temporary, there is only one person she trusts to always return no matter the years or distance...

The shapeshifting god who gifted her with immortality.]]>
320 R. Raeta Jennifer 0 to-read-fantasy 4.21 2023 Peaches & Honey: These Immortal Truths (Peaches and Honey, #1)
author: R. Raeta
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: to-read-fantasy
review:

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Belle Greene 60127954
New York in the 1900s. A young girl, fascinated by rare books, defies the odds and climbs all the ranks. She becomes the director of the fabulous library of the magnate J. P. Morgan and the darling of the international aristocracy, under the false name of Belle da Costa Greene. Belle Greene to close friends.

But the flamboyant collector who turns heads and reigns over the world of bibliophiles hides a terrible secret for the violently racist America of her time. Although she looks white, she is actually African American and, moreover, the daughter of a famous black activist who sees her desire to hide her origins as a betrayal. It is this drama of a being torn between history and a woman’s choice to belong to the society which oppresses her people that Alexandra Lapierre recounts.

The fruit of three years of investigation, this novel retraces the victories and heartbreaks of a woman full of life, as free as she is determined, whose astonishing daring echoes today's battles.]]>
480 Alexandra Lapierre 1609457595 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 4.49 2021 Belle Greene
author: Alexandra Lapierre
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read-fiction
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Smile and Look Pretty 57676365 What happens when four assistants risk everything to say enough is enough?

Best friends Cate, Lauren, Oliviaand Max are overworked and underpaid assistants to some of the most powerfulpeoplein the entertainmentindustries. Like the assistants who came before them, the women know they have to pay their dues and abide the demeaning tasks and verbal abuse from their bosses in order to climb the ladders to their dream jobs.

But as they are passed over for promotions and the toxic office environments reach a breaking point, the women secretlystart an anonymous blog detailing their experiences, which snowballs into hundreds of others coming forward with stories of their own. Confronted with newfound viral fame and the possibility of their identities being revealed, the assistants have to contend with the life-changing consequences of speaking out against those who refuse to share the power.]]>
349 Amanda Pellegrino 0369701100 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 3.82 2022 Smile and Look Pretty
author: Amanda Pellegrino
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read-fiction
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<![CDATA[I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood]]> 60233583
Longlisted for the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

“Sometimes I think about how much bad news there is to tell my kid, the endlessly long, looping CVS receipt scroll of truly terrible things that have happened, and I want to get under the bed and never come out. How do we tell them about all this? Can we just play Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire and then brace for questions? The first of which should be, how is this a song that played on the radio?�

In New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Jessi Klein’s second collection, she hilariously explodes the cultural myths and impossible expectations around motherhood and explore the humiliations, poignancies, and possibilities of midlife.

In interconnected essays like “Listening to Beyoncé in the Parking Lot of Party City,� “Your Husband Will Remarry Five Minutes After You Die,� “Eulogy for My Feet,� and “An Open Love Letter to Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent,� Klein explores this stage of life in all its cruel ironies, joyous moments, and bittersweetness.

Written with Klein’s signature candor and humanity, I'll Show Myself Out is an incisive, moving, and often uproarious collection.]]>
283 Jessi Klein 0062981617 Jennifer 0 3.88 2022 I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood
author: Jessi Klein
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: 2022, just-could-not-finish-it
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<![CDATA[“You Just Need to Lose Weight�: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People]]> 60808740 The co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast and creator of Your Fat Friend equips you with the facts to debunk common anti-fat myths and with tools to take action for fat justice

The pushback that shows up in conversations about fat justice takes exceedingly predicable form. Losing weight is easy—calories in, calories out. Fat people are unhealthy. We’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Fat acceptance “glorifies obesity.� The BMI is an objective measure of size and health. Yet, these myths are as readily debunked as they are pervasive.

In “You Just Need to Lose Weight,� Aubrey Gordon equips readers with the facts and figures to reframe myths about fatness in order to dismantle the anti-fat bias ingrained in how we think about and treat fat people. Bringing her dozen years of community organizing and training to bear, Gordon shares the rhetorical approaches she and other organizers employ to not only counter these pernicious myths, but to dismantle the anti-fat bias that so often underpin them.

As conversations about fat acceptance and fat justice continue to grow, “You Just Need to Lose Weight� will be essential to ensure that those conversations are informed, effective, and grounded in both research and history.

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205 Aubrey Gordon 0807006475 Jennifer 5 2024, non-fiction 4.34 2023 “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People
author: Aubrey Gordon
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: 2024, non-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[The Slow Moon Climbs: The Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause]]> 53040399 The first comprehensive look at menopause from prehistory to today

Are the ways we look at menopause all wrong? Historian Susan Mattern says yes, and The Slow Moon Climbs reveals just how wrong we have been. Taking readers from the rainforests of Paraguay to the streets of Tokyo, Mattern draws on historical, scientific, and cultural research to reveal how our perceptions of menopause developed from prehistory to today. For most of human history, people had no word for menopause and did not view it as a medical condition. Rather, in traditional foraging and agrarian societies, it was a transition to another important life stage. This book, then, introduces new ways of understanding life beyond fertility.

Mattern examines the fascinating "Grandmother Hypothesis"—which argues for the importance of elders in the rearing of future generations—as well as other evolutionary theories that have generated surprising insights about menopause and the place of older people in society. She looks at agricultural communities where households relied on postreproductive women for the family's survival. And she explores the emergence of menopause as a medical condition in the Western world. It was only around 1700 that people began to see menopause as a dangerous pathological disorder linked to upsetting symptoms that rendered women weak and vulnerable. Mattern argues that menopause was another syndrome, like hysterical suffocation or melancholia, that emerged or reemerged in early modern Europe in tandem with the rise of a professional medical class.

The Slow Moon Climbs casts menopause, at last, in the positive light it deserves—not only as an essential life stage, but also as a key factor in the history of human flourishing.

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467 Susan P. Mattern 0691185646 Jennifer 0 to-read-non-fiction 3.91 2019 The Slow Moon Climbs: The Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause
author: Susan P. Mattern
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read-non-fiction
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<![CDATA[Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?]]> 28927917 New York Times Bestseller: “Astonishing . . . has the makings of a classic—and one fantastic read.”�People

What separates your mind from an animal’s? Maybe you think it’s your ability to design tools, your sense of self, or your grasp of past and future—all traits that have helped us define ourselves as the planet’s preeminent species. But in recent decades, these claims have eroded, or even been disproven outright, by a revolution in the study of animal cognition. Take the way octopuses use coconut shells as tools; elephants that classify humans by age, gender, and language; or Ayumu, the young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame. Based on research involving crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, whales, and of course chimpanzees and bonobos, Frans de Waal explores both the scope and the depth of animal intelligence. He offers a firsthand account of how science has stood traditional behaviorism on its head by revealing how smart animals really are, and how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long.

People often assume a cognitive ladder, from lower to higher forms, with our own intelligence at the top. But what if it is more like a bush, with cognition taking different forms that are often incomparable to ours? Would you presume yourself dumber than a squirrel because you’re less adept at recalling the locations of hundreds of buried acorns? Or would you judge your perception of your surroundings as more sophisticated than that of a echolocating bat? De Waal reviews the rise and fall of the mechanistic view of animals and opens our minds to the idea that animal minds are far more intricate and complex than we have assumed. De Waal’s landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal—and human—intelligence.]]>
353 Frans de Waal 0393246191 Jennifer 0 to-read-nature 4.08 2016 Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
author: Frans de Waal
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: to-read-nature
review:

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<![CDATA[Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon]]> 61796681 The story of how Victoria’s Secret skyrocketed from a tiny chain of boutiques to a retail phenomenon with more than $8 billion in annual sales at its peak—all while defining an impossible beauty standard for generations of American women—before the brand’s tight grip on the industry finally slipped

Victoria’s Secret is one of the most influential and polarizing brands to ever infiltrate the psyche of the American consumer. Almost right at its start in the late 1970s, the company developed a cult following for its glamorous catalogs. Back then, shoppers had few alternatives to the stodgy department stores that sold most of the nation’s intimate apparel. By 1982, the founders of Victoria’s Secret avoided bankruptcy by selling to Les Wexner, the fast-fashion pioneer behind the Limited, whose empire of mall brands would go on to dominate American retail for forty years.

Wexner turned Victoria’s Secret into a multibillion-dollar business, and the brand’s cultural influence soared thanks to its airbrushed advertisements and annual televised fashion show, which drew millions of viewers each year. Its supermodel spokeswomen, the sweet but sultry Angels, personified a new American beauty standard.

But as our definition of beauty expanded, Victoria’s Secret failed to evolve and reached a crisis point. Meanwhile, Wexner became increasingly known for his complicated relationship with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his former financial adviser and confidant.

Selling Sexy expertly draws from sources within Victoria’s Secret and across the industry to examine the unprecedented rise of one of the most innovative brands in retail history—a brand that today, under new ownership, is desperately trying to seduce shoppers again.]]>
320 Lauren Sherman 1250850967 Jennifer 0 to-read-non-fiction 3.71 2024 Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon
author: Lauren Sherman
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: to-read-non-fiction
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<![CDATA[By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land]]> 199393033 A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later

Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests—in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples.

In the 1830s, Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed. Over a century later, a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen on tribal land. His defense attorneys argued the murder occurred on the reservation of his tribe, and therefore Oklahoma didn’t have the jurisdiction to execute him. Oklahoma asserted that the reservation no longer existed. In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court settled the dispute. Its ruling that would ultimately underpin multiple reservations covering almost half the land in Oklahoma, including Nagle’s own Cherokee Nation.

Here Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.]]>
352 Rebecca Nagle 0063112043 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 4.44 2024 By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
author: Rebecca Nagle
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.44
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Dear Dickhead 205363943 The French novel taking the world by an ultracontemporary Dangerous Liaisons about sex, feminism, and addiction.

Dear Dickhead, I read the piece you posted on your Insta. You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. you've had your fifteen minutes of fame. The proof? The fact that I bothered to write to you. Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence—at the very moment that Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a no-holds-barred conversation about life under the patriarchy, and above all about addiction—to drugs, to alcohol, to the internet, to rage.

Virginie Despentes, the celebrated author of King Kong Theory, has written her breakthrough a Dangerous Liaisons for our time. We follow Rebecca and Oscar as they develop an unlikely friendship and argue over questions of right and wrong in a city—Paris—where pleasure, excess, and freedom rule the day, or used to. Dear Dickhead is a guns-blazing novel about a culture that makes men and women sick, and about how the search for feeling leaves us addicted to what makes us feel. The result is a provocative and unmissable book.]]>
304 Virginie Despentes 0374611610 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 3.64 2022 Dear Dickhead
author: Virginie Despentes
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2022
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The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]>
490 Liz Moore Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.15
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<![CDATA[The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession]]> 62873378 One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first the story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser.

In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser’s strange world—unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.

In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.

This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.]]>
224 Michael Finkel 0525657320 Jennifer 0 to-read-non-fiction 3.92 2023 The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
author: Michael Finkel
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
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<![CDATA[The Once & Future Witch Hunt: A Descendant's Reckoning from Salem to the Present]]> 199739644
In 1692, Martha Allen Carrier was hanged in the Salem witch trials as the "Queen of Hell." Three hundred years later, her nine-times-great-granddaughter, Alice Markham-Cantor, set out to discover why Martha had died. As she chased her ancestor through the archives, graveyards, and haunted places of New England, grappling with what we owe the past, Alice discovered a shocking truth: witch hunts didn't end in Salem.

Extensively researched and told through alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, The Once & Future Witch Hunt does not treat Salem as a cautionary tale. It treats Salem as an instruction manual—not on how to perform witch hunts, but how to stop them.

Foreword by Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author.

Afterword by Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch.]]>
318 Alice Markham-Cantor 0738777234 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 4.07 The Once & Future Witch Hunt: A Descendant's Reckoning from Salem to the Present
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name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.07
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<![CDATA[Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire]]> 50358527



Aphrodite was said to have been born from the sea, rising out of a froth of white foam. But long before the Ancient Greeks conceived of this voluptuous blonde, she existed as an early spirit of fertility on the shores of Cyprus -- and thousands of years before that, as a ferocious warrior-goddess in the Middle East. Proving that this fabled figure is so much more than an avatar of commercialized romance, historian Bettany Hughes reveals the remarkable lifestory of one of antiquity's most potent myths.






Venus and Aphrodite brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire. From Mesopotamia to modern-day London, from Botticelli to Beyoncé, Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today -- and how we trivialize her power at our peril.]]>
208 Bettany Hughes 1541674235 Jennifer 0 to-read-non-fiction 3.81 2019 Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire
author: Bettany Hughes
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2019
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<![CDATA[House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France]]> 198493964
In House of Lilies , historian Justine Firnhaber-Baker tells the epic story of the Capetian dynasty of medieval France, showing how their ideas about power, religion, and identity continue to shape European society and politics today.

Reigning from 987 to 1328, the Capetian kings became the most powerful monarchy of the Middle Ages and established the foundations of a shared French culture. Consolidating a fragmented realm that eventually stretched from the Rhône to the Pyrenees, they were the first royal house to adopt the fleur-de-lys, displaying this lily emblem to signify their divine favor and legitimate their rule. The Capetians played a part in some of the most dramatic and far-reaching episodes in European history, including the Crusades, bloody waves of religious persecution, and a series of wars with England. The Capetian age saw the emergence of Gothic architecture, the romantic ideals of chivalry and courtly love, and the Church’s role at the center of daily life.

Evocatively interweaving these pivotal developments with the human stories of the rulers who drove them, House of Lilies is the definitive history of the dynasty that forged France—and Europe—as we know it.]]>
448 Justine Firnhaber-Baker 154160475X Jennifer 0 to-read-history 4.20 2024 House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France
author: Justine Firnhaber-Baker
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
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<![CDATA[The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India]]> 59366120
In India, two out of every three people are under the age of thirty-five. These are men and women who grew up with the internet and the advent of smartphones and social media. But when it comes to love and marriage, they’re expected to adhere to thousands of years of tradition. It’s that conflict between obeying tradition and embracing modernity that drives journalist Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds.

Through vivid, lyrical prose, Choksi shines a light on three young couples who buck against arranged marriages in the pursuit of true love, illustrating the challenges, shame, anger, triumph, and loss their actions and choices set in play.

Against the backdrop of India’s beautiful villages and cities, Choksi introduces our newlyweds. First, there’s the lesbian couple forced to flee for a chance at a life together. Then there’s the Hindu woman and Muslim man who escaped their families under the cover of night after being harassed by a violent militia group. Finally, there’s the inter-caste couple who are doing everything to avoid the same fate as a similar couple who were burned alive.

Engaging and moving, The Newlyweds raises universal questions, such What are we really willing to risk for love? If we’re lucky enough to find it, does it change us? If so, for the better? Or for the worse?]]>
288 Mansi Choksi 1982134445 Jennifer 0 to-read-non-fiction 3.82 2022 The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India
author: Mansi Choksi
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.82
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My Roman History: A Memoir 200287080
From the time she first felt called to its gates as a high school student fascinated by Dante and Italian thanks to a life-changing teacher, Rome has been a fixed star around which Alizah Holstein’s life has rotated—despite the fact that she bears no Italian heritage, and has never lived there long enough to call it home.

In this kaleidoscopic yet intimate memoir, her shifting relationship to a vibrant city layered with human history becomes a lens on why we look to the past, on the mysteries of affinity and desire, and on what it means to grow up. Holstein weaves the stories of Romans past and present, and encounters with the city of historical figures from Petrarch to Freud, into the narrative of her evolution from a curious student abuzz with the thrill of discovery, to a lonely researcher in a city to which she feels she belongs despite knowing no one, to an ambitious young historian struggling to find her place in the halls of academia. Following a trail of memories—that first taste of a tartufo cioccolato in Piazza Navona, the ancient walls of the Via Appia blurring from the back of a motorcycle, the smudge of ink on a manuscript left by a scribe's hand over seven hundred years before—she explores what it means to be romana , Roman—and to find solace and self-knowledge in the presence of the past.

An enveloping, original, and deeply resonant account, set against one of the world's most beguiling cities, of the unexpected things that give our lives meaning, My Roman History is a profound depiction of the winding path to self-realization, which—much like history itself—is mysterious, captivating, and ever-unfolding.]]>
368 Alizah Holstein 0593490088 Jennifer 0 to-read-memoir 4.24 My Roman History: A Memoir
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name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.24
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Love in Case of Emergency 54427159 Writing with the wry realism of Sally Rooney, one of Germany� most promising literary talents demonstrates her incisive understanding of the complexities of relationships and the depths of the human heart in this witty and compulsively readable novel about five very different women whose lives intersect.

What happens when women fulfill their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters, and daughters? What comes next? Award-winning author Daniela Krien explores these questions in this powerful novel of friendship, love, loss, and everything in between.

Krien explores the hopes, ambitions, challenges, and disappointments that shape modern women’s lives, offering intimate insights on motherhood and childlessness, bereavement, infidelity, and divorce. At the heart of the novel are five very different women who find themselves hurtling towards a new way of living without knowing quite how they got there.

A fresh take on women’s lives, Love in Case of Emergency is a punchy yet sensitive novel that takes the notion of aspiring to find happiness and connection to new and exhilarating heights.]]>
288 Daniela Krien 0063006006 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 3.18 2019 Love in Case of Emergency
author: Daniela Krien
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2019
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<![CDATA[The Gods Below (The Hollow Covenant, #1)]]> 62969719
Hakara is not willing to pay such a price. Desperate to protect herself, and her sister Rasha, she flees her homeland for the safety of a neighbouring kingdom. But tragedy strikes when they’re separated, and Hakara is forced to abandon Rasha to an unknown fate.

Yet when Hakara discovers she can channel the power of the magical gems, she’s invited to join a clandestine plot to destroy the God Pact. To win Hakara to their cause, the conspirators reveal a startling secret: Rasha is alive � and they can help rescue her.

But only if Hakara goes to war against a god.

The Gods Below begins an epic new fantasy series from Sunday Times bestselling author Andrea Stewart, where two sisters find themselves on opposite sides of a war against gods.]]>
512 Andrea Stewart 0356520676 Jennifer 0 to-read-fantasy 3.67 2024 The Gods Below (The Hollow Covenant, #1)
author: Andrea Stewart
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.67
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The Girl Who Kept the Castle 200575863
After (sort of) accepting his demise, West decides to host a competition to choose his successor. Faye finds herself fighting to keep the tournament running smoothly behind the scenes: putting out kitchen fires, feeding the compost dragon, and making sure competitors stay away from the cockatrice pen.

But killer roosters soon become the least of her worries. A servant of the evil Shadow Queen has sabotaged the contest—set on destroying not just Celurdur but the entire kingdom of Solum. It is up to Faye to stop him, but she’ll need more than a mop. Will a maid’s magic be enough to save everything she loves from utter destruction?]]>
336 Ryan Graudin 0063229412 Jennifer 0 to-read-fantasy 4.24 2024 The Girl Who Kept the Castle
author: Ryan Graudin
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.24
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Nancy: A Comic Collection 43821525 Nancy. Her fresh, irreverent take on the classic comic strip has become a sensation with readers and has earned praise from dozens of media outlets, several of which have named it the best comic of the year. This hardcover collection includes the first nine months of Jaimes' run on Nancy, along with an introduction, essay, interview with the author, and a special gallery of Nancy fan art by the author.]]> 144 Olivia Jaimes 1524853259 Jennifer 0 currently-reading 4.19 2019 Nancy: A Comic Collection
author: Olivia Jaimes
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2019
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<![CDATA[Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America]]> 205478790
The first sweeping history of sex and sexuality in America since John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s classic work, Intimate Matters, Rebecca L. Davis’s Fierce Desires presents a story of dramatic and often surprising change. Davis’s absorbing narrative takes us across four hundred years, from two-spirit people among the Pueblo Indians in the seventeenth century to the gay rights activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya in the twentieth. At every step, she documents the existence of gender nonconformity, queer love, and abortion—facts of sexual life deemed by the Right to be very recent inventions. At the same time, Davis argues that Americans shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as meaningful but secondary reflections of otherwise nonsexual personal qualities to understanding sexuality as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, essential to what makes a person who they are. Creating a new genealogy of sexual pioneers, Davis writes back into history people and ideas that have been forgotten, ignored, or intentionally suppressed.]]>
480 Rebecca L. Davis 1631496573 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 4.00 Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America
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name: Jennifer
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<![CDATA[Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]>
416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Jennifer 0 to-read-non-fiction 4.21 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
author: Naomi Klein
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.21
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<![CDATA[The Full Moon Coffee Shop (The Full Moon Coffee Shop, #1)]]> 202499907 Translated from the Japanese bestseller, this charming and magical novel, inspired by the myth of cats returning favors to those who care for them, reminds us that it’s never too late to follow our stars.

In Japan cats are a symbol of good luck. As the myth goes, if you are kind to them, they’ll one day return the favor. And if you are kind to the right cat, you might just find yourself invited to a mysterious coffee shop under a glittering Kyoto moon. This particular coffee shop is like no other. It has no fixed location, no fixed hours, and seemingly appears at random to adrift young people at crucial junctions in their lives.

It’s also run by talking cats.

While customers at the Full Moon Coffee Shop partake in cakes, coffees, and teas, the cats also consult them on their star charts, offer cryptic wisdom, and let them know where their lives have veered off course—because every person who visits the shop has been feeling more than a little lost. And for a down-on-her-luck screenwriter, a romantically stuck movie director, a hopeful hairstylist, and a technologically challenged website designer, the feline guides will set them back on their fated paths. After all, there is a reason the shop appeared to each of them…]]>
228 Mai Mochizuki 0593726839 Jennifer 0 to-read-fantasy 3.82 2020 The Full Moon Coffee Shop (The Full Moon Coffee Shop, #1)
author: Mai Mochizuki
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2020
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<![CDATA[The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science]]> 208580608 The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo’s Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own

“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name,� writes Dava Sobel at the opening of her shining portrait of the sole Nobel laureate decorated in two separate fields of science—Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre and Chemistry by herself in 1911. And yet, Sobel makes clear, as brilliant and creative as she was in the laboratory, Marie Curie was equally passionate outside it. Grieving Pierre’s untimely death in 1906, she took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne; devotedly raised two brilliant daughters; drove a van she outfitted with x-ray equipment to the front lines of World War I; befriended Albert Einstein and other luminaries of twentieth-century physics; won support from two U.S. presidents; and inspired generations of young women the world over to pursue science as a way of life.

As Sobel did so memorably in her portrait of Galileo through the prism of his daughter, she approaches Marie Curie from a unique angle, narrating her remarkable life of discovery and fame alongside the women who became her legacy—from France’s Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, and Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch, to Mme. Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For decades the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings that probed new theories about the interior of the atom, Marie Curie traveled far and wide, despite constant illness, to share the secrets of radioactivity, a term she coined. Her two triumphant tours of the United States won her admirers for her modesty even as she was mobbed at every stop; her daughters, in Ève’s later recollection, “discovered all at once what the retiring woman with whom they had always lived meant to the world.�

With the consummate skill that made bestsellers of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, and the appreciation for women in science at the heart of her most recent The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel has crafted a radiant biography and a masterpiece of storytelling, illuminating the life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.]]>
318 Dava Sobel 0802163823 Jennifer 0 to-read-history 3.94 2024 The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science
author: Dava Sobel
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average rating: 3.94
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On Freedom 203956715 A brilliant exploration of freedom—what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival—by the acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On TyrannyTimothy Snyder has been called “the leading interpreter of our dark times.� As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarianism here and abroad. His book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Now, in this tour de force of political philosophy, he helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for.Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state We think we're free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes—the habits of mind—that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions (championed by the right) but also the role of institutions (the purview of the left). Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity, and grace.]]> 368 Timothy Snyder 0593728726 Jennifer 0 to-read-non-fiction 4.30 2024 On Freedom
author: Timothy Snyder
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average rating: 4.30
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<![CDATA[I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom]]> 203578812 A standalone darkly humorous thriller set in modern America's age of anxiety, by New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin.

Outside Los Angeles, a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a large black box. She offers him $200,000 cash to transport her and that box across the country, to Washington, DC.

But there are rules:

He cannot look inside the box.
He cannot ask questions.
He cannot tell anyone.
They must leave immediately.
He must leave all trackable devices behind.

As these eccentric misfits hit the road, rumors spread on social media that the box is part of a carefully orchestrated terror attack intended to plunge the USA into civil war.

The truth promises to be even stranger, and may change how you see the world.]]>
400 Jason Pargin 125028595X Jennifer 0 to-read-science-fiction 3.97 2024 I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom
author: Jason Pargin
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.97
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Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Jennifer 0 to-read-mystery 3.34 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Jennifer
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
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<![CDATA[Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books]]> 199119054
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on mission to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books—none of which she’s actually read. To replace the “pornographic� books she’s challenged at the local public library, Lula starts her own lending library in front of her home: a cute wooden hutch with glass doors and neat rows of the worthy literature that she’s sure the town’s readers need.

But Beverly’s daughter Lindsay sneaks in by night and secretly fills Lula Dean’s little free library with banned books wrapped in “wholesome� dust jackets. The Girl’s Guide to the Revolution is wrapped in the cover of The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette. A jacket that belongs to Our Confederate Heroes ends up on Beloved. One by one, neighbors who borrow books from Lula Dean’s library find their lives changed in unexpected ways. Finally, one of Lula Dean’s enemies discovers the library and decides to turn the tables on her, just as Lula and Beverly are running against each other to replace the town’s disgraced mayor.

That’s when all the townspeople who’ve been borrowing from Lula’s library begin to reveal themselves. It’s a diverse and surprising bunch—including the local postman, the prom queen, housewives, a farmer, and the former DA—all of whom have been changed by what they’ve read. When Lindsay is forced to own up to what she’s done, the showdown that’s been brewing between Beverly and Lula will roil the whole town...and change it forever.]]>
301 Kirsten Miller 0063348713 Jennifer 0 to-read-fiction 4.18 2024 Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books
author: Kirsten Miller
name: Jennifer
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/21
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