Jaime's bookshelf: read en-US Mon, 12 May 2025 14:33:33 -0700 60 Jaime's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Piranesi 52702097
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.]]>
246 Susanna Clarke Jaime 2 4.24 2020 Piranesi
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2025/05/12
date added: 2025/05/12
shelves:
review:

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Brother Odd (Odd Thomas #3) 24842331
As ever, where Odd Thomas goes, strangeness goes too. A white dog named Boo befriends him � as does the ghost of Elvis. And a world-famous physicist is conducting experiments in the catacombs of the abbey. Could this be why Odd can once again see bodachs, shadowy harbingers of violence? They prowl the halls, suggesting horror to come.

But what form will it take? And how will Odd defeat an enemy that eclipses any he has met before?]]>
448 Dean Koontz 0007226586 Jaime 0 to-read, own 3.73 2006 Brother Odd (Odd Thomas #3)
author: Dean Koontz
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read, own
review:

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From the Corner of His Eye 236212
Now, in From the Corner of His Eye, Koontz brings together his most powerful themes to draw readers into a spellbinding world made by a master at the top of his form -- a story rich in triumph and tragedy, joy and terror, love, hate, and profound meaning, played out by perhaps the most unforgettable cast of characters he has yet created.

Bartholomew Lampion is born in Bright Beach, California, on a day of tragedy and terror, when the lives of everyone in his family are changed forever. Remarkable events accompany his birth, and everyone agrees that his unusual eyes are the most beautiful they have ever seen.

On this same day, a thousand miles away, a ruthless man learns that he has a mortal enemy named Bartholomew. He doesn't know who Bartholomew is, but he embarks on a search that will become the purpose of his life. If ever he finds the right Bartholomew, he will deal mercilessly with him.

And in San Francisco, a girl is born, the result of a violent rape. Her survival is miraculous, and her destiny is mysteriously linked to the fates of Barty and the man who stalks him.

At the age of three, Barty Lampion is blinded when surgeons reluctantly remove his eyes to save him from a fast-spreading cancer. As the growing boy copes with his blindness and proves to be a prodigy, his mother, an exceptional woman, counsels him that all things happen for a reason, that there is meaning even in his suffering, and that he will affect the lives of people yet unknown to him in ways startling and profound.

At thirteen, Bartholomew regains his sight. How he regains it, why he regains it, and what happens as his amazing life unfolds results in a breathtaking journey of courage, heart-stopping suspense, and high adventure. His mother once told him that every person's life has an effect on every other person's, in often unknowable ways, and Barty's eventful life indeed entwines with others in ways that will astonish and move everyone who reads his story.]]>
622 Dean Koontz 0553801341 Jaime 0 to-read, own 3.84 2000 From the Corner of His Eye
author: Dean Koontz
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-read, own
review:

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The Man in the Iron Mask 2383125
With its daring jailbreak, brilliant masquerade, and heart-stopping sword play, The Man in the Iron Mask contains all the pomp, pageantry, and colorful history that make the novels of Alexandre Dumas so wonderful to read. It is an incomparable tale of honor and loyalty, adventure and derring-do.]]>
1 Alexandre Dumas 0451197003 Jaime 0 to-read, own 3.61 The Man in the Iron Mask
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.61
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read, own
review:

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<![CDATA[Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?]]> 198902287 REESE'S BOOK CLUB MAY 2023 PICK

BOOK OF THE MONTH MAY 2023 PICK

A multigenerational saga that traverses the glamour of old Hollywood and the seductive draw of modern-day showbiz

When Kitty Karr Tate, a White icon of the silver screen, dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the St. John sisters, three young, wealthy Black women, it prompts questions. Lots of questions.

A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty’s affairs than deal with the press. But what she discovers in one of Kitty’s journals rocks her world harder than any other brewing scandal could—and between a cheating fiancĂ© and the fallout from a controversial social media post, there are plenty.

The truth behind Kitty's ascent to stardom from her beginnings in the segregated South threatens to expose a web of unexpected family ties, debts owed, and debatable crimes that could, with one pull, unravel the all-American fabric of the St. John sisters and those closest to them.

As Elise digs deeper into Kitty's past, she must also turn the lens upon herself, confronting the gifts and burdens of her own choices and the power that the secrets of the dead hold over the living. Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? is a sprawling page-turner set against the backdrop of the Hollywood machine, an insightful and nuanced look at the inheritances of family, race, and gender—and the choices some women make to break free of them.]]>
416 Crystal Smith Paul 1250349028 Jaime 0 to-read 3.69 2023 Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?
author: Crystal Smith Paul
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

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The Book of Delights: Essays 38890258 As Heard on NPR's This American ÌęThe New York Times bestselling book that celebratesÌęordinary delights in the world around usÌęby one of America's most original and observant writers and the author of Inciting Joy, award-winning poet Ross Gay. Pre-order The Book of (More) Delights now, too!“Ross Gay’s eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us.â€� —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate The winner of the National Book CriticsÌęAward for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders. In The Book of Delights, one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world–his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.]]> 289 Ross Gay Jaime 0 currently-reading 4.09 2019 The Book of Delights: Essays
author: Ross Gay
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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The Death of Vivek Oji 49110597 A dramatic and deeply moving novel of three generations coping with secrets, violence, and grief, against a backdrop of political and social unrest.

They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.

One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover the lifeless body of her son wrapped in fabric on the welcome mat. The story of that child, Vivek Oji, is the story of two families from disparate cultures who came together in a time of upheaval, and of Vivek’s struggle to be true to a self whose spirit and longings defy conventional expectations. Raised by a privileged, distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, fugue states that disrupt all connection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women resettled in the area. But Vivek’s closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens—and Osita struggles to understand his friend's escalating crisis—the mystery of Vivek’s behavior gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of transcendent freedom.

Propulsively readable, teeming with vivid and unforgettable characters, The Death of Vivek Oji is a story of family and friendship that challenges expectations at every turn. It is a major step forward from a writer of rare insight into the porous barriers between body and identity, spirit, and self.]]>
256 Akwaeke Emezi 0525541616 Jaime 0 currently-reading 4.16 2020 The Death of Vivek Oji
author: Akwaeke Emezi
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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

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

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

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

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]>
454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Jaime 0 to-read 3.86 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome]]> 51630983 352 Emma Southon 1786078376 Jaime 0 to-read 4.19 2020 A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome
author: Emma Southon
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Manage Your Money like a F*cking Grownup: The Best Money Advice You Never Got]]> 38651858
In this clear and engaging basic guide to managing your finances, Sam Beckbessinger covers topics from compound interest and inflation to "Your brain on money", negotiating a raise, and particularly local South African phenomena like "black tax". The book includes exercises and "how-to's", doesn't shy away from the psychology of money, and is empowering, humorous and helpful. The book you wish you'd had at 25, but is never too late to read.]]>
315 Sam Beckbessinger 1868428230 Jaime 0 to-read 4.36 2018 Manage Your Money like a F*cking Grownup: The Best Money Advice You Never Got
author: Sam Beckbessinger
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

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Never Let Me Go 55132921 From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes a devastating novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss.
Ìę
As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is modern classic.]]>
272 Kazuo Ishiguro Jaime 0 currently-reading 3.88 2005 Never Let Me Go
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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

Bringing the magic and suspense of the All Souls Trilogy to a deeply satisfying conclusion, this highly anticipated finale went straight to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. In The Book of Life, Diana and Matthew time-travel back from Elizabethan London to make a dramatic return to the present—facing new crises and old enemies. At Matthew’s ancestral home, Sept-Tours, they reunite with the beloved cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches—with one significant exception. But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when it is, the search for Ashmole 782 and its missing pages takes on even more urgency.]]>
561 Deborah Harkness 0670025593 Jaime 0 to-read 4.15 2014 The Book of Life (All Souls, #3)
author: Deborah Harkness
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

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The Berry Pickers 123036004 A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.]]>
307 Amanda Peters 1646221958 Jaime 0 to-read 4.04 2023 The Berry Pickers
author: Amanda Peters
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Never Flinch (Holly Gibney, #4)]]> 221633230 From master storyteller Stephen King comes an extraordinary new novel with intertwining storylines—one about a killer on a diabolical revenge mission, and another about a vigilante targeting a feminist celebrity speaker—featuring the beloved Holly Gibney and a dynamic new cast of characters.

When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to “kill thirteen innocents and one guiltyâ€� in “an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man,â€� Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea what to think. Are fourteen citizens about to be slaughtered in an unhinged act of retribution? As the investigation unfolds, Izzy realizes that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help.

Meanwhile, controversial and outspoken women’s rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour, drawing packed venues of both fans and detractors. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate’s message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. At first, no one is hurt, but the stalker is growing bolder, and Holly is hired to be Kate’s bodyguard—a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary driven by wrath and his belief in his own righteousness.

Featuring a riveting cast of characters both old and new, including world-famous gospel singer Sista Bessie and an unforgettable villain addicted to murder, these twinned narratives converge in a chilling and spectacular conclusion—a feat of storytelling only Stephen King could pull off.

Thrilling, wildly fun, and outrageously engrossing, Never Flinch is one of King’s richest and most propulsive novels.]]>
448 Stephen King 1668089335 Jaime 0 to-read 3.67 2025 Never Flinch (Holly Gibney, #4)
author: Stephen King
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]>
385 James McBride 0593422945 Jaime 0 to-read 3.83 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

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Remarkably Bright Creatures 59710157 For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus

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

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

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

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]>
362 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204177 Jaime 2 2025, book-club, fiction
***Slight spoiler***



If it weren't for the fact that this was a book club book, I probably would have stopped reading 1/3 of the way in. Because it was, I kept reading. The story it self wasn't horrible. I do enjoy stories where the characters are connected (some here felt overly forced though i.e. Avery and Cameron's mother). Tova was a good character, but honestly, I expected more octopus.

All in all, I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend this book.]]>
4.51 2022 Remarkably Bright Creatures
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: 2025, book-club, fiction
review:
I wanted to like this book more than I did. It was so hyped up that I immediately voted for it as January's choice for my book club. It was ok. I didn't absolutely hate it but I definitely didn't come close to loving it. The writing style just wasn't my thing. I had a very difficult time getting over that. Sentences that are not full sentences (no verbs in sight) are the worst. I fully understand that people talk that way but reading it just kept throwing me off and was such a distraction. I acknowledge that I am an old soul. I was the only one at my book club table that didn't have a problem with this and they all thought it was amazing.

***Slight spoiler***



If it weren't for the fact that this was a book club book, I probably would have stopped reading 1/3 of the way in. Because it was, I kept reading. The story it self wasn't horrible. I do enjoy stories where the characters are connected (some here felt overly forced though i.e. Avery and Cameron's mother). Tova was a good character, but honestly, I expected more octopus.

All in all, I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend this book.
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Love You a Latke 205804581 Love comes home for the challah-days in this sparkling romance.

Snow is falling, holiday lights are twinkling, and Abby Cohen is pissed. For one thing, her most annoying customer, Seth, has been coming into her cafĂ© every morning with his sunshiny attitude, determined to break down her carefully constructed emotional walls. And, as the only Jew on the tourism board of her Vermont town, Abby's been charged with planningÌętheir fledgling Hanukkah festival. Unfortunately, the local vendors don’t understand that the story of Hanukkah cannot be told with light-up plastic figures from the Nativity scene, even if the Three Wise Men wear yarmulkes.

Desperate for support, Abby puts out a call for help online and discovers she was wrong about being the only Jew within a hundred miles. There's one Seth.

As it turns out, Seth’s parents have been badgering him to bring a Nice Jewish Girlfriend home to New York City for Hanukkah, and if Abby can survive his incessant, irritatinglyÌęhandsome smiles, he’ll introduce her to all the vendors she needs to make the festival a success. But over latkes, doughnuts, and winter adventures in Manhattan, Abby begins to realize that her fake boyfriend and his family might just be igniting a flame in her own guarded heart.]]>
368 Amanda Elliot 0593815831 Jaime 4 2025, book-club, fiction 3.79 2024 Love You a Latke
author: Amanda Elliot
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: 2025, book-club, fiction
review:
So it has been a long while since I have read a romance novel and this was a good one to jump into. It was slightly on the tame side though. I thought it was cute, fun, and a bit unrealistic, just as you would expect from most romance stories taking place over 8 days. Along with the love story, this book was also about Abby's reconnection with the Jewish community. I thought that part of the story was unexpected but well done.
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<![CDATA[I Will Teach You to Be Rich: No Guilt. No Excuses. No B.S. Just a 6-Week Program That Works.]]> 53776382 Ramit Sethi is “the new finance guruâ€� (Fortune), “a unique voice on money, one singularly attuned to . . . his generationâ€� (San Francisco Chronicle). He reaches over 500,000 followers a month on his website, iwillteachyoutoberich.com. And his book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, is a New York Times bestseller with 383,000 copies in print—and the kind of backlist title that is so robust that its sales increase year after year. Now on the eve of its tenth anniversary comes a significant cover-to-cover revision.

At the core of the book is Ramit’s extraordinarily simple, powerful, and effective six-week program for gaining control over your finances. Written in an irreverent and entertaining style, I Will Teach You to Be Rich shows you step-by-step how to beat banks and credit cards at the fee game, automate your savings and investments, negotiate a raise, manage student loans, and enjoy vacations and other things you love by practicing conscious spending.Ìę

In addition to completely updating everything from interest rates to financial instruments, Ramit has added a new dimension to the book: a guide for how to live a “rich life”—a life where money brings meaning, where you can afford to give back, and where experiences, and the time to pursue them, are a priority.
Ìę]]>
353 Ramit Sethi 152350787X Jaime 4 4.40 2009 I Will Teach You to Be Rich: No Guilt. No Excuses. No B.S. Just a 6-Week Program That Works.
author: Ramit Sethi
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: 2024, non-fiction, self-improvement
review:

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

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

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]>
304 John Green 0525555218 Jaime 2 2023, audiobook, non-fiction
If you want to read/listen to the most random facts about literally anything, then this book might be for you. It was not for me. I did learn some facts that might be useful if I were ever to make it on Jeopardy and the New Partner song he mentions, I did look up and it is pretty good. However, the continuous list of everything that he is/has suffered from did get exhausting though (as horrible as that is to say).

I give this book: 2 stars]]>
4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2023/06/18
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: 2023, audiobook, non-fiction
review:
So this wasn't what I expected at all. I mean, it's probably my own fault that I skimmed the summary on the Libby app but o-well. Once it was rented and started, I figured I might as well just listen anyway.

If you want to read/listen to the most random facts about literally anything, then this book might be for you. It was not for me. I did learn some facts that might be useful if I were ever to make it on Jeopardy and the New Partner song he mentions, I did look up and it is pretty good. However, the continuous list of everything that he is/has suffered from did get exhausting though (as horrible as that is to say).

I give this book: 2 stars
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It 830502
It’s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real ...

They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name.]]>
1184 Stephen King 0450411435 Jaime 0 currently-reading, 2024 4.28 1986 It
author: Stephen King
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: currently-reading, 2024
review:

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The Lost Apothecary 53288434 A female apothecary secretly dispenses poisons to liberate women from the men who have wronged them - setting three lives across centuries on a dangerous collision course.

Rule #1: The poison must never be used to harm another woman.
Rule #2: The names of the murderer and her victim must be recorded in the apothecary’s register.


One cold February evening in 1791, at the back of a dark London alley in a hidden apothecary shop, Nella awaits her newest customer. Once a respected healer, Nella now uses her knowledge for a darker purpose - selling well-disguised poisons to desperate women who would kill to be free of the men in their lives. But when her new patron turns out to be a precocious twelve-year-old named Eliza Fanning, an unexpected friendship sets in motion a string of events that jeopardizes Nella’s world and threatens to expose the many women whose names are written in her register.

In present-day London, aspiring historian Caroline Parcewell spends her tenth wedding anniversary alone, reeling from the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. When she finds an old apothecary vial near the river Thames, she can’t resist investigating, only to realize she’s found a link to the unsolved “apothecary murdersâ€� that haunted London over two centuries ago. As she deepens her search, Caroline’s life collides with Nella’s and Eliza’s in a stunning twist of fate - and not everyone will survive.]]>
301 Sarah Penner 0778311015 Jaime 3 2024, book-club, fiction 3.72 2021 The Lost Apothecary
author: Sarah Penner
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: 2024, book-club, fiction
review:

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The Overstory 40180098 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller.]]>
502 Richard Powers 039335668X Jaime 4 2024, book-club, fiction 4.10 2018 The Overstory
author: Richard Powers
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: 2024, book-club, fiction
review:

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All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]>
336 Miranda July 0593190262 Jaime 0 to-read 3.51 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

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Hello Beautiful 207599286 Can love make a broken person whole?

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him—so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman year of college, it's as if the world has lit up around him. With Julia comes her family, as she and her three sisters are inseparable: Sylvie, the family's dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book; Cecelia is a free-spirited artist; and Emeline patiently takes care of them all. With the Padavanos, William experiences a newfound contentment; every moment in their house is filled with loving chaos.

But then darkness from William's past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia's carefully orchestrated plans for their future but the sisters' unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?

An exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott's timeless classic Little Women, Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.]]>
387 Ann Napolitano 0593243730 Jaime 0 to-read 4.05 2023 Hello Beautiful
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: to-read
review:

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Poverty, by America 61358638 Reimagining the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.]]>
304 Matthew Desmond 0593239911 Jaime 4 2023, audiobook, non-fiction 4.27 2023 Poverty, by America
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2023, audiobook, non-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution]]> 23317538
It is the rise from falling that Brown takes as her subject in Rising Strong. As a grounded theory researcher, Brown has listened as a range of people—from leaders in Fortune 500 companies and the military to artists, couples in long-term relationships, teachers, and parents—shared their stories of being brave, falling, and getting back up. She asked herself, What do these people with strong and loving relationships, leaders nurturing creativity, artists pushing innovation, and clergy walking with people through faith and mystery have in common? The answer was clear: They recognize the power of emotion and they’re not afraid to lean in to discomfort.

Walking into our stories of hurt can feel dangerous. But the process of regaining our footing in the midst of struggle is where our courage is tested and our values are forged. Our stories of struggle can be big ones, like the loss of a job or the end of a relationship, or smaller ones, like a conflict with a friend or colleague. Regardless of magnitude or circumstance, the rising strong process is the same: We reckon with our emotions and get curious about what we’re feeling; we rumble with our stories until we get to a place of truth; and we live this process, every day, until it becomes a practice and creates nothing short of a revolution in our lives. Rising strong after a fall is how we cultivate wholeheartedness. It’s the process, Brown writes, that teaches us the most about who we are.]]>
336 Brené Brown 0812995821 Jaime 3 4.25 2015 Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution
author: Brené Brown
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2023, audiobook, non-fiction, self-improvement
review:

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<![CDATA[The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America]]> 38122410 An exploration, both personal and deeply reported, of how we learn to eat in today’s toxic food culture

Food is supposed to sustain and nourish us. Eating well, any doctor will tell you, is the best way to take care of yourself. Feeding well, any human will tell you, is the most important job a mother has. But for too many of us, food now feels dangerous. We parse every bite we eat as good or bad, and judge our own worth accordingly. When her newborn daughter stopped eating after a medical crisis, Virginia Sole-Smith spent two years teaching her how to feel safe around food again―and in the process realized how many of us are struggling to do the same thing.

The Eating Instinct visits kitchen tables around America to tell Sole-Smith’s story and the stories of women recovering from weight-loss surgery, of people who eat only nine foods, of families with unlimited grocery budgets and those on food stamps. Every struggle is unique, but Sole-Smith shows how all are also products of our modern food culture―and they’re all asking the same question: How did we learn to eat this way? Why is it so hard to feel good about food? And how can we make it better?]]>
304 Virginia Sole-Smith 1250120985 Jaime 4 3.96 2018 The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America
author: Virginia Sole-Smith
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2023, audiobook, non-fiction, self-improvement
review:

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Dare to Lead 40109367 In her #1 NYT bestsellers, BrenĂ© Brown taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers and culture shifters, she’s showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead.

Leadership is not about titles, status and power over people. Leaders are people who hold themselves accountable for recognising the potential in people and ideas, and developing that potential. This is a book for everyone who is ready to choose courage over comfort, make a difference and lead.

When we dare to lead, we don't pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don't see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it and work to align authority and accountability. We don't avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into the vulnerability that’s necessary to do good work.

But daring leadership in a culture that's defined by scarcity, fear and uncertainty requires building courage skills, which are uniquely human. The irony is that we're choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the same time we're scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines can't do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection and courage to start.

Brené Brown spent the past two decades researching the emotions that give meaning to our lives. Over the past seven years, she found that leaders in organisations ranging from small entrepreneurial start-ups and family-owned businesses to non-profits, civic organisations and Fortune 50 companies, are asking the same questions:

How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders? And, how do you embed the value of courage in your culture?

Dare to Lead answers these questions and gives us actionable strategies and real examples from her new research-based, courage-building programme.

BrenĂ© writes, ‘One of the most important findings of my career is that courage can be taught, developed and measured. Courage is a collection of four skill sets supported by twenty-eight behaviours. All it requires is a commitment to doing bold work, having tough conversations and showing up with our whole hearts. Easy? No. Choosing courage over comfort is not easy. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and work. It's why we're here.’]]>
332 Brené Brown 147356252X Jaime 3 4.17 2018 Dare to Lead
author: Brené Brown
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2023, audiobook, non-fiction, self-improvement
review:

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<![CDATA[How to Keep House While Drowning]]> 60139504 How to Keep House While Drowning will introduce you to six life-changing principles that will revolutionize the way you approach home care—without endless to-do lists. Presented in 31 daily thoughts, this compassionate guide will help you begin to get free of the shame and anxiety you feel over home care.

Inside you will learn:
· How to shift your perspective of care tasks from moral to functional;
· How to stop negative self-talk and shame around care tasks;
· How to give yourself permission to rest, even when things aren’t finished;
· How to motivate yourself to care for your space.]]>
151 K.C. Davis 166800285X Jaime 4 4.22 2022 How to Keep House While Drowning
author: K.C. Davis
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2023, audiobook, non-fiction, self-improvement
review:

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Yearbook 44678031
Yearbook is a collection of true stories that I desperately hope are just funny at worst, and life-changingly amazing at best. (I understand that it’s likely the former, which is a fancy “bookâ€� way of saying “the first one.â€�)

I talk about my grandparents, doing stand-up comedy as a teenager, bar mitzvahs, and Jewish summer camp, and tell way more stories about doing drugs than my mother would like. I also talk about some of my adventures in Los Angeles, and surely say things about other famous people that will create a wildly awkward conversation for me at a party one day.

I hope you enjoy the book should you buy it, and if you don’t enjoy it, I’m sorry. If you ever see me on the street and explain the situation, I’ll do my best to make it up to you.]]>
260 Seth Rogen 1984825402 Jaime 3 4.15 2021 Yearbook
author: Seth Rogen
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2022, audiobook, biography-memoir, non-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer]]> 41552367 JAMES BEARD AWARD WINNER
IACP Cookbook Award nominee

In the face of apocalyptic climate change, a former fisherman shares a bold and hopeful new vision for saving the planet: farming the ocean. Here Bren Smith--pioneer of regenerative ocean agriculture--introduces the world to a groundbreaking solution to the global climate crisis.

A genre-defining "climate memoir," Eat Like a Fish interweaves Smith's own life--from sailing the high seas aboard commercial fishing trawlers to developing new forms of ocean farming to surfing the frontiers of the food movement--with actionable food policy and practical advice on ocean farming. Written with the humor and swagger of a fisherman telling a late-night tale, it is a powerful story of environmental renewal, and a must-read guide to saving our oceans, feeding the world, and--by creating new jobs up and down the coasts--putting working class Americans back to work.]]>
320 Bren Smith 0451494547 Jaime 5 4.39 2019 Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer
author: Bren Smith
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2023, audiobook, biography-memoir, non-fiction
review:

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Spare 62296528
For Harry, this is that story at last.

Before losing his mother, twelve-year-old Prince Harry was known as the carefree one, the happy-go-lucky Spare to the more serious Heir. Grief changed everything. He struggled at school, struggled with anger, with loneliness—and, because he blamed the press for his mother’s death, he struggled to accept life in the spotlight.

At twenty-one, he joined the British Army. The discipline gave him structure, and two combat tours made him a hero at home. But he soon felt more lost than ever, suffering from post-traumatic stress and prone to crippling panic attacks. Above all, he couldn’t find true love.

Then he met Meghan. The world was swept away by the couple’s cinematic romance and rejoiced in their fairy-tale wedding. But from the beginning, Harry and Meghan were preyed upon by the press, subjected to waves of abuse, racism, and lies. Watching his wife suffer, their safety and mental health at risk, Harry saw no other way to prevent the tragedy of history repeating itself but to flee his mother country. Over the centuries, leaving the Royal Family was an act few had dared. The last to try, in fact, had been his mother. . . .

For the first time, Prince Harry tells his own story, chronicling his journey with raw, unflinching honesty. A landmark publication, Spare is full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.]]>
410 Prince Harry 0593593804 Jaime 0 3.78 2023 Spare
author: Prince Harry
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2023, audiobook, biography-memoir, non-fiction
review:

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Greenlights 52838315 From the Academy Award¼–winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.

I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.

Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.â€�

So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.

Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.

It’s a love letter. To life.

It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights - and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.

Good luck.]]>
289 Matthew McConaughey 0593139135 Jaime 4 2023, audiobook, non-fiction 4.21 2020 Greenlights
author: Matthew McConaughey
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2023, audiobook, non-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside]]> 57936600
Nick Offerman has always felt a particular affection for the Land of the Free—not just for the people and their purported ideals but to the actual land the bedrock, the topsoil, and everything inÌębetween that generates the health of your local watershed. In his new book,ÌęNick takes a humorous, inspiring, and elucidating trip to America's trails, farms, and frontier to examine the people who inhabit the land, what that has meant to them and us, and to the landÌęitself, both historically and currently.ÌęÌę

In 2018, Wendell Berry posed a question to Nick, a query that planted the seed of this book, sending Nick on two memorable journeys with pals—a hiking trip to Glacier National Park with his friends Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders, as well as an extended visit to his friend JamesÌęRebanks, the author of The Shepherd's Life and English Pastoral . He followed that up with anÌęexcursionÌęthat could only have come about in 2020—Nick and his wife, MeganÌęMullally, bought an Airstream trailer to drive across (several of) the United States. These three quests inspired someÌę“deep-ish" thinking from Nick, about the history andÌęphilosophyÌęof our relationship with nature in our national parks, in our farming, and in our backyards; what we mean when we talk about conservation; and the importance of outdoor recreation, all subjects very close to Nick's heart.Ìę

With witty, heartwarming stories and a keen insight into the human problems we all confront, this is both a ramble throughÌęand celebration of the land we all love.]]>
352 Nick Offerman 1101984694 Jaime 3 2022, audiobook, non-fiction
At times I did find certain things repetitive. Example, he goes on about Aldo Leopold in one part and in the next part he goes on to explain who he is (after we already heard that in the previous part). This happened a few times and was slightly annoying. Other than that, I highly enjoyed all the 90s jokes and references.

Worth the read (or in this case, listen). ]]>
3.69 2021 Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside
author: Nick Offerman
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/10/17
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2022, audiobook, non-fiction
review:
I enjoyed this book. Offerman is funny and I liked listening to him narrate the audiobook.

At times I did find certain things repetitive. Example, he goes on about Aldo Leopold in one part and in the next part he goes on to explain who he is (after we already heard that in the previous part). This happened a few times and was slightly annoying. Other than that, I highly enjoyed all the 90s jokes and references.

Worth the read (or in this case, listen).
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<![CDATA[How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question]]> 58484901 From the creator of The Good Place and the cocreator of Parks and Recreation, a hilarious, thought-provoking guide to living an ethical life, drawing on 2,500 years of deep thinking from around the world.

Most people think of themselves as “good,â€� but it’s not always easy to determine what’s “goodâ€� or “bad”—especially in a world filled with complicated choices and pitfalls and booby traps and bad advice. Fortunately, many smart philosophers have been pondering this conundrum for millennia and they have guidance for us. With bright wit and deep insight, How to Be Perfect explains concepts like deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, and more so we can sound cool at parties and become better people.

Schur starts off with easy ethical questions like “Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?â€� (No.) and works his way up to the most complex moral issues we all face. Such as: Can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people? How much money should I give to charity? Why bother being good at all when there are no consequences for being bad? And much more. By the time the book is done, we’ll know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. We will be perfect, and all our friends will be jealous. OK, not quite. Instead, we’ll gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day.]]>
304 Michael Schur 1982159316 Jaime 3 2023, non-fiction 4.13 2022 How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question
author: Michael Schur
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2023, non-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[Old-Fashioned on Purpose: A Homesteading Manifesto—Rediscovering Simplicity and Meaning Through the Lost Arts of the Past such as Gardening, Canning and More]]> 81360783 "In a world where so many of us are craving a life of simplicity and meaning,ÌęOld-Fashioned on PurposeÌęgives you the roadmap to rediscovering what really matters."Ìę—Hal Elrod,Ìębestselling author ofÌęThe Miracle Morning Ìę

With a foreword from singer, songwriter, andÌęNew York Times bestselling author Rory Feek

Creator ofÌęThe Prairie HomesteadÌęblog and theÌęOld-Fashioned On Purpose podcast Jill Winger reveals that the secrets to finding happiness today is by turning to the lost arts of the past
Ìę
When the pandemic hit in 2020, flour and vegetable seeds flew off the shelves. But homesteader and entrepreneur Jill Winger believes these longings for sourdough bread and fresh veggies are more than a trend.Ìę
Ìę
As our society races toward progress, we’ve left something important behind. We are more connectedÌę than ever before, yet we’re still feeling unfulfilled. InÌęOld-Fashioned on Purpose, Winger shows how simplifying our lives and adopting retro skills such as gardening and handiwork can be the key to creating the happy and healthy life we’re yearning for. Inside these pages, readers will learn:
Ìę
How to find joy in the kitchen (even if you hate to cook) Proven strategies for growing your own groceries The surprising stress-relievers that can be found in your backyard How to craft a more grounded routine and save money in the process Clever tips and creative DIYs to help you embark on your old-fashioned journey

Ìę
You don’t have to live on a farm to cultivate a simpler life. This inspiring and practical book offers a powerful new sense of purpose, with plenty of tomatoes, chickens, and bread making along the way.
Ìę]]>
401 Jill Winger 0369735900 Jaime 4 4.41 2023 Old-Fashioned on Purpose: A Homesteading Manifesto—Rediscovering Simplicity and Meaning Through the Lost Arts of the Past such as Gardening, Canning and More
author: Jill Winger
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: 2024, non-fiction, self-improvement
review:

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Look Closer 59316367 448 David Ellis 0399170928 Jaime 0 to-read 4.17 2022 Look Closer
author: David Ellis
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1)]]> 26187
A devastating new weapon of destruction.
When world-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to a Swiss research facility to analyze a mysterious symbol -- seared into the chest of a murdered physicist -- he discovers evidence of the unimaginable: the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati...the most powerful underground organization ever to walk the earth. The Illuminati has now surfaced to carry out the final phase of its legendary vendetta against its most hated enemy -- the Catholic Church.

Langdon's worst fears are confirmed on the eve of the Vatican's holy conclave, when a messenger of the Illuminati announces they have hidden an unstoppable time bomb at the very heart of Vatican City. With the countdown under way, Langdon jets to Rome to join forces with Vittoria Vetra, a beautiful and mysterious Italian scientist, to assist the Vatican in a desperate bid for survival.
Embarking on a frantic hunt through sealed crypts, dangerous catacombs, deserted cathedrals, and even the most secretive vault on earth, Langdon and Vetra follow a 400-year-old trail of ancient symbols that snakes across Rome toward the long-forgotten Illuminati lair...a clandestine location that contains the only hope for Vatican salvation.

An explosive international thriller, Angels & Demons careens from enlightening epiphanies to dark truths as the battle between science and religion turns to war.]]>
572 Dan Brown Jaime 0 to-read, own 3.90 2000 Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1)
author: Dan Brown
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/21
shelves: to-read, own
review:

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<![CDATA[My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories]]> 195293285
"There is no greater authority on Jewish cooking than Joan Nathan." —Michael Solomonov, James Beard award-winning chef and author of Zahav

Before hummus was available in every grocery store—before shakshuka was a dish on every brunch menu—Joan Nathan taught home cooks how and why they should make these now-beloved staples themselves. Here, in her most personal book yet, the beloved authority on global Jewish cuisine uses recipes looks back at her own family’s historyâ€� their arrival in America from Germany; her childhood in postwar New York and Rhode Island; her years in Paris, New York, Israel, and Washington, DC. Nathan shares her story—of marriage, motherhood, and a career as a food writer; of a life well-lived and centered around meals—and she punctuates it with all the foods she has come to love.

With over 100 recipes from roast chicken to rugelach, from matzoh ball soup to challah and brisket, here are updated versions of her favorites. But here too are new Salmon with Preserved Lemon and Za’atar; Fragrant Spiced Chicken with Rice, Eggplant, Peppers, and Zucchini; Mahammar (a Syrian pepper, pomegranate and walnut dip); Moroccan Chicken with Almonds, Cinnamon and Couscous; Joan’s version of the perfect Black and White Cookies.

This is a treasury of recipes and stories—and an invitation to a seat at Nathan's table.]]>
464 Joan Nathan 052565898X Jaime 0 to-read 4.16 My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories
author: Joan Nathan
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/21
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Take a Chance!: 101 Entrepreneurial Lessons for Making It Big]]> 205789163 You’re An Entrepreneur. You’ve either started or are thinking of starting your own business. Or you’re all in and need to take a chance. Then this book is for you.

Starting a business is brutal. 70% of businesses fail after five years and only 25% of businesses make it to 15 years or more. What if you had a crystal ball to guide you through your business cycle so you didn’t make the same mistakes as everyone else?

Larry Gaynor is a serial beauty entrepreneur still running TNG Worldwide since 1985. He has dealt with the biggest companies including L’OrĂ©al, Unilever, Amazon and Walmart. As a retailer, he had to take a chance and decide to shut down his $5 million store and become a wholesale distributor. As a distributor, he was cut-off more than ten times and threatened to sell his company or else. As a manufacturer, he had to take a chance and risk everything during the pandemic.

Take A Chance! is Gaynor’s fascinating journey as an entrepreneur spanning more than 50 years. Key take-aways include Gallup-training that changed TNG’s culture; the pivot to manufacturing from being a lowly distributor; the importance of being an Amazon Top 200 Reseller; and the rise and fall of the pro beauty business. Along the way, Gaynor shares his top 101 entrepreneurial lessons for making it big.]]>
416 Larry Gaynor Jaime 0 to-read 4.03 Take a Chance!: 101 Entrepreneurial Lessons for Making It Big
author: Larry Gaynor
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War]]> 177772411 Every day the news is filled with stories of extreme weather that threatens our cities, our health, our tornadoes wiping out whole communities; droughts that ignite catastrophic wildfires; storms flooding roads and destroying infrastructure; rising water levels that jeopardize entire nations; new climate-related diseases that threaten our health. Just as World War II raised an existential threat that united Americans in a common cause, the dangers of climate change are similarly challenging all of our previously held notions of the future—and our only hope, as Tom Steyer sees it, is to unite together to take action in a collective movement akin to a war effort.Ìę Steyer has been on the forefront of the climate war for well over a decade, leveraging his investment expertise, business knowledge, and community-organizing skills to support sustainable climate solutions. In this accessible book—aimed at reaching everyone from Wall Street investors to college students—he explains how capitalism is an effective tool for scaling climate progress, offers his candid take on fossil fuel enablers, and explains why immediate action on the climate front will not only be our key to a healthy and viable future but also an investment in the future of our economy. Steyer tells his own story of coming to understand the urgency of climate action, and, in short, interstitial chapters, he showcases the inspiring work of people on the front lines, whose innovative approaches provide hope for meaningful change. The urgency to act is imperative—and time is running out—and yet Steyer feels confident that we will win this war, precisely because there has never before been a moment more necessary or more rewarding to come together to secure a healthy future for ourselves and the planet.]]> 280 Tom Steyer 1954118643 Jaime 0 to-read 3.84 Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War
author: Tom Steyer
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.84
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/12
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The Gargoyle 7617799 535 Andrew Davidson 0307476235 Jaime 0 to-read, own 3.91 2008 The Gargoyle
author: Andrew Davidson
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/08
shelves: to-read, own
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<![CDATA[The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest]]> 18989736 The Blue Zones, longevity expert and National Geographic Explorer Dan Buettner has discovered a new Blue Zone and launched a major public health initiative to transform cities based on principles from this book. The Blue Zones, Second Edition is completely updated and expands his bestselling classic on longevity, drawing on his research from extraordinarily long-lived communities--Blue Zones--around the globe to highlight the lifestyle, diet, outlook, and stress-coping practices that will add years to your life and life to your years.

The new Blue Zone is Ikaria, Greece, where strong, sweet wine, family, and a Mediterranean diet all play a role in longer life. Also new in this book is a reading group guide, designed for groups to read about, discuss, and implement many of the simple changes advocated for better health.

A long, healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits. If you adopt the right lifestyle, experts say, chances are you may live up to a decade longer. Buettner has led teams of researchers across the globe--from Costa Rica to Sardinia, Italy, to Okinawa, Japan and beyond--to uncover the secrets of Blue Zones. He found that the recipe for longevity is deeply intertwined with community, lifestyle, and spirituality. People live longer and healthier by embracing a few simple but powerful habits, and by creating the right community around themselves. In The Blue Zones, Second Edition, Buettner has blended his lifestyle formula with the latest longevity research to inspire lasting, behavioral change and add years to your life.

Region by region, Buettner reveals the "secrets" of longevity through stories of his travels and interviews with some of the most remarkable--and happily long-living people on the planet. It's not coincidence that the way they eat, interact with each other, shed stress, heal themselves, avoid disease, and view their world yield them more good years of life. Buettner's easy to follow "best practices" and list of healthy lifestyle choices from the Blue Zones will empower readers to live longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives.]]>
340 Dan Buettner Jaime 0 currently-reading 4.28 2008 The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest
author: Dan Buettner
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/24
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating]]> 46140027 How to reclaim your time, money, health, and happiness in our toxic diet culture by a registered dietitian, journalist, and host of the "Food Psych" podcast

68 percent of Americans have dieted at some point in their lives. But upwards of 90% of people who intentionally lose weight gain it back within five years. And as many as 66% of people who embark on weight-loss efforts end up gaining more weight than they lost. If dieting is so clearly ineffective, why are we so obsessed with it?
The culprit is diet culture, a system of beliefs that equates thinness to health and moral virtue, promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, and demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others. It's sexist, racist, and classist, yet this way of thinking about food and bodies is so embedded in the fabric of our society that it can be hard to recognize. It masquerades as health, wellness, and fitness, and for some, it is all-consuming.
In Anti-Diet, Christy Harrison takes on diet culture and the multi-billion-dollar industries that profit from it, exposing all the ways it robs people of their time, money, health, and happiness. It will turn what you think you know about health and wellness upside down, as Harrison explores the history of diet culture, how it's infiltrated the health and wellness world, how to recognize it in all its sneaky forms, and how letting go of efforts to lose weight or eat "perfectly" actually helps to improve people's health -- no matter their size. Drawing on scientific research, personal experience, and stories from patients and colleagues, Anti-Diet provides a radical alternative to diet culture, and helps readers reclaim their bodies, minds, and lives so they can focus on the things that truly matter. ]]>
337 Christy Harrison 0316420360 Jaime 0 currently-reading 4.30 2019 Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating
author: Christy Harrison
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/24
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States]]> 40121985 A pathbreaking history of the United States' overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire

We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an "empire," exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories--the islands, atolls, and archipelagos--this country has governed and inhabited?

In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century's most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress.

In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of space. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.]]>
513 Daniel Immerwahr 0374172145 Jaime 0 to-read 4.47 2019 How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
author: Daniel Immerwahr
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/27
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<![CDATA[Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead]]> 16089813 Researcher and thought leader Dr. Brené Brown offers a powerful new vision that encourages us to dare greatly: to embrace vulnerability and imperfection, to live wholeheartedly, and to courageously engage in our lives.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.â€� —Theodore Roosevelt

Every day we experience the uncertainty, risks, and emotional exposure that define what it means to be vulnerable, or to dare greatly. Whether the arena is a new relationship, an important meeting, our creative process, or a difficult family conversation, we must find the courage to walk into vulnerability and engage with our whole hearts.

In Daring Greatly, Dr. Brown challenges everything we think we know about vulnerability. Based on twelve years of research, she argues that vulnerability is not weakness, but rather our clearest path to courage, engagement, and meaningful connection. The book that Dr. Brown’s many fans have been waiting for, Daring Greatly will spark a new spirit of truth—and trust—in our organizations, families, schools, and communities.]]>
290 Brené Brown 1101594993 Jaime 3 4.37 2012 Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
author: Brené Brown
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/21
date added: 2023/06/21
shelves: 2023, audiobook, non-fiction, self-improvement
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<![CDATA[Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen]]> 60652503
Drawing on insights from ten years spent thinking through cooking, she explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative intimacies of shared meals. Playfully dissolving the boundaries between abstract intellect and bodily pleasure, domesticity and politics, Johnson awakens us to the richness of cooking as a means of experiencing the self and the world - and to the revolutionary potential of the small fires burning in every kitchen.]]>
192 Rebecca May Johnson 1911590480 Jaime 0 to-read 3.71 Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen
author: Rebecca May Johnson
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.71
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date added: 2023/06/19
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Pomegranate 61273768
Ranita Atwater is “getting short.â€�

She is almost done with her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center. With three years of sobriety, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children.

My name is Ranita, and I’m an addict, she has said again and again at recovery meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become? As she claims the story housed within her pomegranate-like heart, she is determined to confront the weight of the past and discover what might lie beyond mere survival.

Ranita is regaining her freedom, but she’s leaving behind her lover Maxine, who has inspired her to imagine herself and the world differently. Now she must steer clear of the temptations that have pulled her down, while atoning for her missteps and facing old wounds. With a fierce, smart, and sometimes funny voice, Ranita reveals how rocky and winding the path to wellness is for a Black woman, even as she draws on family, memory, faith, and love in order to choose life.

Perfect or fans of Jesmyn Ward and Yaa Gyasi, Pomegranate is a complex portrayal of queer Black womanhood and marginalization in America: a story of loss, healing, redemption, and strength. In lyrical and precise prose, Helen Elaine Lee paints a humane and unflinching portrait of the devastating effects of incarceration and addiction, and of one woman’s determination to tell her story.]]>
352 Helen Elaine Lee 1982171898 Jaime 4 2023, book-club, fiction 3.96 2023 Pomegranate
author: Helen Elaine Lee
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/18
date added: 2023/06/18
shelves: 2023, book-club, fiction
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<![CDATA[The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times]]> 61355265 #1 NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER - ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2022 - In an inspiring follow-up to her critically acclaimed, #1 bestselling memoir Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today's highly uncertain world.

There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life's big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering the questions many of us wrestle with: How do we build enduring and honest relationships? How can we discover strength and community inside our differences? What tools do we use to address feelings of self-doubt or helplessness? What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much?

Michelle Obama offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress. Drawing from her experiences as a mother, daughter, spouse, friend, and First Lady, she shares the habits and principles she has developed to successfully adapt to change and overcome various obstacles--the earned wisdom that helps her continue to "become." She details her most valuable practices, like "starting kind," "going high," and assembling a "kitchen table" of trusted friends and mentors. With trademark humor, candor, and compassion, she also explores issues connected to race, gender, and visibility, encouraging readers to work through fear, find strength in community, and live with boldness.

"When we are able to recognize our own light, we become empowered to use it," writes Michelle Obama. A rewarding blend of powerful stories and profound advice that will ignite conversation, The Light We Carry inspires readers to examine their own lives, identify their sources of gladness, and connect meaningfully in a turbulent world.]]>
319 Michelle Obama 0593237463 Jaime 0 to-read 4.26 2022 The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
author: Michelle Obama
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/17
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The Exchange (The Firm, #2) 123285511 #1 New York Times bestselling author John Grisham delivers high-flying international suspense in a stunning new legal thriller that marks the return of Mitch McDeere, the brilliant hero of The Firm.

What became of Mitch and Abby McDeere after they exposed the crimes of Memphis law firm Bendini, Lambert & Locke and fled the country? The answer is in The Exchange, the riveting sequel to The Firm, the blockbuster thrillerÌęthat launched the careerÌęof America’s favorite storyteller. It is now fifteen years later, and Mitch and Abby are living in Manhattan, where Mitch is a partner at the largest law firmÌęin the world. When a mentor in Rome asks him for a favor that will take him far from home, Mitch finds himself at the center of a sinister plot that has worldwideÌęimplications—and once again endangers his colleagues, friends, and family. Mitch has becomeÌęa master at staying one step ahead of his adversaries, but this time there’s nowhereÌęto hide.]]>
338 John Grisham 0385548958 Jaime 0 to-read 3.39 2023 The Exchange (The Firm, #2)
author: John Grisham
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/17
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Crying in H Mart 75668238
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band â€� and meeting the man who would become her husband â€� her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.

It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.]]>
239 Michelle Zauner 1984898957 Jaime 0 to-read 4.20 2021 Crying in H Mart
author: Michelle Zauner
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/17
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Daisy Jones & the Six 63236505
Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she's pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.]]>
375 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0593598423 Jaime 0 to-read 4.18 2019 Daisy Jones & the Six
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Davenports (The Davenports, #1)]]> 58469344
There is Olivia, the beautiful elder Davenport daughter, ready to do her duty by getting married. . . until she meets the charismatic civil rights leader Washington DeWight and sparks fly. The younger daughter, Helen, is more interested in fixing cars than falling in love—unless it's with her sister's suitor. Amy-Rose, the childhood friend turned maid to the Davenport sisters, dreams of opening her own business—and marrying the one man she could never be with, Olivia and Helen's brother, John. But Olivia's best friend, Ruby, also has her sights set on John Davenport, though she can't seem to keep his interest . . . until family pressure has her scheming to win his heart, just as someone else wins hers.

The first book in a breathless new series, The Davenports offers a glimpse into a period of African American history often overlooked, while delivering a totally escapist, swoon-worthy read. Inspired by the real-life story of C.R. Patterson and his family, it's the tale of four determined and passionate young Black women discovering the courage to steer their own path in life—and love.]]>
384 Krystal Marquis 0593463331 Jaime 0 to-read 3.63 2023 The Davenports (The Davenports, #1)
author: Krystal Marquis
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/15
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Sisters of the Lost Nation 61686006 A young Native girl's hunt for answers about the women mysteriously disappearing from her tribe's reservation lead her to delve into the myths and stories of her people, all while being haunted herself, in this atmospheric and stunningly poignant debut.

Anna Horn is always looking over her shoulder. For the bullies who torment her, for the entitled visitors at the reservation's casino...and for the nameless, disembodied entity that stalks her every step--an ancient tribal myth come-to-life, one that's intent on devouring her whole.

With strange and sinister happenings occurring around the casino, Anna starts to suspect that not all the horrors on the reservation are old. As girls begin to go missing and the tribe scrambles to find answers, Anna struggles with her place on the rez, desperately searching for the key she's sure lies in the legends of her tribe's past.

When Anna's own little sister also disappears, she'll do anything to bring Grace home. But the demons plaguing the reservation--both ancient and new--are strong, and sometimes, it's the stories that never get told that are the most important.

Part gripping thriller and part mythological horror, author Nick Medina spins an incisive and timely novel of life as an outcast, the cost of forgetting tradition, and the courage it takes to become who you were always meant to be.]]>
338 Nick Medina 0593546857 Jaime 0 to-read 3.85 2023 Sisters of the Lost Nation
author: Nick Medina
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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Looking Glass Sound 60784412 Looking Glass Sound is the newest twisty psychological horror novel from Catriona Ward, the internationally bestselling author of The Last House on Needless Street and Sundial.

In a lonely cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow begins the last book he will ever write. It is the story of his childhood summer companions and the killer that stalked the small New England town. Of the body they found, and the horror of that discovery echoing down the decades. And of Sky, Wilder’s one-time best friend, who stole his unfinished memoir and turned it into a lurid bestselling novel, Looking Glass Sound.

But as Wilder writes, the lines between memory and fiction blur. He fears he’s losing his grip on reality when he finds notes hidden around the cottage written in Sky’s signature green ink.

Catriona Ward delivers another mind-bending and cleverly crafted tale about one man’s struggle to come to terms with the terrors of his pastâ€� before it’s too late.]]>
342 Catriona Ward 1250860024 Jaime 0 to-read 3.45 2023 Looking Glass Sound
author: Catriona Ward
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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Clytemnestra 61361681 For fans of Madeline Miller's Circe, a stunning debut following Clytemnestra, the most notorious villainess of the ancient world and the events that forged her into the legendary queen.

As for queens, they are either hated or forgotten. She already knows which option suits her best...

You were born to a king, but you marry a tyrant. You stand by helplessly as he sacrifices your child to placate the gods. You watch him wage war on a foreign shore, and you comfort yourself with violent thoughts of your own. Because this was not the first offence against you. This was not the life you ever deserved. And this will not be your undoing. Slowly, you plot.

But when your husband returns in triumph, you become a woman with a choice.

Acceptance or vengeance, infamy follows both. So, you bide your time and force the gods' hands in the game of retribution. For you understood something long ago that the others never did.

If power isn't given to you, you have to take it for yourself.

A blazing novel set in the world of Ancient Greece for fans of Jennifer Saint and Natalie Haynes, this is a thrilling tale of power and prophecies, of hatred, love, and of an unforgettable Queen who fiercely dealt out death to those who wronged her.]]>
435 Costanza Casati 1728268230 Jaime 0 to-read 4.22 2023 Clytemnestra
author: Costanza Casati
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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All the Dangerous Things 60784636
Except for the occasional catnap or small blackout where she loses track of time, she hasn’t slept in a year.

Isabelle's entire existence now revolves around finding him, but she knows she can’t go on this way forever. In hopes of jarring loose a new witness or buried clue, she agrees to be interviewed by a true-crime podcaster—but his interest in Isabelle's past makes her nervous. His incessant questioning paired with her severe insomnia has brought up uncomfortable memories from her own childhood, making Isabelle start to doubt her recollection of the night of Mason’s disappearance, as well as second-guess who she can trust... including herself. But she is determined to figure out the truth no matter where it leads.]]>
326 Stacy Willingham 1250803853 Jaime 0 to-read 4.04 2023 All the Dangerous Things
author: Stacy Willingham
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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What Lies in the Woods 60784373
For decades afterward, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods―no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be.]]>
336 Kate Alice Marshall 1250859883 Jaime 0 to-read 3.93 2023 What Lies in the Woods
author: Kate Alice Marshall
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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Homecoming 61650237
Sixty years later, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for almost twenty years, she now finds herself laid off from her full-time job and struggling to make ends meet. A phone call out of nowhere summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and been raced to the hospital.

Nora has always been a vibrant and strong presence: decisive, encouraging, young despite her years. When Jess visits her in the hospital, she is alarmed to find her grandmother frail and confused. It’s even more alarming to hear from Nora's housekeeper that Nora had been distracted in the weeks before her accident and had fallen on the steps to the attic—the one place Jess was forbidden from playing in when she was small.

At loose ends in Nora's house, Jess does some digging of her own. In Nora's bedroom, she discovers a true crime book, chronicling the police investigation into a long-buried tragedy: the Turner Family Tragedy of Christmas Eve, 1959. It is only when Jess skims through the book that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this once-infamous crime—a crime that has never been resolved satisfactorily. And for a journalist without a story, a cold case might be the best distraction she can findâ€�

An epic novel that spans generations, Homecoming asks what we would do for those we love, and how we protect the lies we tell. It explores the power of motherhood, the corrosive effects of tightly held secrets, and the healing nature of truth. Above all, it is a beguiling and immensely satisfying novel from one of the finest writers working today.]]>
560 Kate Morton Jaime 0 to-read 4.17 2023 Homecoming
author: Kate Morton
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/15
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Homecoming 61683285
Sixty years later, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for almost twenty years, she now finds herself laid off from her full-time job and struggling to make ends meet. A phone call out of nowhere summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and been raced to the hospital.

Nora has always been a vibrant and strong presence: decisive, encouraging, young despite her years. When Jess visits her in the hospital, she is alarmed to find her grandmother frail and confused. It’s even more alarming to hear from Nora's housekeeper that Nora had been distracted in the weeks before her accident and had fallen on the steps to the attic—the one place Jess was forbidden from playing in when she was small.

At loose ends in Nora's house, Jess does some digging of her own. In Nora's bedroom, she discovers a true crime book, chronicling the police investigation into a long-buried tragedy: the Turner Family Tragedy of Christmas Eve, 1959. It is only when Jess skims through the book that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this once-infamous crime—a crime that has never been resolved satisfactorily. And for a journalist without a story, a cold case might be the best distraction she can findâ€�

An epic novel that spans generations, Homecoming asks what we would do for those we love, and how we protect the lies we tell. It explores the power of motherhood, the corrosive effects of tightly held secrets, and the healing nature of truth. Above all, it is a beguiling and immensely satisfying novel from one of the finest writers working today.]]>
547 Kate Morton 0063020890 Jaime 0 to-read 4.00 2023 Homecoming
author: Kate Morton
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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I Will Find You 61392437 David and Cheryl Burroughs are living the dream - married, a beautiful house in the suburbs, a three year old son named Matthew - when tragedy strikes one night in the worst possible way.

David awakes to find himself covered in blood, but not his own - his son's. And while he knows he did not murder his son, the overwhelming evidence against him puts him behind bars indefinitely.

Five years into his imprisonment, Cheryl's sister arrives - and drops a bombshell.

She's come with a photograph that a friend took on vacation at a theme park. The boy in the background seems familiar - and even though David realizes it can't be, he knows it is. It's Matthew, and he's still alive.

David plans a harrowing escape from prison, determined to do what seems impossible - save his son, clear his own name, and discover the real story of what happened that devastating night.]]>
329 Harlan Coben 1538748363 Jaime 0 to-read 4.01 2023 I Will Find You
author: Harlan Coben
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?]]> 61796683 REESE'S BOOK CLUB MAY 2023 PICK

BOOK OF THE MONTH MAY 2023 PICK

A multigenerational saga that traverses the glamour of old Hollywood and the seductive draw of modern-day showbiz

When Kitty Karr Tate, a White icon of the silver screen, dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the St. John sisters, three young, wealthy Black women, it prompts questions. Lots of questions.

A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty’s affairs than deal with the press. But what she discovers in one of Kitty’s journals rocks her world harder than any other brewing scandal could—and between a cheating fiancĂ© and the fallout from a controversial social media post, there are plenty.

The truth behind Kitty's ascent to stardom from her beginnings in the segregated South threatens to expose a web of unexpected family ties, debts owed, and debatable crimes that could, with one pull, unravel the all-American fabric of the St. John sisters and those closest to them.

As Elise digs deeper into Kitty's past, she must also turn the lens upon herself, confronting the gifts and burdens of her own choices and the power that the secrets of the dead hold over the living. Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? is a sprawling page-turner set against the backdrop of the Hollywood machine, an insightful and nuanced look at the inheritances of family, race, and gender—and the choices some women make to break free of them.]]>
416 Crystal Smith Paul 1250815304 Jaime 0 to-read 3.70 2023 Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?
author: Crystal Smith Paul
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/15
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The House Is on Fire 61273814 The author of Florence Adler Swims Forever returns with a masterful work of historical fiction about an incendiary tragedy that shocked a young nation and tore apart a community in a single night—told from the perspectives of four people whose actions during the inferno changed the course of history.

Richmond, Virginia 1811. It’s the height of the winter social season. The General Assembly is in session, and many of Virginia’s gentleman planters, along with their wives and children, have made the long and arduous journey to the capital in hopes of whiling away the darkest days of the year. At the city’s only theater, the Charleston-based Placide & Green Company puts on two plays a night to meet the demand of a populace that’s done looking for enlightenment in a church.

On the night after Christmas, the theater is packed with more than six hundred holiday revelers. In the third-floor boxes, sits newly widowed Sally Henry Campbell, who is glad for any opportunity to relive the happy times she shared with her husband. One floor away, in the colored gallery, Cecily Patterson doesn’t give a whit about the play but is grateful for a four-hour reprieve from a life that has recently gone from bad to worse. Backstage, young stagehand Jack Gibson hopes that, if he can impress the theater’s managers, he’ll be offered a permanent job with the company. And on the other side of town, blacksmith Gilbert Hunt dreams of one day being able to bring his wife to the theater, but he’ll have to buy her freedom first.

When the theater goes up in flames in the middle of the performance, Sally, Cecily, Jack, and Gilbert make a series of split-second decisions that will not only affect their own lives but those of countless others. And in the days following the fire, as news of the disaster spreads across the United States, the paths of these four people will become forever intertwined.

Based on the true story of Richmond’s theater fire, The House Is on Fire offers proof that sometimes, in the midst of great tragedy, we are offered our most precious—and fleeting—chances at redemption.]]>
376 Rachel Beanland 1982186143 Jaime 0 to-read 4.07 2023 The House Is on Fire
author: Rachel Beanland
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/15
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Hang the Moon 61272702
Most folk thought Sallie Kincaid was a nobody who’d amount to nothing. Sallie had other plans.

Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie is her father’s daughter, sharp-witted and resourceful, Eddie is his mother’s son, timid and cerebral. When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out.

Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That’s a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger.

You will fall in love with Sallie Kincaid, a feisty and fearless, terrified and damaged young woman who refuses to be corralled.]]>
368 Jeannette Walls 1501117297 Jaime 0 to-read 3.67 2023 Hang the Moon
author: Jeannette Walls
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/15
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Weyward 60654349 I am a Weyward, and wild inside.

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

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

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

Weaving together the stories of three extraordinary women across five centuries, Emilia Hart's Weyward is an enthralling novel of female resilience and the transformative power of the natural world.]]>
329 Emilia Hart 125028080X Jaime 0 to-read 4.03 2023 Weyward
author: Emilia Hart
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/15
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Birnam Wood 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]>
432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Jaime 0 to-read 3.79 2023 Birnam Wood
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/15
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Hello Beautiful 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sistersâ€� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]>
416 Ann Napolitano Jaime 0 to-read 4.14 2023 Hello Beautiful
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/15
shelves: to-read
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The Left Hand of Darkness 18423 The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants spend most of their time without a gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.]]>
304 Ursula K. Le Guin Jaime 0 to-read 4.11 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/15
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<![CDATA[Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books]]> 4907263 We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true.

For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran.

Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,â€� she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense.

Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice.]]>
384 Azar Nafisi Jaime 3 3.79 2003 Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
author: Azar Nafisi
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2019/05/30
date added: 2023/06/07
shelves:
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<![CDATA[Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less - and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined]]> 30227209
Using captivating stories to illustrate research in psychology and management, Rice University professor Scott Sonenshein examines why some people and organizations succeed with so little while others fail with so much.

People and organizations approach resources in two different ways: “chasingâ€� and “stretching.â€� When chasing, we exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of more. When stretching, we embrace the resources we already have. This frees us to find creative and productive ways to solve problems, innovate, and engage our work and lives more fully.

STRETCH shows why everyone from executives to entrepreneurs, professionals to parents, and athletes to artists perform better with constraints; why seeking too many resources undermines our work and well-being; and why even those with a lot benefit from making the most out of a little.

Drawing from examples in business, education, sports, medicine, and history, Sonenshein teaches a powerful framework of resourcefulness that allows anybody to work and live better.]]>
304 Scott Sonenshein 0062457225 Jaime 3 3.61 Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less -  and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined
author: Scott Sonenshein
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.61
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2021/05/30
date added: 2023/06/07
shelves: non-fiction, read-but-do-not-own, self-improvement, 2021
review:

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Small Mercies 61812308 The acclaimed New York Times bestselling writer returns with a masterpiece to rival Mystic River —an all-consuming tale of revenge, family love, festering hate, and insidious power, set against one of the most tumultuous episodes in Boston’s history.

In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of “Southie,â€� the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.

One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched—asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business.

Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.]]>
303 Dennis Lehane 0062129481 Jaime 4 2023 4.21 2023 Small Mercies
author: Dennis Lehane
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/27
date added: 2023/06/06
shelves: 2023
review:
I really enjoyed this book and it stuck w/ me a few days after reading it. Granted I haven't lived in Southie but I know the area a little bit and I always like when I can feel connected like that in the story. Where I know the streets and places mentioned but I can also learn a little about what was going on in the area at that time. Would definitely recommend this book.
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<![CDATA[Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book]]> 48932367 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and pioneering journalist, an expansive look at how history has been shaped by humanity’s appetite for food, farmland, and the money behind it all—and how a better future is within reach.

The story of humankind is usually told as one of technological innovation and economic influence—of arrowheads and atomic bombs, settlers and stock markets. But behind it all, there is an even more fundamental driver: Food.

In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, trusted food authority Mark Bittman offers a panoramic view of how the frenzy for food has driven human history to some of its most catastrophic moments, from slavery and colonialism to famine and genocide—and to our current moment, wherein Big Food exacerbates climate change, plunders our planet, and sickens its people. Even still, Bittman refuses to concede that the battle is lost, pointing to activists, workers, and governments around the world who are choosing well-being over corporate greed and gluttony, and fighting to free society from Big Food’s grip.

Sweeping, impassioned, and ultimately full of hope, Animal, Vegetable, Junk reveals not only how food has shaped our past, but also how we can transform it to reclaim our future.]]>
384 Mark Bittman 1328974626 Jaime 3 audiobook, 2022, 2023 3.89 2021 Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book
author: Mark Bittman
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/06
date added: 2023/06/06
shelves: audiobook, 2022, 2023
review:
All in all this book was a good listen. Gave me incite to the earlier days of our food system which I enjoyed. I didn't necessarily agree w/ his stance on baby formula (some women need to use it and shouldn't be shamed for it). I would recommend this to someone that wants to learn more about our (currently broken) food system but some things I would take with a grain of salt.
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<![CDATA[Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain]]> 62587676 Ìę
When Andrew McCarthy's eldest son began to take his first steps into adulthood, McCarthy found himself wishing time would slow down. Looking to create a more meaningful connection with Sam before he fled the nest, as well as recreate his own life-altering journey decades before, McCarthy decided the two of them should set out on a trek like few 500 miles across Spain's Camino de Santiago.
Ìę
Over the course of the journey, the pair traversed an unforgiving landscape, having more honest conversations in five weeks than they'd had in the preceding two decades. ÌęDiscussions of divorce, the trauma of school, McCarthy's difficult relationship with his own father, fame, and Flaming Hot Cheetos threatened to either derail their relationship or cement it. Ìę Walking With Sam Ìęcaptures this intimate, candid and hopeful expedition as the father son duo travel across the country and towards one another.]]>
256 Andrew McCarthy 1538709201 Jaime 0 currently-reading, 2023 3.97 2023 Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain
author: Andrew McCarthy
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/01
shelves: currently-reading, 2023
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The Bookbinder 63946934 A young British woman working in a book bindery gets a chance to pursue knowledge and love when World War I upends her life in this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club pick The Dictionary of Lost Words.

“Williams spins an immersive and compelling tale, sweeping us back to the Oxford she painted so expertly in The Dictionary of Lost Words.”—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife

It is 1914, and as the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, women must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who live on a narrow boat in Oxford and work in the bindery at the university press.

Ambitious, intelligent Peggy has been told for most of her life that her job is to bind the books, not read them—but as she folds and gathers pages, her mind wanders to the opposite side of Walton Street, where the female students of Oxford’s Somerville College have a whole library at their fingertips. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has: to spend her days folding the pages of books in the company of the other bindery girls. She is extraordinary but vulnerable, and Peggy feels compelled to watch over her.

Then refugees arrive from the war-torn cities of Belgium, sending ripples through the Oxford community and the sistersâ€� lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can educate herself and use her intellect, not just her hands. But as war and illness reshape her world, her love for a Belgian soldier—and the responsibility that comes with it—threaten to hold her back.

The Bookbinder is a story about knowledge—who creates it, who can access it, and what truths get lost in the process. Much as she did in the international bestseller The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams thoughtfully explores another rarely seen slice of history through women’s eyes.]]>
437 Pip Williams 0593600444 Jaime 0 to-read 3.94 2023 The Bookbinder
author: Pip Williams
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/30
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The Housekeepers 62197595 On the night of London's grandest ball, a bold group of women launches a daring revenge heist against Mayfair society.

Mrs. King is no ordinary housekeeper. Born into a world of con artists and thieves, she’s made herself respectable, running the grandest home in Mayfair. The place is packed with treasures, a glittering symbol of wealth and power, but dark secrets lurk in the shadows. When Mrs. King is suddenly dismissed from her position, she recruits an eclectic group of women to join her in revenge: A black-market queen out to settle her scores; an actress desperate for a magnificent part; a seamstress dreaming of a better life; and Mrs. King’s predecessor, with her own desire for vengeance.]]>
365 Alex Hay 1525805002 Jaime 0 to-read 3.26 2023 The Housekeepers
author: Alex Hay
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/30
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<![CDATA[Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman]]> 59808451 Madly Deeply is a rare invitation into the mind of Alan Rickman—one of the most magnetic, beloved performers of our time.

From his breakout role in Die Hard to his outstanding, multifaceted performances in the Harry Potter films, Galaxy Quest, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and more, Alan Rickman cemented his legacy as a world-class actor. His air of dignity, his sonorous voice, and the knowing wit he brought to each role continue to captivate audiences today.

But Rickman’s ability to breathe life into projects wasn't confined to just his performances. As you'll find, Rickman's diaries detail the extraordinary and the ordinary, flitting between worldly and witty and gossipy, while remaining utterly candid throughout. He takes us inside his home, on trips with friends across the globe, and on the sets of films and plays ranging from Sense and Sensibility, to NoĂ«l Coward's Private Lives, to the final film he directed, A Little Chaos.

Running from 1993 to his death in 2016, the diaries provide singular insight into Rickman's public and private life. Reading them is like listening to Rickman chatting to a close companion. Meet Rickman the consummate professional actor, but also the friend, the traveler, the fan, the director, the enthusiast; in short, the man beyond the icon.

Madly, Deeply features a photo insert, a foreword by Emma Thompson, and an afterword by Rima Horton.]]>
469 Alan Rickman 1250847958 Jaime 0 to-read 3.54 2022 Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman
author: Alan Rickman
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/08
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Becoming 38746485
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.]]>
426 Michelle Obama 1524763136 Jaime 4 2022 4.42 2018 Becoming
author: Michelle Obama
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2018
rating: 4
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date added: 2022/10/17
shelves: 2022
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The Seed Keeper 52639051 A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakota family's struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.

Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakota people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato--where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they've inherited.

On a winter's day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband's farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron--women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools.

Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.]]>
372 Diane Wilson 1571311378 Jaime 0 to-read 4.26 2021 The Seed Keeper
author: Diane Wilson
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/02/10
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[Black, White, and The Grey: The Story of an Unexpected Friendship and a Beloved Restaurant]]> 56563411

In this dual memoir, Mashama Bailey and John O. Morisano take turns telling how they went from tentative business partners to dear friends while turning a dilapidated formerly segregated Greyhound bus station into The Grey, now one of the most celebrated restaurants in the country. Recounting the trying process of building their restaurant business, they examine their most painful and joyous times, revealing how they came to understand their differences, recognize their biases, and continuously challenge themselves and each other to be better.

Through it all, Bailey and Morisano display the uncommon vulnerability, humor, and humanity that anchor their relationship, showing how two citizens commit to playing their own small part in advancing equality against a backdrop of racism.]]>
304 Mashama Bailey 1984856200 Jaime 0 to-read 3.99 2021 Black, White, and The Grey: The Story of an Unexpected Friendship and a Beloved Restaurant
author: Mashama Bailey
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/23
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<![CDATA[The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat]]> 56197437
“As a species, we’re hardwired to obsess over food,â€� Matt Siegel explains as he sets out “to uncover the hidden side of everything we put in our mouths.â€� Siegel also probes subjects ranging from the myths—and realities—of food asÌęaphrodisiac, toÌęhowÌęone of the rarestÌęand most exoticÌęspices in all the world (vanilla)Ìębecame a synonym for uninspired sexual proclivities, to the role of food in fairy- and morality tales.]]>
288 Matt Siegel 0062973215 Jaime 0 to-read 3.63 2021 The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat
author: Matt Siegel
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/23
shelves: to-read
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The Delicacy 55405296
Tulip and his brother Rowan have left the simple comforts of their remote Scottish island with a to grow succulent, organic vegetables in an idyllic market garden, and to open a restaurant serving these wholesome culinary delights to the busy sprawl of London.

The world of fine dining seems impossibly competitive... until they discover a deliriously scrumptious new species of mushroom. The dish brings diners in droves, catapulting their small restaurant to success beyond their wildest dreams.

Now, pressured by the demands of a hungry city, Tulip is desperate to crack the secret of their new ingredient's growth. But just how much will he sacrifice to feed his own insatiable ambition?]]>
320 James Albon 160309492X Jaime 0 to-read 3.89 2021 The Delicacy
author: James Albon
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/01/23
shelves: to-read
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Black Cake 57926137 We can’t choose what we inherit. But can we choose who we become?

In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking tale Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their lineage and themselves.

Can Byron and Benny reclaim their once-close relationship, piece together Eleanor’s true history, and fulfill her final request to “share the black cake when the time is rightâ€�? Will their mother’s revelations bring them back together or leave them feeling more lost than ever?

Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel is a story of how the inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories, and even names can shape relationships and history. Deeply evocative and beautifully written, Black Cake is an extraordinary journey through the life of a family changed forever by the choices of its matriarch.]]>
385 Charmaine Wilkerson Jaime 0 to-read 4.06 2022 Black Cake
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/23
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them]]> 57845087 Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s pathbreaking tour of the world’s vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these―rice, wheat, and corn―now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome

The source of much of the world’s food―seeds―is mostly in the control of just four corporations. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow. Half of all the world’s cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company. And one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer.

If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same wherever you are in the world, you’re by no means alone. This when we lose diversity and foods become endangered, we not only risk the loss of traditional foodways, but also of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our food has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. Our food monoculture is a threat to our health―and to the planet.

In Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods before it’s too late. He tells the fascinating stories of the people who continue to cultivate, forage, hunt, cook, and consume what the rest of us have forgotten or didn’t even know existed. Take honey―not the familiar product sold in plastic bottles, but the wild honey gathered by the Hadza people of East Africa, whose diet consists of eight hundred different plants and animals and who communicate with birds in order to locate beesâ€� nests. Or consider murnong―once the staple food of Aboriginal Australians, this small root vegetable with the sweet taste of coconut is undergoing a revival after nearly being driven to extinction. And in Sierra Leone, there are just a few surviving stenophylla trees, a plant species now considered crucial to the future of coffee.

From an Indigenous American chef refining precolonial recipes to farmers tending Geechee red peas on the Sea Islands of Georgia, the individuals profiled in Eating to Extinction are essential guides to treasured foods that have endured in the face of rampant sameness and standardization. They also provide a roadmap to a food system that is healthier, more robust, and, above all, richer in flavor and meaning.]]>
464 Dan Saladino 0374605327 Jaime 0 to-read 4.30 Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them
author: Dan Saladino
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/23
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home]]> 42202117 Now a limited Netflix series starring Zoe Saldana!

This Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller is “a captivating story of love lost and foundâ€� (Kirkus Reviews) set in the lush Sicilian countryside, where one woman discovers the healing powers of food, family, and unexpected grace in her darkest hours.

It was love at first sight when actress Tembi met professional chef, Saro, on a street in Florence. There was just one problem: Saro’s traditional Sicilian family did not approve of his marrying a black American woman. However, the couple, heartbroken but undeterred, forged on. They built a happy life in Los Angeles, with fulfilling careers, deep friendships, and the love of their lives: a baby girl they adopted at birth. Eventually, they reconciled with Saro’s family just as he faced a formidable cancer that would consume all their dreams.

From Scratch chronicles three summers Tembi spends in Sicily with her daughter, Zoela, as she begins to piece together a life without her husband in his tiny hometown hamlet of farmers. Where once Tembi was estranged from Saro’s family, now she finds solace and nourishment—literally and spiritually—at her mother-in-law’s table. In the Sicilian countryside, she discovers the healing gifts of simple fresh food, the embrace of a close knit community, and timeless traditions and wisdom that light a path forward. All along the way she reflects on her and Saro’s romance—an incredible love story that leaps off the pages.

In Sicily, it is said that every story begins with a marriage or a death—in Tembi Locke’s case, it is both. “Locke’s raw and heartfelt memoir will uplift readers suffering from the loss of their own loved onesâ€� (Publishers Weekly), but her story is also about love, finding a home, and chasing flavor as an act of remembrance. From Scratch is for anyone who has dared to reach for big love, fought for what mattered most, and those who needed a powerful reminder that life is...delicious.]]>
339 Tembi Locke 1501187651 Jaime 0 to-read 3.94 2019 From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home
author: Tembi Locke
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/23
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Shadow of Night (All Souls, #2)]]> 11559200 A Discovery of Witchesâ€� cliffhanger ending, Shadow of Night takes Diana and Matthew on a trip through time to Elizabethan London, where they are plunged into a world of spies, magic, and a coterie of Matthew’s old friends, the School of Night. As the search for Ashmole 782 deepens and Diana seeks out a witch to tutor her in magic, the net of Matthew’s past tightens around them, and they embark on a very different—and vastly more dangerous—journey.]]> 584 Deborah Harkness 0670023485 Jaime 0 to-read 4.04 2012 Shadow of Night (All Souls, #2)
author: Deborah Harkness
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[A Discovery of Witches (All Souls, #1)]]> 8667848
Deep in the stacks of Oxford's Bodleian Library, young scholar Diana Bishop unwittingly calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript in the course of her research. Descended from an old and distinguished line of witches, Diana wants nothing to do with sorcery; so after a furtive glance and a few notes, she banishes the book to the stacks. But her discovery sets a fantastical underworld stirring, and a horde of daemons, witches, and vampires soon descends upon the library. Diana has stumbled upon a coveted treasure lost for centuries-and she is the only creature who can break its spell.

Debut novelist Deborah Harkness has crafted a mesmerizing and addictive read, equal parts history and magic, romance and suspense. Diana is a bold heroine who meets her equal in vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont, and gradually warms up to him as their alliance deepens into an intimacy that violates age-old taboos. This smart, sophisticated story harks back to the novels of Anne Rice, but it is as contemporary and sensual as the Twilight series-with an extra serving of historical realism.]]>
592 Deborah Harkness 0670022411 Jaime 0 to-read 4.01 2011 A Discovery of Witches (All Souls, #1)
author: Deborah Harkness
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

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Spin Cycle 247165 Her boyfriend may be cheating.
Her mother’s got a secret.
Is everyone having great sex but Rachel?

Lately, stand-up comic Rachel Katz’s life has begun to resemble a not-so-funny comedy routine â€� the kind where nobody laughs and everybody inches toward the door.

It began when her husband cheated ... with another man. Now she’s raising a ten-year-old son who’s fixated on Barbra Streisand and wondering if her dentist boyfriend â€� who won’t stop flossing long enough to make love to her â€� is having an affair.

Enter Matt Clapton, a wickedly sexy washing machine repairman who likes Rachel’s jokes and makes her feel like a woman for the first time in ages â€� maybe in her entire life.

With her mother busy planning a wedding Rachel isn’t sure she wants, her son dead set on inviting Barbra to the reception, and the groom-to-be in South Africa, working on someone else’s oral hygiene, the question is: What’s she going to do about it? Especially when fame and fortune beckon in a comedy contest that could put her on the map ... and change her life forever.

Spin Cycle tells a wickedly funny, shamelessly erotic story of lovers and liars, exes and children, parents and other strangers. This hip and hilarious new novel by the acclaimed author of Neurotica introduces a heroine who never loses her sense of humor and who discovers, somewhere between the rinse and spin cycles, that love � and laughter � can truly conquer all.]]>
288 Sue Margolis 0440509238 Jaime 2 fiction, read-but-do-not-own 3.38 2001 Spin Cycle
author: Sue Margolis
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves: fiction, read-but-do-not-own
review:

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Love in the Time of Cholera 9712 348 Gabriel GarcĂ­a MĂĄrquez 140003468X Jaime 2 3.92 1985 Love in the Time of Cholera
author: Gabriel GarcĂ­a MĂĄrquez
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1985
rating: 2
read at: 2009/02/22
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves: fiction, 2009, read-but-do-not-own
review:

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<![CDATA[The Five People You Meet in Heaven]]> 3431
Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here?"]]>
196 Mitch Albom 0786868716 Jaime 2 fiction, 2008 4.01 2003 The Five People You Meet in Heaven
author: Mitch Albom
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at: 2008/06/30
date added: 2021/01/28
shelves: fiction, 2008
review:
This book was alright...I mainly read it because others said that it was really good and that I should...all in all it was ok but was not that great. The only things that I liked about it was that it shows how people are connected and do not even know it, and that certain things happen for a reason. I do tend to like things like that but other than that...not too thrilled.
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Anna Karenina 151
«Nos capĂ­tulos iniciais de Anna KarĂ©nina, somos conduzidos, uma e outra vez, a um sentido de analogia musical. HĂĄ efeitos de contraponto e harmonia no desenvolvimento das principais tramas do “prelĂșdio Oblonskiâ€� (o acidente na estação ferroviĂĄria, a zombadora discussĂŁo sobre o divĂłrcio entre Vronski e a baronesa Chilton, o deslumbramento do fogo vermelho diante dos olhos de Anna). O mĂ©todo de Tolstoi Ă© polifĂłnico; mas as harmonias principais desen- volvem-se com uma tremenda força e amplitude. As tĂ©cnicas musicais e linguĂ­sticas nĂŁo podem comparar-se de um modo exato. Mas como poderĂ­amos elucidar de outro modo o sentimento de que as novelas de Tolstoi surgem de um princĂ­pio interior de ordem e vitalidade, enquanto as dos escritores menos importantes parecem alinhavadas?»

«Anna KarĂ©nina morre no mundo do romance; mas cada vez que lemos o livro ela ressuscita, e mesmo depois de o termos acabado adquire outra vida na nossa recordação. Em cada personagem literĂĄria existe algo da FĂ©nix imortal. AtravĂ©s das vidas perdurĂĄveis das suas personagens, a prĂłpria existĂȘncia de Tolstoi teve a sua eternidade.» [George Steiner, Tolstoi ou Dostoievski]]]>
838 Leo Tolstoy 0143035002 Jaime 3 2010, classics, fiction, own 4.11 1878 Anna Karenina
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1878
rating: 3
read at: 2010/07/07
date added: 2020/11/29
shelves: 2010, classics, fiction, own
review:

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The Devil and the Dark Water 51854625 A murder on the high seas. A detective duo. A demon who may or may not exist.

It's 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world's greatest detective, is being transported to Amsterdam to be executed for a crime he may, or may not, have committed. Traveling with him is his loyal bodyguard, Arent Hayes, who is determined to prove his friend innocent.

But no sooner are they out to sea than devilry begins to blight the voyage. A twice-dead leper stalks the decks. Strange symbols appear on the sails. Livestock is slaughtered.

And then three passengers are marked for death, including Samuel.

Could a demon be responsible for their misfortunes?

With Pipps imprisoned, only Arent can solve a mystery that connects every passenger onboard. A mystery that stretches back into their past and now threatens to sink the ship, killing everybody on board.

The breathtaking new novel from Stuart Turton, author of the The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, winner of the Costa Best First Novel Award.]]>
463 Stuart Turton Jaime 0 to-read 3.82 2020 The Devil and the Dark Water
author: Stuart Turton
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/10/20
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[All Together Dead (Sookie Stackhouse #7)]]> 2071683
Sookie Stackhouse has her hands full with shapeshifter Quinn—a possible new man in her life—and the upcoming central U.S. Vampire Summit on the shores of Lake Michigan. Sookie's job at the summit is to support Vampire Queen Sophie-Anne, whose power base was weakened by hurricane damage to New Orleans. But Sookie is about to discover just how dangerous that job can be, as she is drawn further and further into the vampire world...]]>
323 Charlaine Harris 0441015816 Jaime 5 fiction, own, 2011 3.93 2007 All Together Dead (Sookie Stackhouse #7)
author: Charlaine Harris
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2011/01/10
date added: 2020/09/18
shelves: fiction, own, 2011
review:
As a fan of this series, I have to say that this is one of the better ones. Not award winning literature but these are great for quick, fun, entertaining reads.
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The Hotel New Hampshire 11768 520 John Irving 0552992097 Jaime 0 to-read 3.93 1981 The Hotel New Hampshire
author: John Irving
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/08/17
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals]]> 4906098 One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year

Winner of the James Beard Award

Author of #1 New York Times Bestsellers In Defense of Food and Food Rules

Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. Will it be fast food tonight, or something organic? Or perhaps something we grew ourselves? The question of what to have for dinner has confronted us since man discovered fire. But as Michael Pollan explains in this revolutionary book, how we answer it now, as the dawn of the twenty-first century, may determine our survival as a species. Packed with profound surprises, The Omnivore's Dilemma is changing the way Americans thing about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.]]>
468 Michael Pollan 1101147172 Jaime 0 currently-reading 4.30 2006 The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
author: Michael Pollan
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/05/22
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir]]> 16089320 328 Jenny Lawson 1743096445 Jaime 2
Maybe if this was 10 years ago I might have enjoyed it more? Upon reviewing my Ć·±ŠÓéÀÖ shelves, I did rate "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" and "Assholes Finish First" 3 stars so its possible. At this stage in my life I just did not find it that funny. I chuckled 3 or 4 times throughout the whole 318 pages and couldn't wait to be done with it. Had it not have been a book club book, I might not have bothered to waste my time finishing it. I am grateful that I loaned this book from the library instead of spending my money on it and I most definitely will not be reading the second book.]]>
3.85 2012 Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir
author: Jenny Lawson
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2020/01/20
date added: 2020/05/22
shelves: 2020, biography-memoir, book-club, read-but-do-not-own
review:
It is quite unfortunate that this is how I kicked off my reading for 2020 (why could't I have finished Little Women first???). This was the book selected for my book club. I had previously never heard of Jenny Lawson and after reading this I now know why. Anyone remember Tucker Max? Jenny Lawson reminds me of a female Tucker Max only her stories aren't about her sexual escapades but she does say vagina a lot. She is very vulgar (and repetitive) and it gets exhausting. As for the writing style, apparently she is a famous blogger and this book was written just as if it were multiple blog posts smashed together. I couldn't stand it. She is not only a fan of postscripts but she also likes to talk about her editor and include editor notes. It was extremely annoying.

Maybe if this was 10 years ago I might have enjoyed it more? Upon reviewing my Ć·±ŠÓéÀÖ shelves, I did rate "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" and "Assholes Finish First" 3 stars so its possible. At this stage in my life I just did not find it that funny. I chuckled 3 or 4 times throughout the whole 318 pages and couldn't wait to be done with it. Had it not have been a book club book, I might not have bothered to waste my time finishing it. I am grateful that I loaned this book from the library instead of spending my money on it and I most definitely will not be reading the second book.
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<![CDATA[A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose, #2)]]> 52827087 Alternate cover edition can be found here

In this second thrilling installment of the Gunnie Rose series, Lizbeth Rose is hired onto a new crew for a seemingly easy protection job, transporting a crate into Dixie, just about the last part of the former United States of America she wants to visit. But what seemed like a straight-forward job turns into a massacre as the crate is stolen. Up against a wall in Dixie, where social norms have stepped back into the last century, Lizbeth has to go undercover with an old friend to retrieve the crate as what’s inside can spark a rebellion, if she can get it back in time.]]>
304 Charlaine Harris Jaime 0 to-read 4.26 2020 A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose, #2)
author: Charlaine Harris
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

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The High Price of Materialism 1334669 149 Tim Kasser 026211268X Jaime 2
This book was not what I expected. I actually expected it to be more like the last 3rd of it (which is the only part I really enjoyed). The first 2/3rds where very research/psychology heavy. I have a research background so I did not necessarily mind that but a lot of it was Kasser's teams studies or studies he was mentioning that were not cited properly in the end notes. The tables and graphs were helpful but at times the book dragged on.

It was a relatively short book (in length) but if you are not into research papers/style writing, then this book probably isn't for you.

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3.62 2002 The High Price of Materialism
author: Tim Kasser
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2002
rating: 2
read at: 2020/01/21
date added: 2020/01/22
shelves: 2020, non-fiction, read-but-do-not-own
review:
All in all, I agree with the general premise of this book (the more you have doesn't make you more happy/satisfied). I have been interested in leading a more minimalist, frugal, sustainable lifestyle and this book was recommended, probably from a blogger but I can't remember who.

This book was not what I expected. I actually expected it to be more like the last 3rd of it (which is the only part I really enjoyed). The first 2/3rds where very research/psychology heavy. I have a research background so I did not necessarily mind that but a lot of it was Kasser's teams studies or studies he was mentioning that were not cited properly in the end notes. The tables and graphs were helpful but at times the book dragged on.

It was a relatively short book (in length) but if you are not into research papers/style writing, then this book probably isn't for you.


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<![CDATA[Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need]]> 40491946 The International BestsellerNew York Public Library's "Top 10 Think Thrifty Reads of 2023""This book blew my mind. More importantly, it made financial independence seem achievable. I read Financial Freedom three times, cover-to-cover."Ìę —LifehackerMoney is unlimited. Time is not. Become financially independent as fast as possible.In 2010, 24-year old Grant Sabatier woke up to find he had $2.26 in his bank account. Five years later, he had a net worth of over $1.25 million, and CNBC began calling him "the Millennial Millionaire." By age 30, he had reached financial independence. Along the way he uncovered that most of the accepted wisdom about money, work, and retirement is either incorrect, incomplete, or so old-school it's obsolete.Financial Freedom is a step-by-step path to make more money in less time, so you have more time for the things you love. It challenges the accepted narrative of spending decades working a traditional 9 to 5 job, pinching pennies, and finally earning the right to retirement at age 65, and instead offers readers an forget everything you've ever learned about money so that you can actually live the life you want.Sabatier offers surprising, counter-intuitive advice on topics such as how * ÌęCreate profitable side hustles that you can turn into passive income streams or full-time businesses* ÌęSave money without giving up what makes you happy* ÌęNegotiate more out of your employer than you thought possible* ÌęTravel the world for less* ÌęLive for free--or better yet, make money on your living situation* ÌęCreate a simple, money-making portfolio that only needs minor adjustments* ÌęThink creatively--there are so many ways to make money, but we don't see them.But most importantly, Sabatier highlights that, while one's ability to make money is limitless, one's time is not. There's also a limit to how much you can save, but not to how much money you can make. No one should spend precious years working at a job they dislike or worrying about how to make ends meet. Perhaps the biggest You need less money to "retire" at age 30 than you do at age 65.Financial Freedom is not merely a laundry list of advice to follow to get rich quick--it's a practical roadmap to living life on one's own terms, as soon as possible.]]> 558 Grant Sabatier 0525534598 Jaime 4 3.93 2019 Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need
author: Grant Sabatier
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/12/25
shelves: 2019, non-fiction, read-but-do-not-own
review:

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<![CDATA[Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)]]> 16130549 The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) and the very special 12-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.

On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless � mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky 12-year-old Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the "steam" that children with the "shining" produce when they are slowly tortured to death.

Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father's legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant "shining" power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes "Doctor Sleep."

Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan's own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra's soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of hyper-devoted fans of The Shining and wildly satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King canon.]]>
531 Stephen King 1476727651 Jaime 0 to-read 4.11 2013 Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)
author: Stephen King
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

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Pride and Prejudice 1885 Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work "her own darling child" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679783268]]>
279 Jane Austen 1441341706 Jaime 0 to-read 4.28 1813 Pride and Prejudice
author: Jane Austen
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1813
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

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