Medhat The Fanatic Reader's bookshelf: read en-US Thu, 08 May 2025 06:30:07 -0700 60 Medhat The Fanatic Reader's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Elsewhere 2974764 222 William Peter Blatty 1587670836 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.28 1989 Elsewhere
author: William Peter Blatty
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/08
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Titanic: Ship of Lost Illusions: A Floating Microcosm of Edwardian Society]]> 220483178 A fresh exploration of the Titanic disaster reveals how class, gender, and racial prejudices shaped contemporary responses.

When it set sail on its ill-fated maidenĚývoyage, RMS Titanic was a marvel of modernĚýtechnology and the latest in luxury, providing aĚýgilded setting and false sense of security for itsĚýpassengers to act out their imagined ideal livesĚýin a reflection of pre-First World War society.ĚýWhen disaster struck in the form of an icebergĚýfour days into its maiden voyage, that societyĚýwas frozen in a moment of time, revealing class,Ěýgender and racial discrimination that pervadedĚýcontemporary social attitudes.

Kevin Brown takes a fresh approach inĚýexploring the social attitudes to class, manliness,Ěýheroism and cowardice, social redemption,Ěýthe proper role of women and the social,Ěýreligious and racial prejudices revealed by theĚýsinking. He re-evaluates the code of womenĚýand children first, revealing how attitudesĚýglorifying manliness influenced the behaviourĚýof passengers and crew during the sinking, asĚýwell as suggesting a narrative of chivalry andĚýself-sacrifice to create heroes from the victimsĚýand brand the surviving men as cowards; anĚýinterpretation that is challenged here.

Eyewitness accounts evoke the horror of theĚýnight and reveal the underlying ideas of the day.ĚýThey also show that women played a less passiveĚýrole than expected of them. The responses to theĚýsinking by politicians across the spectrum, theĚýlabour movement and suffragettes, suffragistsĚýand anti-suffragists is explored to show moreĚýcritical contemporary responses to the disasterĚýthat challenge the heroic narrative. It was aĚýworld that was never so confident in modernityĚýafter the disaster but yet still held on to illusionsĚýof chivalry.]]> 256 Kevin Brown 1036119726 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 3.89 Titanic: Ship of Lost Illusions: A Floating Microcosm of Edwardian Society
author: Kevin Brown
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.89
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/06
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai, titanic-collection
review:

]]> My Brilliant Friend 125444425 331 Elena Ferrante Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.15 2015 My Brilliant Friend
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/06
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> The Haar 61173293
Muriel McAuley has lived in the Scottish fishing village of Witchaven all her life. She was born there, and she intends to die there.

But when an overseas property developer threatens to evict the residents from their homes and raze Witchaven to the ground in the name of progress, all seems lost� until the day a mysterious fog bank creeps inland.

The Haar.

To some it brings redemption� to others, it brings only madness and death. What macabre secrets lie within� The Haar.

Romantic and deranged, The Haar is a gore-soaked folk horror fairy tale from David Sodergren, author of The Forgotten Island and Maggie’s Grave.]]> 212 David Sodergren Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.05 2022 The Haar
author: David Sodergren
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> The Piano Teacher 7008801 288 Elfriede Jelinek 0802144616 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.63 1983 The Piano Teacher
author: Elfriede Jelinek
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> The Most Secret Memory of Men 125078950
The first Sub-Saharan African winner of France’s top literary prize, the Goncourt.

In 2018, Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer in Paris, discovers a legendary book from the 1930s, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity . No one knows what became of its author, once hailed as the “Black Rimbaud,� after the book caused a scandal. Enthralled by this mystery, Diégane decides to search for T.C. Elimane, going down a path that will force him to confront the great tragedies of history, from colonialism to the Holocaust.

Alongside his investigation, Diégane becomes part of a group of young African writers in Paris. Together they talk, drink, make love, philosophize about the role of exile in artistic creation. Diégane grows particularly close to two the seductive Siga, who holds so many secrets, and the photojournalist Aïda, impossible to pin down.

The Most Secret Memory of Men is an astonishing novel about the choice between living and writing, and the desire to transcend the divide between Africa and the West. Above all, it is an ode to literature and its timelessness.]]> 496 Mohamed Mbougar Sarr 1635423279 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.29 2021 The Most Secret Memory of Men
author: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> The Book of Disappearance 209141112 What if all Palestinians vanished from their homeland overnight?

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

Critically acclaimed in Arabic, spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine.]]> 224 Ibtisam Azem 1916751024 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 5 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read
It's beautiful, brutal, and honest. It compelled me to keep on reading and exploring the emotions of its people.]]> 4.24 2014 The Book of Disappearance
author: Ibtisam Azem
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read
review:
A love letter to Palestine and, most specifically, to the city of Jaffa.

It's beautiful, brutal, and honest. It compelled me to keep on reading and exploring the emotions of its people.
]]> <![CDATA[Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)]]> 23278767 342 Anne Rice Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 3.70 1976 Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)
author: Anne Rice
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai, 0-cinema-stack
review:

]]> The Silentiary 57496542 The Silentiary takes place in a nameless Latin American city during the early 1950s. A young man employed in middle management entertains an ambition to write a book of some sort. But first he must establish the necessary precondition, which the crowded and noisily industrialized city always denies him, however often he and his mother and wife move in search of it. He thinks of embarking on his writing career with something simple, a detective novel, and ponders the possibility of choosing a victim among the people he knows and planning a crime as if he himself were the killer. That way, he hopes, his book might finally begin to take shape.

The Silentiary, along with Zama and The Suicides, is one of the three thematically linked novels by Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation, after the dedication “To the victims of expectation� in Zama. Together they constitute, in Juan José Saer’s words, “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish.”]]> 176 Antonio di Benedetto 1681375621 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 5 4.5 stars 3.76 1964 The Silentiary
author: Antonio di Benedetto
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: 1-in-dubai, 0-10-before-the-end-2024, 1-in-dubai-read
review:
4.5 stars
]]> A Room with a View 15994573
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.

Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?]]> 237 E.M. Forster 0141199822 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.79 1908 A Room with a View
author: E.M. Forster
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1908
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> A Room with a View 3087
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.

Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?]]> 119 E.M. Forster 1420925431 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read 3.91 1908 A Room with a View
author: E.M. Forster
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1908
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Going Solo 227964742
Millions watched as Toby Lyngstad got rejected by his teenage crush on British TV’s most popular talent show, Make Me a Popstar.

While Toby’s heartbreak became a viral internet sensation that haunted him for years, his crush, Cole Kennedy, skyrocketed to global superstardom as part of the show’s most successful boy band, The Go Tos.

A decade later, Toby is the host of radio’s Pop Review, and he’s finally put Cole Kennedy behind him. Or so he thought. When Cole shocks the music world by leaving The Go Tos and going solo, Toby’s boss sees a promotional opportunity too good to miss—and signs a million-pound deal to send Pop Review along on Cole’s first solo tour.

Now, trapped in a travelling studio with the man who once broke his heart, Toby must confront his worst nightmare: Despite Cole ruining his life, the chemistry between them burns hotter than ever.

With millions watching their every interaction, can Toby and Cole overcome a decade of hurt to write their happily ever after? Or will their second chance at love become another viral humiliation?

Going Solo is the second book in The Brent Boys series, which started with The Paper Boys. It's perfect for fans of Red, White and Royal Blue and Boyfriend Material.]]> 348 D.P. Clarence 1739550951 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai, arc 4.59 2025 Going Solo
author: D.P. Clarence
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai, arc
review:

]]> Queer 10287367
Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141189918]]> 150 William S. Burroughs Medhat The Fanatic Reader 4 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read 3.39 1985 Queer
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read
review:
This reads like a series of mental masturbatory session under the influence of weeds. A rather short but enjoyable read with an anticlimactic epilogue.
]]> <![CDATA[Titanic: The Story of the Disaster in the Newspapers of the Day published by Castle Books,US (1999)]]> 132851772 0 unknown author Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 5.00 Titanic: The Story of the Disaster in the Newspapers of the Day published by Castle Books,US (1999)
author: unknown author
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai, titanic-collection
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent]]> 197993505
Memorably introduced by Ishiguro himself, The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain collects the lyrics of sixteen songs he wrote for world-renowned American singer Stacey Kent, which were set to music by her partner, Jim Tomlinson. An exquisite coming together of the literary and musical worlds, the lyrics are infused with a sense of yearning, melancholy, love, and the romance of travel and liminal spaces.

Further exploring the notion of collaboration and interpretation, the collection is illustrated by the acclaimed Italian artist Bianca Bagnarelli, whose work perfectly captures the atmosphere and sensibility of the songs.]]> 98 Kazuo Ishiguro 0593802519 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 4 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read 3.79 2024 The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Swann's Way (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 61820434 Now available for the first time in the United States, a celebrated translation of the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Swann's Way, the first of the seven volumes that constitute Marcel Proust's lifework, In Search of Lost Time, introduces the larger themes of the whole sequence while standing on its own as a brilliant evocation of the French Belle �poque.

Here we encounter Proust's narrator, restless and unfulfilled in middle age, his life weighing on him as a burden of things forgotten and things undone, until quite by chance he is brought to remember the world of his childhood, his clinging attachment to his mother, his dread of his father, summers in the country and the two walks his family regularly took, one by a great aristocratic estate, the other by the house of a certain Charles Swann, to whom a mystery was attached. A child's world and the world of adults the child can only begin to imagine unfurl before us, and Proust's pages spill over with incident and puzzlement, pathos and humor.

The novel then takes a further step into the past to tell of the goings-on at the Parisian salon of the bourgeois Verdurins, where social climbing and artistic accomplishment exist in incongruous and comic conjunction, and of Swann's infatuation with the courtesan Odette. Swann, man about town and familiar of royalty, is soon reduced to walking after midnight, unrecognizable to himself and to his friends, forlorn as a child awaiting a goodnight kiss, no thought in his head but love--and in Proust's universe there is no more terrible affliction.

James Grieve began his career as a translator of Proust in the early 1970s, driven by his dismay at how many readers deemed In Search of Lost Time to be too difficult for them to take on. Grieve's artful and celebrated version of Swann's Way--only now available outside his native Australia--shows that this is hardly the case. Proust's great narrative covers the whole gamut of human experiences and emotions, but to read it is to know joy.]]> 450 Marcel Proust 1681376296 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.41 1913 Swann's Way (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Marcel Proust
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1913
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Death Ship: Recovering the Bodies of Titanic's Dead | The tale of Titanic’s dead, and the unflinching dedication of the City of Halifax]]> 218702723 The Death Recovering the Bodies of Titanic's Dead Victoria Brown explores the journey of the victims from the end of their life � how they died, how they decomposed - to their burial in the Nova Scotian city of Halifax, and what their legacy means for the future of the wreck.]]> 293 Victoria Brown 1803998040 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 4
]]> 4.60 The Death Ship: Recovering the Bodies of Titanic's Dead | The tale of Titanic’s dead, and the unflinching dedication of the City of Halifax
author: Victoria Brown
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.60
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: 1-in-dubai, titanic-collection, 1-in-dubai-read
review:
This book was so fascinating in the approach it took to explore death. I never read anything like it in the history of Titanic.


]]> <![CDATA[Black List (Scot Harvath, #11)]]> 17559292 An explosive thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Brad Thor: Scot Harvath must survive a stunning masterwork of action, intrigue, and ingenious plot twists.Somewhere deep inside the United States government is a closely guarded list. Members of Congress never get to see it—only the President and a secret team of advisers. Once your name is on the list, it doesn’t come off…until you’re dead.



Someone has just added counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath’s name.



Somehow Harvath must evade the teams dispatched to kill him long enough to untangle who has targeted him and why they want him out of the way.



Somewhere, someone, somehow can put all the pieces together. The only question is, will Harvath get to that person before the United States suffers the most withering terrorist attack ever conceived?



An intense, page-turning novel that is action-packed and frighteningly real, Black List blurs the line between fiction and reality and once again reaffirms why Brad Thor “is arguably the best thriller writer of our time� (Suspense Magazine) and “America’s favorite author� (KTTX).]]> 480 Brad Thor 1439193029 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.12 2012 Black List (Scot Harvath, #11)
author: Brad Thor
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Titanic Files (Vol. 1): Collected Writings on RMS Titanic (1)]]> 229153590 320 George Behe 1803997265 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 0.0 The Titanic Files (Vol. 1): Collected Writings on RMS Titanic (1)
author: George Behe
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai, titanic-collection
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What I'd Rather Not Think About]]> 61921644 What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them?


This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.


In brief, precise vignettes, full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour, Posthuma tells the story of a depressive brother, viewed from the perspective of the sister who both loves and resents her twin, struggles to understand him, and misses him terribly.]]> 224 Jente Posthuma 1914484711 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.70 2020 What I'd Rather Not Think About
author: Jente Posthuma
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> The Immoralist 17278778 "The humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and a belief in the human race - and all four are present in Gide ... the humanist of our age." - E.M. Forster

In The Immoralist , André Gide presents the confessional account of a man seeking the truth of his own nature. The story's protagonist, Michel, knows nothing about love when he marries the gentle Marceline out of duty to his father. On the couple's honeymoon to Tunisia, Michel becomes very ill, and during his recovery he meets a young Arab boy whose radiant health and beauty captivate him. An awakening for him both sexually and morally, Michel discovers a new freedom in seeking to live according to his own desires. But, as he also discovers, freedom can be a burden. A frank defence of homosexuality and a challenge to prevailing ethical concepts, The Immoralist is a literary landmark, marked by Gide's masterful, pure, simple style.]]> 144 André Gide 0141182997 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.46 1902 The Immoralist
author: André Gide
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1902
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> A Night to Remember 61834 A Night to Remember remains the definitive, classic tale of the sinking of the Titanic. Walter Lord interviewed more than sixty survivors before committing their searingly vivid recollections to his minute-by-minute account of the Titanic's fatal collision and the experiences of both passengers and crew under pressure of the unthinkable: the swift plummet into icy waters of the ship promised never to sink.

With a new introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick, bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea and Sea of Glory, this fiftieth-anniversary edition of Walter Lord's classic brings the drama of that night back to life. As Philbrick concludes in his introduction: "From first to last, A Night to Remember is about the people who briefly inhabited the Titanic, and never again will an author have the opportunity to speak to so many of them. In this most essential way, Lord's book can never be outdone, making A Night to Remember the ultimate survivors' tale."]]> 182 Walter Lord 0805077642 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 5
the rating for my 2nd time reading this book.

I have tried many times to read A Night To Remember, and I always ended-up putting it aside.

This time, however, the reading experience was quite different. Six days earlier, I started 'Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories Of Those Who Survived', and as I learned a lot about survivors' post-Titanic life, I formed some kind of an attachment and an understanding to them; thus, I guess, I was meant to read A Night To Remember, the story of the sinking right after reading about the events that took place after it.

A Night To Remember was an immersive experience that I won't be able to forget. As I continued with each page, I kept picturing what was happening in my mind and was able to place myself behind these people's shoulders who witnessed the unimaginable.

The book was concise, easy to read at times (but sometimes not), and it provided everything that I needed to know about the Titanic's definitive last hours.]]> 4.07 1955 A Night to Remember
author: Walter Lord
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: short-listed-2018-tbr, april-tbr-2018, april-2019-tbr, titanic-collection
review:
5-star rating for my 2nd reread on April 9-13, 2025 for the 113th anniversary of the Titanic sinking.

the rating for my 2nd time reading this book.

I have tried many times to read A Night To Remember, and I always ended-up putting it aside.

This time, however, the reading experience was quite different. Six days earlier, I started 'Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories Of Those Who Survived', and as I learned a lot about survivors' post-Titanic life, I formed some kind of an attachment and an understanding to them; thus, I guess, I was meant to read A Night To Remember, the story of the sinking right after reading about the events that took place after it.

A Night To Remember was an immersive experience that I won't be able to forget. As I continued with each page, I kept picturing what was happening in my mind and was able to place myself behind these people's shoulders who witnessed the unimaginable.

The book was concise, easy to read at times (but sometimes not), and it provided everything that I needed to know about the Titanic's definitive last hours.
]]> The Boys from Brazil 9633082 Thus Ira Levin opens one of the strangest & most masterful novels of his career. Why has Mengele marked a number of harmless aging men for murder? What is the hidden link that binds them? What interest can they possibly hold for their killers: six former SS men dispatched from South America by the most wanted Nazi still alive, the notorious Angel of Death? One man alone must answer these questions & stop the killings--Lieberman, himself aging & thought by some to be losing his grip on reality.
At the heart of The Boys from Brazil lies a frightening contemporary nightmare, chilling & all too possible.]]> 258 Ira Levin 1849015902 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.94 1976 The Boys from Brazil
author: Ira Levin
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Afloat (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 1782011 Afloat, originally published as Sur l’eau in 1888, is a work of dazzling but treacherously shifting currents, a seemingly simple logbook of a sailing cruise along the French Mediterranean coast that opens up to reveal unexpected depths, as Guy de Maupassant merges fact and fiction, dream and documentation in a wholly original style. Humorous and troubling stories, unreliable confessions, stray reminiscences, and thoughts on life, love, art, nature, and society all find a place in Maupassant’s pages, which are, in conception and in effect, so many reflections of the fluid sea on which he finds himself–happily but forever precariously–afloat. Afloat is thus a book that in both content and form courts risk while setting out to chart the meaning, and limits, of freedom, a book that makes itself up as it goes along and in doing so proves as startling and compellingly vital as the paintings of Maupassant’s contemporaries van Gogh and Gauguin.]]> 120 Guy de Maupassant 1590172590 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.96 1888 Afloat (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1888
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> Melville 33590864
Moby-Dick looms large in the world’s imagination. But until the mid-1930s--eighty years after it first appeared in English--it remained unavailable in French. The Provencal novelist Jean Giono fell in love with the book. He inspired his friend Lucien Jacques to join him in the project of rendering Melville’s stirring prose. After they finished, their publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface. Giono was unwilling at first to accept--the translation had taken a few years to complete, and he was eager to move on. But he was brought around by the desire to introduce Melville to the French public.

The result, issued as a separate volume in French, is an unparalleled intercultural creation, part preface, part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. The French publisher continues to classify it as “un essai,� a literary experiment. Melville: A Novel is an intimate homage from one great writer to another, across time and space, a true meeting of French and American minds. Paul Eprile’s meticulous translation of this startling text brings the exchange full circle.]]> 107 Jean Giono 1681371375 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.62 1941 Melville
author: Jean Giono
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1941
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)]]> 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 387 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 5 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read
And there I was, telling myself that it's going to be extremely boring and lackluster like "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" was, and that the sole reason why I now want to finish the book is to be informed and participate in online discourses, and not be spoiled before the movie comes out in November 2026.

However, all that has changed, because from page 104 onwards and until the very last page of the Epilogue, Sunrise on the Reaping ripped my heart away, thrilled and entertained me, and let me feel all the rage, sadness, and grief that the capital has caused Haymitch Abernathy, because same as in Katniss' timing, President Snow couldn't be any more ruthless, vile, and bloodthirsty.

The journey that we take with Haymitch, as opposed to the one we experienced in Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, is filled with a lot of challenges that had much higher stakes than what young President Snow had to endure. And most notably of all, the arena in this book is twisty with lots of ingenious sadism involved that some scenes will never leave my memory, but I really hope that they do.

Haymitch is at the center of this book, but other characters--like Lou Lou, Maysilee, Wellie, and Ampert--also breathed more life into Haymitch's and this book, and because of that, we pay the same price that Haymitch ends up paying because of the bond that they created.

4.5 stars]]> 4.60 2025 Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read
review:
Sunrise on the Reaping & I didn't start off well. Even with all the excitement kicking in my body, the first 103 were boring and felt cheesy; cheesy YA romantic dialogue that sucked the energy out of me.

And there I was, telling myself that it's going to be extremely boring and lackluster like "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" was, and that the sole reason why I now want to finish the book is to be informed and participate in online discourses, and not be spoiled before the movie comes out in November 2026.

However, all that has changed, because from page 104 onwards and until the very last page of the Epilogue, Sunrise on the Reaping ripped my heart away, thrilled and entertained me, and let me feel all the rage, sadness, and grief that the capital has caused Haymitch Abernathy, because same as in Katniss' timing, President Snow couldn't be any more ruthless, vile, and bloodthirsty.

The journey that we take with Haymitch, as opposed to the one we experienced in Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, is filled with a lot of challenges that had much higher stakes than what young President Snow had to endure. And most notably of all, the arena in this book is twisty with lots of ingenious sadism involved that some scenes will never leave my memory, but I really hope that they do.

Haymitch is at the center of this book, but other characters--like Lou Lou, Maysilee, Wellie, and Ampert--also breathed more life into Haymitch's and this book, and because of that, we pay the same price that Haymitch ends up paying because of the bond that they created.

4.5 stars
]]> Hard Times 22364136 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780141439679.

'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root everything else'

Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and his family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and 'bully of humility' Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery. And, as their fortunes cross with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimised weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is eventually forced to recognise the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and machinery.

This edition of Hard Times is based on the text of the first volume publication of 1854. Kate Flint's introduction sheds light on the frequently overlooked character interplay in Dickens' great critique of Victorian industrial society.]]> 321 Charles Dickens Medhat The Fanatic Reader 4
I had high expectations from this novel, and although these expectations weren't exactly met, I can still tell you that Hard Times was a touching story.

It was bleak most of the times and miserable, but the book's main characters were memorable and, most importantly, very distinguishable from each other. I loved following the steps of Thomas Gradgrind and his intelligent daughter Louisa, and Sissy Jupe, for whom I instantly cared. The Bully of Humility, Mr. Bounderby, Louisa's husband, was an interesting character, and I was thrilled by what we discover about him at the end of Hard Times.

In my humble opinion, Hard Times deserved to be a longer, more developed novel. There were plot-threads and characters that would have made the story multi-layered were they explored more.

Hard Times was divided into 3 parts, and since this had been written in the 19th century, the language and/or the style was/weren't always accessible ... that was true for parts 1 and 2, but the last part was surprisingly easy to understand and faster in pace. The 3rd part also had the book's most moving moments, with a poignant, unforgettable last chapter.

In hopes that I'll read a 5-star Dickens book soon.]]> 3.42 1854 Hard Times
author: Charles Dickens
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1854
rating: 4
read at: 2020/08/02
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: on-hold, charles-dickens-collection, classics, to-read-in-2nd-half-2020
review:
Hard Times is the second book that I've read by Charles Dickens.

I had high expectations from this novel, and although these expectations weren't exactly met, I can still tell you that Hard Times was a touching story.

It was bleak most of the times and miserable, but the book's main characters were memorable and, most importantly, very distinguishable from each other. I loved following the steps of Thomas Gradgrind and his intelligent daughter Louisa, and Sissy Jupe, for whom I instantly cared. The Bully of Humility, Mr. Bounderby, Louisa's husband, was an interesting character, and I was thrilled by what we discover about him at the end of Hard Times.

In my humble opinion, Hard Times deserved to be a longer, more developed novel. There were plot-threads and characters that would have made the story multi-layered were they explored more.

Hard Times was divided into 3 parts, and since this had been written in the 19th century, the language and/or the style was/weren't always accessible ... that was true for parts 1 and 2, but the last part was surprisingly easy to understand and faster in pace. The 3rd part also had the book's most moving moments, with a poignant, unforgettable last chapter.

In hopes that I'll read a 5-star Dickens book soon.
]]> Evenings and Weekends 181109993 For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend.

London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever�

Maggie, a once-hopeful artist turned waitress, is pregnant and preparing to move back to her hometown with her boyfriend and father-to-be Ed, leaving the city she loves and the life she imagined for herself.

Ed, coasting through life as a barely competent bike courier, is ready for a new start with Maggie and their baby, if only to finally leave behind his secret past of hooking up with strange men in train station bathrooms—and his secret past with Maggie’s best friend, Phil.

Phil, who sleepwalks through his office job and lives for the weekends, is on the brink of achieving his first real relationship with his roommate Keith. The two live in an illegal warehouse commune with other quirky creatives and idealists—the site of the party to end all parties.

As the temperature continues to climb, Maggie, Ed, and Phil will have to confront their shared pasts, current desires, and limits of their future lives together before the weekend is over.

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.77 2024 Evenings and Weekends
author: OisĂ­n McKenna
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> Ernesto (NYRB Classics) 30419774 A coming of age story that is a classic of gay literature, now in English for the first time

An NYRB Classics Original

Ernesto is a classic of gay literature, a tender, complex, and poignant tale of sexual awakening by one of Italy's most famous and beloved poets. Ernesto is a sixteen-year-old boy from an educated family who lives alone with his mother in Trieste. His mother is eager for him to get ahead in the world and has asked a local businessman to give him some workplace experience by employing him in his warehouse. One day a workingman makes advances to Ernesto, who responds with willing curiosity. A month of trysts ensues before the boy begins to tire of the relationship. He starts to avoid the unhappy man and finally escapes him altogether by engineering his own dismissal from the firm. And yet his experience has changed him, and as Umberto Saba's unfinished, autobiographical story breaks off, Ernesto has struck up a new, increasingly romantic attachment to a boy his own age.

Ernesto combines remarkable honesty with delicate and exact psychological insight. Saba not only describes Ernesto's feelings, restlessness, and passion but also, in witty, sardonic, and emotion-laden asides, comments and reflects on them from the more knowing but also rueful point of view of the older man he became.]]> 164 Umberto Saba 1681370824 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.59 1975 Ernesto (NYRB Classics)
author: Umberto Saba
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> Like Death 29972881
Anne, the comtesse de Guilleroy, is a youthful forty, the wife of a busy politician. The painter and the comtesse have been lovers for many years. Anne’s daughter, Annette—the spitting image of her mother in her lovely youth—has finished her schooling and is returning to Paris. Her parents are putting together an excellent match. Everything is as it should be—until the painter and comtesse are each seized by an agonizing suspicion, like death . . .

In its devastating depiction of the treacherous nature of love, Like Death is more than the equal of Swann’s Way. Richard Howard’s new translation brings out all the penetration and poetry of this masterpiece of nineteenth-century fiction.]]> 218 Guy de Maupassant 1681370328 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.79 1889 Like Death
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1889
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days: The Revised and Expanded 2011 Edition]]> 11854028 336 Jared Cade 0720613906 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.62 1998 Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days: The Revised and Expanded 2011 Edition
author: Jared Cade
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Breaking Titanic: Analysing RMS Titanic's Hull Fracture]]> 219234388 368 Eugene Nesmeyanov 1803997958 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 5.00 Breaking Titanic: Analysing RMS Titanic's Hull Fracture
author: Eugene Nesmeyanov
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai, titanic-collection
review:

]]> Dream Count 221034989 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until � betrayed and brokenhearted � she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America � but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0008685738 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 3.89 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai, signed-by-the-author
review:

]]> <![CDATA[One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This]]> 213870084 From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

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

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

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

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.68 2025 One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 4.50 2025 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
author: John Green
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai, signed-by-the-author
review:

]]> An Abundance of Katherines 16109785
On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun - but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl.

Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself.]]> 228 John Green Medhat The Fanatic Reader 3 hardcovers 3.5/5 3.44 2006 An Abundance of Katherines
author: John Green
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2015/07/31
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: hardcovers
review:
3.5/5
]]> <![CDATA[Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day]]> 916856 234 Winifred Watson 190315510X Medhat The Fanatic Reader 4 3.98 1938 Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
author: Winifred Watson
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1938
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: 1-in-dubai, 0-cinema-stack, 0-instant-tbr, 1-in-dubai-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Strain (The Strain Trilogy, #1)]]> 19501681
In a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, a former professor and survivor of the Holocaust named Abraham Setrakian knows something is happening. And he knows the time has come, that a war is brewing.

So begins a battle of mammoth proportions as the vampiric virus that has infected New York begins to spill out into the streets. Eph, who is joined by Setrakian and a motley crew of fighters, must now find a way to stop the contagion and save his city - a city that includes his wife and son - before it is too late.]]> 585 Guillermo del Toro 0062344617 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read 3.85 2009 The Strain (The Strain Trilogy, #1)
author: Guillermo del Toro
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Pierre and Jean 28111874 he not left a share of the friend's estate? Vivid, ironical and emotionally profound, Pierre and Jean is considered Maupassant's greatest novel -- an intensely personal story of suspicion, jealousy and family love.

This volume also includes Maupassant's celebrated preface, in which he discusses his theories of the novel.]]> 176 Guy de Maupassant Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.84 1888 Pierre and Jean
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1888
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Mamluks: Slave Warriors of Medieval Islam]]> 62134373
From humble beginnings as slaves in Egypt, the Mamluks trained as soldiers and rose in status to seize control of the largest empire in Islam. They ruled over Egypt and Syria for over two centuries. They saved the region from devastation from the Mongols and expelled the last of the Crusaders from the Holy Land. The Mamluks presided over the last flowering of the culture of medieval Islam, where their scientific and artistic achievements were at least preserved, if only advanced a little.

Conquest by the Ottomans of 1517 may have ended the Mamluke Sultanate, but the Mamluks themselves continued as a powerful military class until modern times. They fought Napoleon when he invaded Egypt in 1798. Their alleged end in 1811 was as bloody as the rest of their history, but there is even evidence of the Mamluks continuing longer, possibly until the later nineteenth century.]]> 288 John Brunton 1398107344 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.60 The Mamluks: Slave Warriors of Medieval Islam
author: John Brunton
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.60
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 18209502
Shakespeare, Nietzsche wrote, was Montaigne’s best reader—a typically brilliant Nietzschean insight, capturing the intimate relationship between Montaigne’s ever-changing record of the self and Shakespeare’s kaleidoscopic register of human character. And there is no doubt that Shakespeare read Montaigne—though how extensively remains a matter of debate—and that the translation he read him in was that of John Florio, a fascinating polymath, man-about-town, and dazzlingly inventive writer himself.

Florio’s Montaigne is in fact one of the masterpieces of English prose, with a stylistic range and felicity and passages of deep lingering music that make it comparable to Sir Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. This new edition of this seminal work, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt, features an adroitly modernized text, an essay in which Greenblatt discusses both the resemblances and real tensions between Montaigne’s and Shakespeare’s visions of the world, and Platt’s introduction to the life and times of the extraordinary Florio. Altogether, this book provides a remarkable new experience of not just two but three great writers who ushered in the modern world.]]> 418 Michel de Montaigne 1590177223 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.01 1603 Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Michel de Montaigne
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1603
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dante: Poet of the Secular World (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 31698
CONTENTS
I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature
II. Dante's Early Poetry
III. The Subject of the "Comedy"
IV. The Structure of the "Comedy"
V. The Presentation
VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality
Notes
Index]]> 202 Erich Auerbach 1590172191 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.16 1929 Dante: Poet of the Secular World (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Erich Auerbach
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1929
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> Flaubert and Madame Bovary 52836 384 Francis Steegmuller 1590171160 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.00 1977 Flaubert and Madame Bovary
author: Francis Steegmuller
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> Marshlands 53248464 A slim but powerful work of metafiction by a Nobel Prize-winning French writer and intellectual.

André Gide is the inventor of modern metafiction and of autofiction, and his short novel Marshlands shows him handling both forms with a deft and delightful touch. The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing “Marshlands,� which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and always talking about, what else, the wonderful book he is writing�Marshlands. He tells his friends about the book, and they tell him what they think, which is not exactly flattering, and of course those responses become part of the book in the reader’s hand. Marshlands is both a poised satire of literary pretension and a superb literary invention, and Damion Searls’s new translation of this early masterwork by one of the key figures of twentieth-century literature brings out all the sparkle of the original.]]> 144 André Gide 1681374722 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.79 1895 Marshlands
author: André Gide
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1895
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> Franny and Zooey 7710230 â€Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much only in a different way.â€�

First published in The New Yorker as two sequential stories, â€Frannyâ€� and â€Zooeyâ€� offer a dual portrait of the two youngest members of J. D. Salinger’s fictional Glass family.

Franny Glass is a pretty, effervescent college student on a date with her intellectually confident boyfriend, Lane. They appear to be the perfect couple, but as they struggle to communicate with each other about the things they really care about, slowly their true feelings come to the surface. The second story in this book, â€Zooeyâ€�, plunges us into the world of her ethereal, sophisticated family. When Franny’s emotional and spiritual doubts reach new heights, her older brother Zooey, a misanthropic former child genius, offers her consolation and brotherly advice.

Written in Salinger’s typically irreverent style, these two stories offer a touching snapshot of the distraught mindset of early adulthood and are full of the insightful emotional observations and witty turns of phrase that have helped make Salinger’s reputation what it is today.]]> 150 J.D. Salinger Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.83 1957 Franny and Zooey
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding: a Hercule Poirot Short Story (Hercule Poirot, #SS-26)]]> 44066606 55 Agatha Christie 9897788093 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 2 4.01 The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding: a Hercule Poirot Short Story (Hercule Poirot, #SS-26)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.01
book published:
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves:
review:

]]> The Stand 60311454 Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting and eerily plausible as when it was first published.

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read

A patient escapes from a biological testing facility, unknowingly carrying a deadly weapon: a mutated strain of super-flu that will wipe out 99 percent of the world's population within a few weeks. Those who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge--Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a peaceful community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the nefarious "Dark Man," who delights in chaos and violence. As the dark man and the peaceful woman gather power, the survivors will have to choose between them--and ultimately decide the fate of all humanity.

(This edition includes all of the new and restored material first published in The Stand The Complete And Uncut Edition.)]]> 1439 Stephen King 0307743683 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 4 4.25 1978 The Stand
author: Stephen King
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2015/02/09
date added: 2025/03/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Man in the Black Suit: 4 Dark Tales]]> 10587 THE MAN IN THE BLACK SUIT

FOUR UNABRIDGED DARK TALES FROM STEPHEN KING

The Man in the Black Suit read by John Cullum

"...the face of the man in the black suit grows ever clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said. I don't want to think of him, but I can't help it, and sometimes at night my old heart beats so hard and so fast I think it will tear itself right clear of my chest."

A haunting recollection of a mysterious boyhood event, The Man in Black Suit read by John Cullum leads off this masterful collection from Stephen King.

Other dark tales include: All That You Love Will Be Carried Away read by Peter Gerety, in which a man checks into a Lincoln, Nebraska Motel 6 to find the meaning in his life; That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French read by Becky Ann Baker presents the ultimate case of déjà vu; and The Death of Jack Hamilton read by Arliss Howard -- a blistering tale of Depression-era outlaws on the run.
Whether writing about encounters with the dead, the near dead, or about the mundane dreads of life, Stephen King's The Man In The Black Suit: Four Dark Tales is intense, eerie and instantly compelling.]]> Stephen King 074352585X Medhat The Fanatic Reader 3 Boring and MEH. 2.5 stars 3.70 1994 The Man in the Black Suit: 4 Dark Tales
author: Stephen King
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1994
rating: 3
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Boring and MEH. 2.5 stars
]]> <![CDATA[Worth Dying For (Jack Reacher #15)]]> 7928249 The Duncans want Reacher gone—and it’s not just past secrets they’re trying to hide. They’re awaiting a secret shipment that’s already late—and they have the kind of customers no one can afford to annoy. For as dangerous as the Duncans are, they’re just the bottom of a criminal food chain stretching halfway around the world.

For Reacher, it would have made much more sense to keep on going, to put some distance between himself and the hard-core trouble that’s bearing down on him.

For Reacher, that was also impossible.

]]> 384 Lee Child 0385344317 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 4 hardcovers 4.12 2010 Worth Dying For (Jack Reacher #15)
author: Lee Child
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2016/08/27
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: hardcovers
review:
kicking asses has never been this much fun!
]]> The Moon Is Down 22294464 130 John Steinbeck 0141395370 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 5 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read 3.95 1942 The Moon Is Down
author: John Steinbeck
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1942
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read
review:

]]> Old Man Goriot 4552782 Old Man Goriot is Balzac's acknowledged masterpiece. A key novel in his Comédie Humaine series, it is a vividly realized portrait of bourgeois Parisian society in the years following the French Revolution.]]> 336 Honoré de Balzac 0140449728 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 4 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read 3.92 1835 Old Man Goriot
author: Honoré de Balzac
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1835
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume I]]> 221256639 It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate.

The first volume of the poetic, page-turning masterpiece about one woman’s fall through the cracks of time.

Tara Selter has slipped out of time.

Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.

She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand � the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband’s surprise at seeing her return home unannounced. But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain.

As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can’t shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there’s a way to escape.]]> 192 Solvej Balle 0571383378 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.86 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I
author: Solvej Balle
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> The Gardens of Light 979198
When using the words "Manichean" or "Manichaeism" one rarely thinks Mani, painter, doctor and Eastern philosopher of the third century, called "the Buddha of Light" by the Chinese and "the apostle of Jesus" by the Egyptians . His tolerant and humanist philosophy wanted to reconcile the religions of his time. It earned him persecution, torment and hatred...]]> 254 Amin Maalouf 0349108714 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.66 1991 The Gardens of Light
author: Amin Maalouf
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> The Birthday Party 61889840
Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier's The Birthday Party is a deft unravelling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.]]> 504 Laurent Mauvignier 1804270229 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.75 2020 The Birthday Party
author: Laurent Mauvignier
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> New Grub Street 32043953
Scholarly, anxious Edwin Reardon had achieved a precarious career as the writer of serious fiction. On the strength of critical acclaim for his fourth novel, he has married the refined Amy Yule. But the brilliant future Amy expected has evaded her husband. The catastrophe of the Reardon's failing marriage is set among the rising and falling fortunes of novelists, journalists, and scholars who labour 'in the valley of the shadow of books'.

George Gissing's New Grub Street was written at breakneck speed in the autumn of 1890 and is considered his best novel. Intensely autobiographical, it reflects the literary and cultural crisis in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century.]]> 457 George Gissing 0198729189 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.20 1891 New Grub Street
author: George Gissing
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1891
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man]]> 38911971
As a once-promising novelist who was tortured by the Nazis and survived a year in Auschwitz, author Jean Améry had a particular sympathy for the lived experience of vulnerability, affliction, and suffering, and in this book—available in English for the first time—he asserts the moral claims of Dr. Bovary. What results is a moving paean to the humanity of Charles Bovary and to the supreme value of love.]]> 184 Jean Améry 1681372509 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.34 1978 Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man
author: Jean Améry
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.34
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)]]> 21532185
Among the exiles gathered in the town of Chenor, or Black-Waters, are the granite-faced Old Bolshevik Ryzhik, stoic yet gentle Varvara, and Rodion, a young, self-educated worker who is trying to make sense of the world and history. They struggle in the unlikely company of Russian Orthodox Old Believers who are also suffering for their faith. Against unbelievable odds, the young Rodion will escape captivity and find a new life in the wild. Surviving the dark winter night of the soul, he rediscovers the only real, and most radical, form of hope.Ěý]]> 240 Victor Serge 1590177703 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.01 1939 Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)
author: Victor Serge
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1939
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> Miserable Miracle 244977 Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable.

Includes forty pages of black-and-white drawings.]]> 200 Henri Michaux 1590170016 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.05 1956 Miserable Miracle
author: Henri Michaux
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Blue Lard (New York Review Classics)]]> 157995355
Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author’s books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines.

The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese—peppered with ample neologisms—and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process� is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write.

This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers?

Blue Lard is a stylistically acrobatic book, translated by Max Lawton into an English idiom just as bizarre as the Russian original. Evoking both Pulp Fiction and the masterpieces of Marquis de Sade,ĚýSorokin’s novel is a brutal, heady trip that annihilates all of its twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century competition in the Russian canon—and that annihilates Russia itself in a resounding act of heavy-metal dissidence.]]> 368 Vladimir Sorokin 1681378183 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.10 1999 Blue Lard (New York Review Classics)
author: Vladimir Sorokin
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
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]]> Augustus 20697542 Augustus, his third great novel, John Williams tookĚý on an entirely new challenge, a historical narrative set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire. To tell the story, Williams turned to the epistolary novel, a genre that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher’s Crossing and the campus novel in Stoner. Augustus is the final triumph of a writer who has comeĚýto be recognized around the world as an American master.]]> 336 John Williams 1590178211 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.44 1972 Augustus
author: John Williams
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
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]]> The Party 217222130 An irresistible novella about two sisters and a night that changes everything, from the master chronicler of our heart’s hidden desires

Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She’d have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn’t explain it.

On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students� party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn’s misgivings. As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives.

In this irresistible novella of two young women coming of age, Tessa Hadley explores the ever-changing desires, the sudden revelations and the lasting mysteries that are bound up with who we are, and who we might become.]]> 128 Tessa Hadley 1787335550 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.34 2024 The Party
author: Tessa Hadley
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Season of Migration to the North]]> 6145869
But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man—whom he has asked to look after his wife—in an unsettled and violent no-man’s-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.

Season of Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century.]]> 139 Tayeb Salih 1590173023 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.87 1966 Season of Migration to the North
author: Tayeb Salih
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Boys Alive (New York Review Classics)]]> 138234035
Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first novel and remains his best-known work of fiction. He'd moved to Rome a few years before, after finding himself embroiled in a provincial sex scandal, and the impact of the city on Pasolini—its lively, aggressive dialect, its postwar squalor and violence—was accompanied by a new awareness that for him respectability was no longer an “Like it or not, I was tarred with the brush of Rimbaud . . . or even Oscar Wilde.� Urgently looking for teaching work, walk-on parts in films, literary journalism, anything to achieve independence and security, he was drawn to other outcasts who cared nothing for bourgeois values, who lived intensely, carelessly, refusing to be hampered by scruple and convention.

This was the context in which he began to work on a novel, and though socialism was the intellectual and artistic fashion of the day and Pasolini was a socialist, his book was completely free of any sentimental or patronizing concern for the plight of the underprivileged. Pasolini revels in the vitality of the squalor he so lavishly and energetically evokes. In Boys Alive , he devotes his native lyricism and vast literary resources to conjuring up an urban inferno as vast and hideous as it is colorful and dynamic.

There is no grand plot, but Pasolini’s narrative voice moves like a heat-seeking missile, infallibly locking onto situations of great intensity, conflict and comedy. Possessing nothing, his young characters fight to survive and to live. At all costs they must have fun; boredom is death. And if food and fun must be paid for, then money will be looting, hustling, scavenging, stealing. Once found it is immediately squandered on sharp clothes and shoes, drunk away, gambled away, or simply lost. Boasting and exhibitionism are the norm, and every boy aspires to be the toughest, the shrewdest, the most unscrupulous punk on the block. As each new episode begins—a warehouse heist, an evening’s gambling, a search for sex—the reader can only tremble, waiting for disaster to strike. Everything is up in the air. Nothing is predictable.

Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out the salt and intelligence of this vital and never less than scandalous work of art.]]> 224 Pier Paolo Pasolini 1681377624 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.60 1955 Boys Alive (New York Review Classics)
author: Pier Paolo Pasolini
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1955
rating: 0
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]]> Butcher's Crossing 457228 Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.

It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, ď¬red up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,â€� drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to ď¬nd a world as irremediably changed as they have been.]]> 274 John Williams 1590171985 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.18 1960 Butcher's Crossing
author: John Williams
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1960
rating: 0
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]]> Nightmare Alley 7140096 Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.

And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.]]> 275 William Lindsay Gresham 1590173481 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.87 1946 Nightmare Alley
author: William Lindsay Gresham
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> Down Below 31171199 A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism's most compelling figures

In 1937 Leonora Carrington—later to become one of the twentieth century’s great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild—was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence.

In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a concentration camp. Carrington suffered a psychotic break. She wept for hours. Her stomach became “the mirror of the earth”—of all worlds in a hostile universe—and she tried to purify the evil by compulsively vomiting. As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded Carrington to flee to Spain. Facing the approach “of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings,� she packed a suitcase that bore on a brass plate the word Revelation.

This was only the beginning of a journey into madness that was to end with Carrington confined in a mental institution, overwhelmed not only by her own terrible imaginings but by her doctor’s sadistic course of treatment. In Down Below she describes her ordeal—in which the agonizing and the marvelous were equally combined—with a startling, almost impersonal precision and without a trace of self-pity. Like Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Down Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.]]> 112 Leonora Carrington 1681370603 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.77 1945 Down Below
author: Leonora Carrington
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/26
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]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

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

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 2 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read
I wanted so badly to DNF the book and call it a day. The first 2 stories were the best part, while the rest felt like an extreme case of mental diarrhea. ]]> 3.87 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: 1-in-dubai, 1-in-dubai-read
review:
I really, really, really wanted to love this book, but it would be a disservice to the time & effort that I spent reading these stories to give it a higher rating.

I wanted so badly to DNF the book and call it a day. The first 2 stories were the best part, while the rest felt like an extreme case of mental diarrhea.
]]> Breakfast of Champions 12502523 Librarian's Note: this is an alternate cover edition - ISBN 10: 0385334206 (ISBN 13: 9780385334204)

In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.]]> 303 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.80 1973 Breakfast of Champions
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
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]]> The Lily in the Valley 201339431 The Lily of the Valley is a tale about love which parodies and depicts French society in the period of the Bourbon Restoration. It concerns the affection—emotionally vibrant but never consummated—between Félix de Vandenesse and Henriette de Mortsauf.]]> 280 Honoré de Balzac 1681377985 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.83 1835 The Lily in the Valley
author: Honoré de Balzac
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1835
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Memoirs of Two Young Wives]]> 36241926
Despite Balzac’s title, these aren’t memoirs; rather, this is an epistolary novel. For some ten years, these two will—enthusiastically if not always faithfully—keep up their correspondence, obeying their vow to tell each other every tiny detail of their strange new lives, comparing their destinies, defending and sometimes bemoaning their choices, detailing the many changes, personal and social, that they undergo. As Balzac writes, “Renée is reason. . . Louise is wildness. . . and both will lose.� Balzac being Balzac, he seems to argue for the virtues of one of these lives over the other; but Balzac being Balzac, that argument remains profoundly ambiguous: “I would,� he once wrote, “rather be killed by Louise than live a long life with Renée.”]]> 249 Honoré de Balzac 1681371251 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.86 1842 The Memoirs of Two Young Wives
author: Honoré de Balzac
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1842
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
review:

]]> Son of Rosemary 24003658
It is the dawn of a new millennium. A time when human hope is shadowed by fear and uncertainty. When a mother is about to be reunited with her son. And when a world in need of a savior will discover a new reason to be afraid.]]> 211 Ira Levin 1472111532 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 2.63 1997 Son of Rosemary
author: Ira Levin
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 2.63
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
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]]> Butcher 197516630 From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a women’s asylum in the nineteenth century, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the world

In this harrowing story based on authentic historical documents, we follow the career of Dr. Silas Weir, “Father of Gyno-Psychiatry,� as he ascends from professional anonymity to national renown. Humiliated by a procedure gone terribly wrong, Weir is forced to take a position at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, where he reigns. There, he is allowed to continue his practice, unchecked for decades, making a name for himself by focusing on women who have been neglected by the state—women he subjects to the most grotesque modes of experimentation. As he begins to establish himself as a pioneer of nineteenth-century surgery, Weir’s ambition is fueled by his obsessive fascination with a young Irish indentured servant named Brigit, who becomes not only Weir’s primary experimental subject, but also the agent of his destruction.

Narrated by Silas Weir’s eldest son, who has repudiated his father’s brutal legacy, Butcher is a unique blend of fiction and fact, a nightmare voyage through the darkest regions of the American psyche conjoined, in its startling conclusion, with unexpected romance. Once again, Joyce Carol Oates has written a spellbinding novel confirming her position as one of our celebrated American visionaries of the imagination.]]> 352 Joyce Carol Oates 0593537777 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.75 2024 Butcher
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/15
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]]> My Husband 63017297 In this suspenseful and darkly funny debut novel, a sophisticated French woman spends her life obsessing over her perfect husband--but can their marriage survive her passionate love?

At forty years old, she has an enviable life: a successful career, stunning looks, a beautiful house in the suburbs, two healthy children, and most importantly, an ideal husband. After fifteen years together, she is still besotted with him. But she's never quite sure that her passion is reciprocated. After all, would a truly infatuated man ever let go of his wife's hand when they're sitting on the couch together?

Determined to keep their relationship perfect, she meticulously prepares for every encounter they have, always taking care to make her actions seem effortless. She watches him attentively, charting every mistake and punishing him accordingly to help him improve. And she tests him--setting traps to make sure that he still loves her just as much as he did when they first met.

Until one day she realizes she may have gone too far . . .

The winner of France's First Novel Prize in 2021, My Husband builds on the premise of hits like Gone Girl and Fates and Furies--how well can you really know your spouse?--and adds the tension and creepy obsession of You. The result is an irresistible read--compelling, tense, and engaging, infused with sly subversive humor, and told in an utterly original voice that makes it unforgettable.

Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan]]> 272 Maud Ventura 0063274825 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.67 2021 My Husband
author: Maud Ventura
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/15
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]]> Piercing 830979 A pulsating psycho-thriller from Ryu Murakami, author of In the Miso Soup

A renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami; a musician, filmmaker (Tokyo Decadence), TV personality, and award-winning author; has gained a cult following in the West. His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, won Japan's most coveted literary prize and sold over a million copies, and his most recent psychosexual thriller, In the Miso Soup, gave readers a further taste of his incredibly agile imagination. In Piercing, Murakami, in his own unique style, explores themes of child abuse and what happens to the voiceless among us, weaving a disturbing, spare tale of two people who find each other and then are forced into hurting each other deeply because of the haunting specter of their own abuse as children.

]]> 185 Ryū Murakami 0747593132 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.58 1994 Piercing
author: Ryū Murakami
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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]]> Upside Down 75305024
Ardith became a single mother when Morgan was seven, after her unfaithful husband died in a helicopter accident. In recent years, she has found amiable companionship with fellow actor Bill West. But Ardith’s comfortable world is turned upside down when she hires a temporary personal assistant, Josh Gray, while Bill is away filming in London. Josh’s rough-around-the-edges persona is the opposite of what Ardith is used to, but an unexpected tragedy brings them closer,Ěýstirring up conflicting feelings in her for this younger man.

In New York, Morgan is swept off her feet by world-renowned TV anchorman Ben Ryan. Though more than two decades her senior, Ben is handsome, charismatic, and just as smitten as Morgan. But when a blackmail scheme puts his career—and their relationship—on the line, Morgan doesn’t know where to turn. Perhaps . . . to her mother? As each woman navigatesĚýan unconventional romance, they cautiously approach each other on newĚýterms and attempt to put aside their past for a new future.

In Upside Down, Danielle Steel tells an unforgettable story of bold choices, second chances, and the hope of reconciliation.]]> 256 Danielle Steel 0593498372 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.76 Upside Down
author: Danielle Steel
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.76
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> The Butler 61066142
Joachim von Hartmann was born and raised in Buenos Aires by his loving German mother, inseparable from his identical twin. When Joachim moves to Paris with his mother in his late teens, his twin stays behind and enters a dark world. Meanwhile, Joachim begins training to be a butler, fascinated by the precision and intense demands, and goes on to work in some of the grandest homes in England. His brother never reappears.

Olivia White has given ten years of her life to her magazine, which failed, taking all her dreams with it. A bequest from her mother allows her a year in Paris to reinvent herself. She needs help setting up a home in a charming Parisian apartment. It is then that her path and Joachim’s cross.

Joachim takes a job working for Olivia as a lark and enjoys the whimsy of a different life for a few weeks, which turn to months as the unlikely employer and employee learn they enjoy working side by side. At the same time, Joachim discovers the family history he never knew: a criminal grandfather who died in prison, the wealthy father who abandoned him, and the dangerous criminal his twin has become. While Olivia struggles to put her life back together, Joachim’s comes apart.

Stripped of their old roles, they strive to discover the truth about each other and themselves, first as employer and employee, then as friends. Their paths no longer sure, they are a man and woman who reach a place where the past doesn’t matter and only what they are living now is true.]]> 336 Danielle Steel 1984821547 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.72 2021 The Butler
author: Danielle Steel
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> War 217163885 Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Woodward tells the revelatory, behind-the-scenes story of three wars—Ukraine, the Middle East and the struggle for the American Presidency.

War is an intimate and sweeping account of one of the most tumultuous periods in presidential politics and American history.

We see President Joe Biden and his top advisers in tense conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. We also see Donald Trump, conducting a shadow presidency and seeking to regain political power.

With unrivaled, inside-the-room reporting, Woodward shows President Biden’s approach to managing the war in Ukraine, the most significant land war in Europe since World War II, and his tortured path to contain the bloody Middle East conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas.

Woodward reveals the extraordinary complexity and consequence of wartime back-channel diplomacy and decision-making to deter the use of nuclear weapons and a rapid slide into World War III.

The raw cage-fight of politics accelerates as Americans prepare to vote in 2024, starting between President Biden and Trump, and ending with the unexpected elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president.

War provides an unvarnished examination of the vice president as she tries to embrace the Biden legacy and policies while beginning to chart a path of her own as a presidential candidate.

Woodward’s reporting once again sets the standard for journalism at its most authoritative and illuminating.]]> 448 Bob Woodward 166805227X Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.19 2024 War
author: Bob Woodward
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

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

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

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.51 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Beautyland 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The 23rd Midnight (Women's Murder Club, #23)]]> 62315603 Ěý
Reporter Cindy Thomas wrote a book that put him on the bestseller list.
Ěý
An obsessed maniac has turned Burke’s true-crime story into a playbook. And is embellishing it with gruesome touches all his own.Ěý
Ěý
Now Lindsay’s tracking an elusive suspect, and the entire Murder Club is facing destruction.]]> 352 James Patterson 0316402788 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.14 2023 The 23rd Midnight (Women's Murder Club, #23)
author: James Patterson
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> Journey into the Past 7938057 Journey into the Past, published here for the first time in America, is a novella that was found among Zweig’s papers after his death. Investigating the strange ways in which love, in spite of everything - time, war, betrayal - can last, Zweig tells the story of Ludwig, an ambitious young man from a modest background who falls in love with the wife of his rich employer. His love is returned, and the couple vow to live together, but then Ludwig is dispatched on business to Mexico, and while he is there the First World War breaks out. With travel and even communication across the Atlantic now shut down, Ludwig makes a new life in the New World. Years later, however, he returns to Germany to find his beloved a widow and their mutual attraction as strong as ever. But is it possible for love to survive precisely as the impossible?]]> 136 Stefan Zweig 1590173678 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.91 1976 Journey into the Past
author: Stefan Zweig
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Dante's Inferno: A Graphic Novel Adaptation]]> 207003533 Acclaimed French animators Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi adapt Dante’s literary classic Inferno in the sweeping, dramatic style that brought The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Fantasia 2000 to life Guided by the poet Virgil, Dante crosses the nine circles of Hell to find his beloved, Beatrice, in Paradise. Along the way, he must recognize and reject each of the incarnations of sin. In each circle of Hell, Dante confronts both sinners and demons, from Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Achilles, and Paris, whose loves were famously their downfall, to the Greek Furies and Medusa, to heretics like Epicurus, whose teachings claimed that the soul died with the body, now forced to writhe in a flaming tomb for eternity. Each layer of Hell reveals monsters, gods, historical and mythological kings, philosophers, queens, and hordes of the miserable, faceless damned, all culminating in a confrontation with Lucifer himself. Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi make this famously dense literary classic accessible without distorting it and betraying the spirit of the Italian genius. They deftly translate it into comics while taking care to preserve the heart of the a taste for excess, dramatic tension, and the inevitable darkness of the subject matter. Literary aficionados will appreciate this decadent graphic novel adaptation, which does not seek to sand down the source material. Likewise, adults whose imaginations were fueled by films like Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame as children, which the Brizzi brothers animated sequences for, will be swept up in this lushly illustrated adult fable, unfettered by the demands of corporate animation studios.]]> 160 Paul Brizzi 1419776754 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.84 2023 Dante's Inferno: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
author: Paul Brizzi
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Hot Mess (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #19)]]> 205788239 In Hot Mess, book 19 of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series from #1 international bestselling author Jeff Kinney, Greg Heffley is in for a particularly awkward summer with his whole family.

The pressure is building for Greg Heffley, who discovers that when you mix heaps of family, a tiny beach house, and sweltering heat, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Speaking of recipes—the secret ingredients behind Gramma’s famous meatballs have been closely guarded for years. Can Greg unpack all of his family’s mysteries before their vacation is over? Or will he just stir the pot?

This sidesplittingly relatable summer story is the funniest Wimpy Kid book yet!]]> 218 Jeff Kinney 1419766953 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 4 4.16 2024 Hot Mess (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #19)
author: Jeff Kinney
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: 1-in-dubai, signed-by-the-author, 1-in-dubai-read
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]]> A Gift for Dying 44493961
That is, until he meets Kassie.

Because she claims to have a terrible gift - with one look into your eyes, she can see when and how you will die.

Adam doesn't believe her.

But then a serial killer starts wreaking havoc across the city, and only Kassie seems to know where he'll strike next.

Against all his intuition, Adam starts to think Kassie might be telling the truth.

He just doesn't realise how dangerous this trust might be . . .]]> 480 M.J. Arlidge 1405932503 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 3.77 2019 A Gift for Dying
author: M.J. Arlidge
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Truth or Dare (D.i. Helen Grace)]]> 58684455 BUT WHO IS PULLING THE STRINGS?

THE CHILLING THRILLER FROM THE MIND OF MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER M. J. ARLIDGE

A crimewave sweeps through the city and no-one is safe. An arson at the docks. A carjacking gone wrong. A murder in a country park. What connects all these crimes without causes, which leave no clues?

Detective Inspector Helen Grace faces the rising tide of cases which threatens to drown the city. But each crime is just a piece of a puzzle which is falling into place.

And when it becomes clear just how twisted and ingenious this web of crime is, D.I. Grace will realise that it may be impossible to stop it . . .

A RELENTLESS, NAIL-BITING MYSTERY FROM THE MASTER OF THE KILLER THRILLER.

* * * * *

PRAISE FOR M. J. ARLIDGE AND THE HELEN GRACE THRILLERS

'Chilling' THE TIMES

'Gripping' SUNDAY MIRROR

'Addictive' EXPRESS

'Truly excellent' THE SUN

'Amazing' RICHARD MADELEY

'Mesmerizing' LISA GARDNER

'Chills to the bone' DAILY MAIL

'This is going to be as big as Jo Nesbo' JUDY FINNIGAN

'Helen Grace is one of the greatest heroes to come along in years' JEFFERY DEAVER]]> 480 M.J. Arlidge 1409188477 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 3.98 2021 Truth or Dare (D.i. Helen Grace)
author: M.J. Arlidge
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> Eye For An Eye 175740985 UNTIL NOW...

'Emily' is a devoted single mother.
'Jack' starts a new job in a new town.
'Russell' may be falling in love.

They all share the same secret:
none of them are who they say they are.

They are among only nine criminals in the UK who have been granted lifelong anonymity, for their own safety, because of their terrible crimes.

But what if someone exposed their true identities to the families of their victims, who are desperate for revenge?

Probation officer Olivia Campbell is caught in the crossfire of this unprecedented crisis - and as the hunt for the mole behind it all intensifies, so too does the search for the vigilante killers let loose by the leaks...

Everyone is a suspect. Anyone could be a killer.
Who deserves justice? And who gets to decide?]]> 484 M.J. Arlidge 1398708208 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 4.02 2023 Eye For An Eye
author: M.J. Arlidge
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> Afterlives 59088639
Another young man returns at the same time. Hamza was not stolen for the war, but sold into it; he has grown up at the right hand of an officer whose protection has marked him life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only work and security � and the love of the beautiful Afiya.

As fate knots these young people together, as they live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away…]]> 275 Abdulrazak Gurnah Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 3.72 2020 Afterlives
author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> By the Sea 77818
Meanwhile, Latif Mahmud, someone intimately connected with Saleh's past, lives quietly alone in his London flat. When Saleh and Latif meet in an English seaside town, a story is unravelled. It is a story of love, betrayal, of seduction and of possession, and of a people desperately trying to find stability amidst the maelstrom of their times.]]> 245 Abdulrazak Gurnah 0747557853 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 3.86 2001 By the Sea
author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> An Orchestra of Minorities 51836904
Set across Nigeria and Cyprus, An Orchestra of Minorities, written in the mythic style of the Igbo tradition, weaves a heart-wrenching tale about fate versus free will.]]> 528 Chigozie Obioma 0349143188 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 3.66 2019 An Orchestra of Minorities
author: Chigozie Obioma
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> The Road to the Country 214336998
"Chigozie Obioma is that rare an original. His world is a mix of the real and the folkloric, and his writing sounds like no one else’s." � Wall Street Journal

At first the vision is grainy—like something seen through wet glass. But slowly it clears, and there appears the figure of a man.

When Kunle's younger brother disappears as his country explodes in civil war, Kunle must set out on an impossible rescue mission. Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, The Road to the Country is the epic story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt and shame who must go to war to free himself. Kunle's search for his brother becomes a journey of atonement that will see Kunle conscripted into the breakaway Biafran army and forced to fight a war he hardly understands, all while navigating the prophecies of a local Seer, he who marks Kunle as an Abami Eda —one who will die and return to life.

The story of a young man seeking redemption in a country on fire, Chigozie Obioma’s novel is an odyssey of brotherhood, love, and unimaginable courage set during one of the most devastating conflicts in the history of Africa. Intertwining myth and realism into a thrilling, inspired, and emotionally powerful novel, The Road to the Country is Chigozie Obioma's masterpiece.]]> 384 Chigozie Obioma 1529153468 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 3.41 2024 The Road to the Country
author: Chigozie Obioma
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> Nestlings 65212029 Nat Cassidy is at his razor-sharp best again with his horror novel Nestlings, which harnesses the creeping paranoia of Rosemary's Baby and the urban horror of 'Salem's Lot, set in an exclusive New York City residential building.

Ana and Reid need a break. The horrifically complicated birth of their first child has left Ana paralyzed, bitter, and struggling―with mobility, with her relationship with Reid, with resentment for her baby. Reid dismisses disturbing events and Ana’s deep unease and paranoia, but he can't explain the needle-like bite marks on their baby.]]> 293 Nat Cassidy 1250265258 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.81 2023 Nestlings
author: Nat Cassidy
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
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]]> Diavola 209264836 White Lotus meets Hereditary in this uproarious and unsettling dissection of a dysfunctional family and their ghosts, both literal and metaphorical. Perfect for fans of Grady Hendrix and Ronald Malfi

Anna only has one rule for the annual Pace family vacations: tread lightly, and survive.

It isn’t easy when she’s the only one who doesn’t seem to fit in. Her twin brother Benny goes with the flow so much he’s practically dissolved, and her high-strung older sister Nicole is so used to everyone―including her blandly docile husband and two young daughters―falling in line that Anna often ends up chastised for simply asking a question. Her Mom is baffled by Anna’s life choices (why waste her artistic talent at an ad agency?), and her Dad―well, he just wants a little peace and quiet.

The gorgeous villa outside a remote Tuscan town seems like the perfect place to endure so much family time―not to mention Benny’s demanding new boyfriend, Christopher. If her family becomes too much to handle, then at least Anna can wander off to a wine tasting or lose herself in an art gallery. That is, until strange things start to happen―strange noises at night, food rotting within hours, dreams that feel more like memories. Then, the unsettling warnings from the locals: don’t open the tower door.

But Anna does open it. And what she releases threatens to devour her family―that is, if her family doesn’t tear itself apart first.]]> 336 Jennifer Marie Thorne 1835410022 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.83 2024 Diavola
author: Jennifer Marie Thorne
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The City and Its Uncertain Walls]]> 205358060 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library � a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.

A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times.]]> 464 Haruki Murakami 1787304477 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 3.76 2023 The City and Its Uncertain Walls
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> One Day 220390405
It’s 1988 and Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley have only just met. But after only one day together, they cannot stop thinking about one another. Over twenty years, snapshots of that relationship are revealed on the same day—July 15th—of each year. Dex and Em face squabbles and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. And as the true meaning of this one crucial day is revealed, they must come to grips with the nature of love and life itself.
--penguinrandomhouse]]> 496 David Nicholls 139974089X Medhat The Fanatic Reader 0 to-read, 1-in-dubai 4.06 2009 One Day
author: David Nicholls
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: to-read, 1-in-dubai
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]]> The Dark Man 17925150
i have ridden rails...

More than forty years after Stephen King first wrote his breathtaking poem "The Dark Man," Glenn Chadbourne set out to answer those questions in this World's First Edition hardcover featuring more than 70 full-page illustrations from the talented artist behind The Secretary of Dreams.

i have slept in glaring swamps...

This Cemetery Dance Publications hardcover is a true marriage of words and art, with Chadbourne pulling the images from King's imagination and illustrating them in magnificent detail. This incredible blending of King's words with Chadbourne's art creates a unique page turning experience you can return to again and again, always finding new details hidden on every page. You'll discover hidden layers and mysterious secrets for years to come.

i am a dark man...

So who is the Dark Man and why is he traveling the country? The answers are terrifying....]]> 88 Stephen King 1587674211 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 5 Very eerie. 4.13 1969 The Dark Man
author: Stephen King
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: 1-in-dubai, my-stephen-king-collection, 1-in-dubai-read, read-stephen-king-books
review:
Very eerie.
]]> <![CDATA[The Mystery of the Blue Train (Hercule Poirot, #6)]]> 16335
When the Blue Train stops, the jewel is missing, and the woman is found dead in her compartment. It's the perfect mystery, filled with passion, greed, deceit, and confusion.

Is Hercule Poirot the perfect detective to solve it?]]> 317 Agatha Christie 1579126952 Medhat The Fanatic Reader 3 3.84 1928 The Mystery of the Blue Train (Hercule Poirot, #6)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Medhat The Fanatic Reader
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1928
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: 1-in-dubai, 0-cinema-stack, 1-in-dubai-read, my-read-agatha-christie-collection, my-agatha-christie-collection, my-favorite-agatha-christie-books
review:

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