emma's bookshelf: read en-US Sat, 26 Apr 2025 14:22:45 -0700 60 emma's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Vladivostok Circus 198164651
Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of art college in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar.

As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok winds down, the windy port city deserted as performers head home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas.

What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion. Set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean, Vladivostok Circus explores collaboration, creativity and belonging, all the while immersing the reader in Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.

‘Dusapin’s beautiful prose, with imagery both metallic and mineral, insinuates its way towards a delicate empathy between the generations, as well as examining the confusion that comes with dual nationality, and the lifetime loss that is exile.� Irish Times

‘Fragmentation, recurring imagery and a flair for evoking atmosphere so effective that lassitude seems to seep through the pages recalls Deborah Levy’s writing.� Guardian]]> 224 Elisa Shua Dusapin 191419831X emma 4 me about circuses in books: :)

dusapin'sbooks are atmospheric, immersive, but unlike many books that carry those descriptors, there's nothing fantastical about their settings. they're often mundane, populated by drudgery and disappointment, and we're left frantically wondering the same question that haunts each of her protagonists: why am i here?

in spite of its unusual setup � a costume designer in nowheresville russia attempting to put together looks for a trio of gravity-defying gymnasts in an off-season circus � this book has the same query at its core.

nathalie doesn't know why she's found herself in any place she's ever been, least of all this random-ass one. and yet, just as the artists have to trust each other not to fall, she has to learn how totrust where she is and where she's going.

nothing much happens in this book, as with all of dusapin's, but it's a subtle, clarifying novel about so many of the weirdest parts of being alive: relationships that feel all-important but are snuffed out by time, the haunting desire for purpose, the phenomenon of people eating absurd foods on public transit. that is not nothing.

bottom line: not her strongest, but i enjoyed a lot here.]]> 3.45 2024 Vladivostok Circus
author: Elisa Shua Dusapin
name: emma
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: literary-fiction, non-ya, diverse, authors-of-color, 3-and-a-half-stars, recommend, to-buy, reviewed
review:
me about circuses in real life: :/
me about circuses in books: :)

dusapin'sbooks are atmospheric, immersive, but unlike many books that carry those descriptors, there's nothing fantastical about their settings. they're often mundane, populated by drudgery and disappointment, and we're left frantically wondering the same question that haunts each of her protagonists: why am i here?

in spite of its unusual setup � a costume designer in nowheresville russia attempting to put together looks for a trio of gravity-defying gymnasts in an off-season circus � this book has the same query at its core.

nathalie doesn't know why she's found herself in any place she's ever been, least of all this random-ass one. and yet, just as the artists have to trust each other not to fall, she has to learn how totrust where she is and where she's going.

nothing much happens in this book, as with all of dusapin's, but it's a subtle, clarifying novel about so many of the weirdest parts of being alive: relationships that feel all-important but are snuffed out by time, the haunting desire for purpose, the phenomenon of people eating absurd foods on public transit. that is not nothing.

bottom line: not her strongest, but i enjoyed a lot here.
]]> Finding Grace 215570667
Years later Tom makes a decision that ripples through their families' lives in ways he could not have foreseen. As the consequences of that fateful choice unfold, two women's paths become irrevocably intertwined. But when old love clashes with new, who will be left standing? And what happens when your secrets come back to haunt you?]]> 336 Loretta Rothschild 1250381827 emma 0 4.10 2025 Finding Grace
author: Loretta Rothschild
name: emma
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: arc, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, non-ya, literary-fiction, to-read
review:
the synopsis did not prepare me for the first chapter of this book
]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

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

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore emma 0
(picking this up for a substack post in which i let you guys choose my reads)]]> 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: emma
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: library, mystery-thriller-horror-etc, non-ya, currently-reading
review:
i'm constantly running behind bandwagons, approximately 4-12 months late

(picking this up for a substack post in which i let you guys choose my reads)
]]> Bitter Texas Honey 216522700 The Royal Tenenbaums meets Fleabag in this hilarious and dizzyingly smart debut about an over-the-top evangelical Texan family—and the daughter at its center racing to finish her very important novel before her ex-boyfriend finishes his.

It’s 2011, and twenty-three-year-old Joan West is not like the rest of her liberal peers in Austin, nor is she quite like her Tea Party Republican, God-loving family. Sure, she listens to conservative talk radio on her way to and from her internship at the Capitol. But she was once an America-hating leftist who kissed girls at parties, refused to shave, and had plenty of emotionless sex with jazz school friends—that is until a drug-induced mania forced her to return to her senses.

But above all Joan is a writer, an artist, or at least she desperately wants to be. Always in search of inspiration for her novel, she catalogs every detail of her relationships with men—including with her former muse slash current arch nemesis Roberto—and mines her very dysfunctional family for material. But when her beloved, credit card debt–racked cousin Wyatt finds himself in crisis, Joan’s worldview is cracked open and everything comes crashing down.

Funny, whip-smart, and often tender, Bitter Texas Honey introduces us to the unforgettable and indefatigable Joan West: ambitious, full of contradictions, utterly herself. As she wades through it all—addiction, politics, loss, and, notably, her father’s string of increasingly bizarre girlfriends—we witness her confront what it means to be a person, and an artist, in the world.]]> 336 Ashley Whitaker 0593476158 emma 2
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.58 2025 Bitter Texas Honey
author: Ashley Whitaker
name: emma
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: literary-fiction, non-ya, arc, 2-stars, to-review, unpopular-opinion, eh
review:
THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS meets FLEABAG??? this must be for me specifically

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> A Family Matter 220161203 An exquisite and revelatory debut novel about the devastating consequences of one woman’s affair.

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

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

A Family Matter is a heartbreaking and hopeful exploration of love and loss, intimacy and injustice, custody and care, and whether it is possible to heal from the wounds of the past in the changed world of today.]]> 240 Claire Lynch 1668078899 emma 0
(thanks to the publisher for the arc)]]> 4.29 A Family Matter
author: Claire Lynch
name: emma
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: arc, from-publisher-author, literary-fiction, non-ya, owned, tbr-owned, tbr-arc, currently-reading
review:
constantly seeking out character-driven irish literature

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)
]]> <![CDATA[Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life]]> 50887097 A wondrous debut from an extraordinary new voice in nonfiction, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a dark and astonishing tale of love, chaos, scientific obsession, and—possibly—even murder.

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.

Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.

When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool�a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.

Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don’t Exist reads like a fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.]]> 225 Lulu Miller emma 0 to-read, non-ya, nonfiction 4.15 2020 Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
author: Lulu Miller
name: emma
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, non-ya, nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters]]> 16200
*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet]]> 208 Mark Dunn 0385722435 emma 0 to-read 3.93 2001 Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters
author: Mark Dunn
name: emma
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Everlasting Things]]> 59808042
Lush, sensuous, and deeply romantic, The Book of Everlasting Things is the story of two lovers and two nations, split apart by forces beyond their control, yet bound by love and memory. Filled with exquisite descriptions of perfume and calligraphy, spanning continents and generations, Aanchal Malhotra’s debut novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.]]> 480 Aanchal Malhotra 1250802024 emma 0 to-read, non-ya, historical 4.13 2022 The Book of Everlasting Things
author: Aanchal Malhotra
name: emma
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, non-ya, historical
review:

]]> Memoirs of Hadrian 12172 347 Marguerite Yourcenar 0374529264 emma 0 to-read, historical, non-ya 4.27 1951 Memoirs of Hadrian
author: Marguerite Yourcenar
name: emma
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1951
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, historical, non-ya
review:

]]> The Safekeep 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 emma 0 to-read, historical, non-ya 4.05 2024 The Safekeep
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: emma
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, historical, non-ya
review:

]]> Shark Heart 62919375
At first, Wren internally resists her husband’s fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis changes? Then, a glimpse of Lewis’s developing carnivorous nature activates long-repressed memories for Wren, whose story vacillates between her childhood living on a houseboat in Oklahoma, her time with her college ex-girlfriend, and her unusual friendship with a woman pregnant with twin birds.]]> 416 Emily Habeck 1668006499 emma 0 3.95 2023 Shark Heart
author: Emily Habeck
name: emma
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, magical-realist-urban-whatever, non-ya
review:

]]> Patricia Wants to Cuddle 59093587 The contestants of a reality television dating show compete for love—and their lives—in this pulse-pounding and viciously funny fiction debut from the GLAAD Award-winning author of Real Queer America.

When the final four women in competition for an aloof, if somewhat sleazy, bachelor's heart arrive on a mysterious island in the Pacific Northwest, they mentally prepare themselves for another week of extreme sleep deprivation, invasive interviews, and of course, the salacious drama that viewers nationwide tune in to eagerly devour. Each woman came on 'The Catch' for her own reasons—brand sponsorships, followers, and yes, even love—and they've all got their eyes steadfastly trained on their respective prizes.

Enter Patricia, a temperamental, but woefully misunderstood local, living alone in the dark, verdant woods and desperate to forge a connection of her own. As the contestants perform for the cameras that surround them, Patricia watches from her place in the shadows, a queer specter haunting the bombastic display of heterosexuality before her. But when the cast and crew at last make her acquaintance atop the island's tallest and most desolate peak, they soon realize that if they're to have any hope of making it to the next Elimination Event, they'll first have to survive the night.

A whirlwind romp careening toward a last-girl-standing conclusion and a scathing indictment of contemporary American media culture, Patricia Wants to Cuddle is also a love story: between star-crossed lesbians who rise above their intolerant town, a deeply ambivalent woman and her budding self-actualization, and a chosen family of misfit islanders forging community against all odds.]]> 256 Samantha Allen 163893004X emma 0 3.52 2022 Patricia Wants to Cuddle
author: Samantha Allen
name: emma
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, lgbt-plus, mystery-thriller-horror-etc, non-ya
review:

]]> Friends of the Museum 214152164 Coworkers at a legendary but troubled New York City museum struggle with issues large and small over the course of one extraordinary day in this whip-smart “marvel� (Mona Awad, bestselling author of Bunny) of a novel in the vein of The White Lotus.

When Diane Schwebe, the director of a major New York museum, is awakened in the early morning by a text message from the museum’s lawyer, it is the start of a twenty-four hour roller-coaster ride.

Diane has sacrificed many things in her life to help the fading institution stave off irrelevance and financial ruin. In this battle, she’s surrounded by her stalwart her enigmatic and tireless personal assistant, Chris; the museum’s trusty head of security, Shay; and its general counsel, Henry—a man whose ability to weasel his way out of a jam is matched only by his capacity to avoid learning anything from the experience.

Orbiting Diane is a motley assortment of museum employees, each on the precipice of collapse or among them a line cook staring down a huge opportunity he’s not sure he wants; a costume curator stuck in an inescapable rut; and the ambivalent curator of the museum’s film program, whose first day on the job might very well be his last.

On this day of the museum’s annual gala, every plate that Diane has kept spinning will fall and by daybreak, someone will be dead.

Wise, surprising, and darkly funny, Friends of the Museum is a kaleidoscopic tragicomedy that surges along to the unstoppable tick of the clock, leaving you on the edge of your seat until the final second.]]> 496 Heather McGowan 1668031272 emma 2
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the arc)]]> 3.09 2025 Friends of the Museum
author: Heather McGowan
name: emma
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: non-ya, literary-fiction, arc, 2-stars, to-review, nope, owned
review:
i want to be friends with a museum

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the arc)
]]> Beartown (Beartown, #1) 33413128
People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.]]> 432 Fredrik Backman emma 2
sorry to my friend but i should've stuck with the first thing.

i have absolutely no idea what this book was trying to say.

this is kind of insane even on the surface, because this book is 432 pages long and has a pretty simple subject: Bad Thing Happens In Hockey Town.

it's even more insane when you consider that conservatively 50% of this book is made up of truisms. "Because that's what friendship is" to finish a chapter. "You never stop being a parent" in the middle of a paragraph. "Every day can mark a minute or a lifetime depending on who you spend it with" as a dramatic start to a scene that is all of 2 pages long and in truth has nothing more original or significant in it than that.

for a book with so much to say about friendship and violence and love and community and family and hockey, i came away feeling like it'd said very little at all.

bottom line: this is a book of mugs.]]> 4.27 2016 Beartown (Beartown, #1)
author: Fredrik Backman
name: emma
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/19
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: contemporary, non-ya, 2-stars, unpopular-opinion, nope, reviewed
review:
nothing could have convinced me i would like this book. then my friend mentioned liking it 1 time and suddenly i believed i would fall in love with it.

sorry to my friend but i should've stuck with the first thing.

i have absolutely no idea what this book was trying to say.

this is kind of insane even on the surface, because this book is 432 pages long and has a pretty simple subject: Bad Thing Happens In Hockey Town.

it's even more insane when you consider that conservatively 50% of this book is made up of truisms. "Because that's what friendship is" to finish a chapter. "You never stop being a parent" in the middle of a paragraph. "Every day can mark a minute or a lifetime depending on who you spend it with" as a dramatic start to a scene that is all of 2 pages long and in truth has nothing more original or significant in it than that.

for a book with so much to say about friendship and violence and love and community and family and hockey, i came away feeling like it'd said very little at all.

bottom line: this is a book of mugs.
]]> Heart the Lover 228110489 “Lily King is one of our great literary treasures.”—Madeline Miller

From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, loss, and the lasting impact of first love

You knew I’d write a book about you someday.

Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.

In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.

Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.

Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.]]> 256 Lily King 0802165176 emma 0 4.67 2025 Heart the Lover
author: Lily King
name: emma
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, arc, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, non-ya, literary-fiction
review:

]]> The Enchanted April 62026009 336 Elizabeth von Arnim 0241619742 emma 0
this is another installment of project long classics, in which i read intimidating paragons of literature in small bits over the course of a month in order to make them less scary, but really so i can keep buying penguin clothbounds and make puns.

in this case, this book is not long, nor is there a penguin clothbound edition of it (update: YES THERE IS NEVER MIND ABOUT EVERYTHING), nor is my title a pun (it's mild wordplay at best). but i want to read this book, so we're doing it anyway.


CHAPTER ONE
i love books about seasons, i love short and under-read classics, i love nyrb editions, i love reading about people traveling to italy, i love when women cast off their burdens like the extra in mamma mia who throws her bundle of sticks away during dancing queen. this seems like a recipe for success.


CHAPTER TWO
you do not need to convince me that it is the god-given right of woman to go on a girls' trip to the mediterranean. but if you did, i'd be sold. this lady is sad as hell!


CHAPTER THREE
they want these girls paying the equivalent of six thousand american dollars for a month in this washed up castle...i'm sick rn. death to landlords.


CHAPTER FOUR
"Also things happen so awkwardly. It really is astonishing, how awkwardly they happen." my worldview summed up.


CHAPTER FIVE
we are in a medieval italian castle and our main characters are kissing. enchanting!


CHAPTER SIX
i fear i may never want this book or this april or this book about april to end.


CHAPTER SEVEN
well, i do wish that mrs. fisher and lady caroline were more of a vibe. but i guess we can't be a group of best friends from day 1.


CHAPTER EIGHT
i am trying really hard to be annoyed by lady caroline but it might be impossible. who could hate a hot girl who wants to be left alone to think depressing thoughts?


CHAPTER NINE
i can't say i'm having the same problem with mrs. fisher. only a truly evil person could hate pasta.


CHAPTER TEN
"Well, let her be peculiar if she likes. A woman with her looks can be any damned thing she pleases." i have never been more jealous of a statement made behind someone's back in my life.


CHAPTER ELEVEN
wait...why are we inviting men on the girls' trip??! this is like when your one friend keeps bringing her boring boyfriend to dinner. i expected more from my ladies.


CHAPTER TWELVE
i feel i am being prevented purposefully from fully loving any of these characters. i want to appreciate mrs wilkins and her power of mundane prophecy, but she just invited her stupid husband. i want to love lady caroline, a perpetually irritated hot girl with the nickname "scrap," but she keeps snapping at everybody. mrs fisher is pure evil and mrs arbuthnot is too quiet and secretive. we're halfway through! let's get it together!


CHAPTER THIRTEEN
you guys are bumming me out! LIVE A LITTLE!


CHAPTER FOURTEEN
this guy hasn't even been here 15 minutes and he's already blown up the stove and harassed the guests and tried to pick up a client for his law office while in just a towel. this is why i said no husbands.


CHAPTER SIXTEEN
all of the characters may be charmed by this man but i refuse to be.]]> 3.99 1922 The Enchanted April
author: Elizabeth von Arnim
name: emma
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1922
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: non-ya, literary-fiction, classics, library, currently-reading, project-long-classics
review:
welcome to...THE ENCHANTED APRIL.

this is another installment of project long classics, in which i read intimidating paragons of literature in small bits over the course of a month in order to make them less scary, but really so i can keep buying penguin clothbounds and make puns.

in this case, this book is not long, nor is there a penguin clothbound edition of it (update: YES THERE IS NEVER MIND ABOUT EVERYTHING), nor is my title a pun (it's mild wordplay at best). but i want to read this book, so we're doing it anyway.


CHAPTER ONE
i love books about seasons, i love short and under-read classics, i love nyrb editions, i love reading about people traveling to italy, i love when women cast off their burdens like the extra in mamma mia who throws her bundle of sticks away during dancing queen. this seems like a recipe for success.


CHAPTER TWO
you do not need to convince me that it is the god-given right of woman to go on a girls' trip to the mediterranean. but if you did, i'd be sold. this lady is sad as hell!


CHAPTER THREE
they want these girls paying the equivalent of six thousand american dollars for a month in this washed up castle...i'm sick rn. death to landlords.


CHAPTER FOUR
"Also things happen so awkwardly. It really is astonishing, how awkwardly they happen." my worldview summed up.


CHAPTER FIVE
we are in a medieval italian castle and our main characters are kissing. enchanting!


CHAPTER SIX
i fear i may never want this book or this april or this book about april to end.


CHAPTER SEVEN
well, i do wish that mrs. fisher and lady caroline were more of a vibe. but i guess we can't be a group of best friends from day 1.


CHAPTER EIGHT
i am trying really hard to be annoyed by lady caroline but it might be impossible. who could hate a hot girl who wants to be left alone to think depressing thoughts?


CHAPTER NINE
i can't say i'm having the same problem with mrs. fisher. only a truly evil person could hate pasta.


CHAPTER TEN
"Well, let her be peculiar if she likes. A woman with her looks can be any damned thing she pleases." i have never been more jealous of a statement made behind someone's back in my life.


CHAPTER ELEVEN
wait...why are we inviting men on the girls' trip??! this is like when your one friend keeps bringing her boring boyfriend to dinner. i expected more from my ladies.


CHAPTER TWELVE
i feel i am being prevented purposefully from fully loving any of these characters. i want to appreciate mrs wilkins and her power of mundane prophecy, but she just invited her stupid husband. i want to love lady caroline, a perpetually irritated hot girl with the nickname "scrap," but she keeps snapping at everybody. mrs fisher is pure evil and mrs arbuthnot is too quiet and secretive. we're halfway through! let's get it together!


CHAPTER THIRTEEN
you guys are bumming me out! LIVE A LITTLE!


CHAPTER FOURTEEN
this guy hasn't even been here 15 minutes and he's already blown up the stove and harassed the guests and tried to pick up a client for his law office while in just a towel. this is why i said no husbands.


CHAPTER SIXTEEN
all of the characters may be charmed by this man but i refuse to be.
]]> <![CDATA[This Could Be Us (Skyland, #2)]]> 182762109 fixeseverything. She’s a domestic goddess who's never met a party she couldn't host or a charge she couldn't lead. The one with all the answers and the perfect vinaigrettefor that summer salad. But none of her varied talents can save her when catastrophe strikes, and the life she built with the man who was supposed to be her forever, goespoofin a cloud of betrayal and disillusion.

But there is no time to pout or sulk, or even grieve the life she lost.She's toobusy keeping a roof over her daughters' heads and food on the table.And in the process of saving them all, Soledad rediscovers herself. From the ashes of a life burned to the ground, something bold and new can rise.

But then an unlikely man enters the picture—the forbidden one, the one she shouldn't want but can't seem to resist. She's lost it all before and refuses to repeat hermistakes. Can she trust him? Can she trustherself?

After all she's lost . . .and found . . .can she be brave enough to make room for what could be?]]> 416 Kennedy Ryan 1538706822 emma 4
and it actually worked.

the third book isn't even out yet and i'm already sad this series has to end.

this was such an emotional read. it's supposedly a romance, but that love story was the least of our worries. the relationships between our protagonist, soledad, and her daughters, sisters, and friends were so glorious.

i wasn't sure if i would like this book much at the beginning � i really dislike when romancesbegin with the main character in a doomed relationship with a piece of sh*t with no redeeming qualities. it felt like soledad's ex husband had a comical number of negative attributes, when this would have been a believable and compelling story with one or two. as it is i'm like...girl! what the hell did you see in him in the first place.

but still. other than that, this very complicated love story didn't cut any corners. it was so sweet and such a rewarding read. if not quite as good (FOR ME) as the first one.

bottom line: let's just add more and more women to this friend group so this series never ends.]]> 4.37 2024 This Could Be Us (Skyland, #2)
author: Kennedy Ryan
name: emma
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: authors-of-color, diverse, romance, non-ya, 4-stars, to-buy, recommend, reviewed
review:
don't jinx me. i'm chasing the high of finally actually liking a romance.

and it actually worked.

the third book isn't even out yet and i'm already sad this series has to end.

this was such an emotional read. it's supposedly a romance, but that love story was the least of our worries. the relationships between our protagonist, soledad, and her daughters, sisters, and friends were so glorious.

i wasn't sure if i would like this book much at the beginning � i really dislike when romancesbegin with the main character in a doomed relationship with a piece of sh*t with no redeeming qualities. it felt like soledad's ex husband had a comical number of negative attributes, when this would have been a believable and compelling story with one or two. as it is i'm like...girl! what the hell did you see in him in the first place.

but still. other than that, this very complicated love story didn't cut any corners. it was so sweet and such a rewarding read. if not quite as good (FOR ME) as the first one.

bottom line: let's just add more and more women to this friend group so this series never ends.
]]> Favorite Daughter 216970882 A GOODREADS HOTTEST DEBUT

“So stunningly fresh and darkly funny that every page surprised me. Morgan Dick doesn’t just craft a clever plot—she writes brilliantly about grief and addiction and inheritance and, yes, redemption.�
—Catherine Newman, author of the New York Times bestseller Sandwich

A darkly funny debut novel about two estranged sisters who are unknowingly thrown together by their problematic father’s dying wish

Mickey and Arlo are half sisters. But they’ve never spoken and never met. Arlo adored her father—but always lived in the shadow of his magnetic personality and burdensome vices. Meanwhile, their father abandoned ​Mickey and her mother years ago, and Mickey has hated him since. When she receives news of her father’s passing, Mickey is shocked to learn that he’s left her his not-inconsiderable fortune. The catch: Mickey must attend a series of therapy sessions before the money can be released.

Unbeknownst to either woman, the psychologist Mickey’s father has ensured she meets with is her half sister, Arlo. Having cared for her beloved father on his sickbed, Arlo is devastated to discover he’s cut her out of his will. She resolves to learn where the money went and why.

Working together as therapist and patient—with no idea that they’re in fact sisters—Arlo and Mickey soon get under each other’s skin. Arlo, eager to outrun a mistake in her professional past, is keen to redeem herself with her new client. But Mickey is far from the model patient. As Mickey’s personal and professional lives spiral out of control and Arlo uncovers the truth about who her new patient really is, the sisters find themselves on a crash course that will break—or save—them both.]]> 344 Morgan Dick 0593832264 emma 0 3.87 2025 Favorite Daughter
author: Morgan Dick
name: emma
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, arc, from-publisher-author, non-ya, literary-fiction
review:
i didn't even know my parents wrote a book about me
]]> I Leave It Up to You 214269353 From the award-winning author of Flux comes a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?

A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.

Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all. As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 AM fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night's pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James—he embraces new roles, That of romantic interest to the male nurse who took care of him throughout, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.

There is value in the joyous rhythms of this once-abandoned life. But second chances are an even messier business than running a restaurant, and the lure of a self-determined path might, once again, prove too hard to resist.

Why do we run from those we love, and why do we still love those who run from us? A highly entertaining and poignant story about second chances and self-discovery, I Leave It Up to You pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing after the ground gives way.]]> 311 Jinwoo Chong 0593727053 emma 0
(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 4.03 2025 I Leave It Up to You
author: Jinwoo Chong
name: emma
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: tbr-arc, tbr-owned, arc, authors-of-color, diverse, sci-fi, non-ya, currently-reading
review:
i'm ready to take my love of sushi to the next level (reading about it)

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> <![CDATA[Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family]]> 220160600 In the style of Crying in H Mart and Minor Feelings, filmmaker Jill Damatac blends memoir, food writing, and colonial history as she cooks her way through recipes from her native-born Philippines and shares stories of her undocumented family in America.

Jill Damatac left the US in 2015 after living there as an undocumented immigrant with her family for twenty-two years. America was the only home she knew, where invisibility had become her identity—her mother tongue and indigenous roots long buried—and where poverty, domestic violence, ill health, and xenophobia were everyday experiences. First traveling to her native Philippines, she eventually settled in London, England, where she was free to pursue an education at Cambridge University, fully investigate her roots, and process what happened to her and her family; after nine years, she was granted British citizenship.

Interweaving forgotten colonial history and long-buried indigenous traditions, Damatac takes us through her time in America, cooking her way through Filipino recipes in her kitchen as she searches for a sense of self and renewed possibility. With emotional intelligence, clarity, and grace, Dirty Kitchen explores fractured memories to ask questions of identity, colonialism, immigration, belonging, and to find ways in which the ritual, tradition, and comfort of food, can answer them.



RAVES AND REVIEWS:


“A hard journey to freedom. Damatac weaves history, mythology, and recipes into an affecting memoir of abuse, grief, longing, and frustration.�
—Kirkus Reviews


"Dirty Kitchen is not only an astonishing memoir—it is a bravura juggling act of genre, and a vivid testament to resilience. An absolute marvel."
—Jose Antonio Vargas, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen


“Part personal memoir, part cultural analysis, and all heart, Dirty Kitchen invites us into Jill Damatac's searing journey from decades of undocumented invisibility through the slow and recursive process of healing. Vulnerable and gripping, Damatac's debut explores what it means to reclaim one's life from the jaws of generational trauma and colonialism, while honoring the great ancestral gifts of Filipino heritage. Dirty Kitchen heralds the arrival of an unforgettable new talent. This book will make you cry, laugh, and hunger for more, and Damatac's wisdoms will leave you forever changed.�
—Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country


“There's a blue fire to Jill Damatac's way with words. In Dirty Kitchen, history itself burns sapphire bright.�
—Saeed Jones, author of Alive at the End of the World and How We Fight For Our Lives


“Dirty Kitchen is a feast of many ingredients: at once a searing, heartfelt account of one undocumented family’s life as told through dish after mouthwatering dish, as well as a fierce, unflinching look at the indigenous and colonial history that seasons every meal. This is a book that knows that the root of the word ‘recipe� is ‘to receive’—one that shows us, with profound resolve and tenderness, all the things we receive with every meal: every pleasure, every pain, every story, every ghost. A book to sate multiple hungers, that leaves its reader truly fed.�
—Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not The Heart and How To Read Now


“As nimble and bold as the dishes she describes, Jill Damatac confronts the intersectional cruelties of colonialism and patriarchy with an unflinching spirit. Damatac celebrates the resilience of Filipino food as an ingredient for healing passed down through the ancestors. Dirty Kitchen is a literary feast that sticks to your fingers like a sumptuous kamayan.�
—Albert Samaha, author of Concepcion: Conquest, Colonialism, and an Immigrant Family’s Fate

"Jill Damatac brings together myth and memory, history and hauntings, colonialism and catharsis and seats them around her table. Any reader of Dirty Kitchen is in for a feast when they pull up a chair."
—Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration]]> 256 Jill Damatac 1668084635 emma 0 books about food &gt;&gt;&gt; 4.35 Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family
author: Jill Damatac
name: emma
average rating: 4.35
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, arc, authors-of-color, diverse, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, nonfiction, non-ya, memoir
review:
books about food >>>
]]> <![CDATA[First-Time Caller (Heartstrings, #1)]]> 213243908 A hopeless romantic meets a jaded radio host in this cozy, Sleepless in Seattle-inspired love story from beloved author B.K. Borison.

Aiden Valentine has a secret: he's fallen out of love with love. And as the host of Baltimore's romance hotline, that's a bit of a problem. But when a young girl calls in to the station asking for dating advice for her mom, the interview goes viral, thrusting Aiden and Heartstrings into the limelight.

Lucie Stone thought she was doing just fine. She has a good job; an incredible family; and a smart, slightly devious kid. But when all of Baltimore is suddenly scrutinizing her love life-or lack thereof—she begins to question if she's as happy as she thought. Maybe a little more romance wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Everyone wants Lucie to find her happy ending... even the handsome, temperamental man calling the shots. But when sparks start to fly behind the scenes, Lucie must make the final call between the radio-sponsored happily ever after or the man in the headphones next to her.]]> 448 B.K. Borison 0593641191 emma 0 to-read 4.06 2025 First-Time Caller (Heartstrings, #1)
author: B.K. Borison
name: emma
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Happiness and Love 214151342 Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends—an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stand for everything she detests�Happiness and Love is a piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.

Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world—a group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-on—our narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, she’s wandering around the Lower East Side, thinking about the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca, when she runs into Eugene, one half of the artist-curator couple at the heart of her old social set. Despite her better judgement, she accepts his invitation to a dinner party. And though the party is held only hours after Rebecca’s funeral, it not a memorial of Rebecca but a dinner held in honor of a young, newly famous actress whose lateness delays the party by hours.

As the guests sip their natural wine and await the actress’s arrival, the narrator, from her perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates them—their manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugene’s loft on the Bowery. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts� empty little lives—a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.]]> 224 Zoe Dubno 166806295X emma 0 3.78 2025 Happiness and Love
author: Zoe Dubno
name: emma
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, arc, from-publisher-author, literary-fiction, non-ya, owned, tbr-arc, tbr-owned
review:

]]> Work Nights 220161402 A young queer woman finds herself in a love triangle with an unobtainable intern and a quick-tempered musician in this charming debut that combines Triple Sec with The Devil Wears Prada.

Jane Grabowski hauls herself to her nine to five office job at New York City’s most acclaimed newspaper to sit in stale air under severe florescent lights and mask her rage by sending emails with too many exclamation points.

Luckily, Jane has a reason to keep coming into the Madeline, the distractingly beautiful intern. Madeline has never dated a woman and is uncomfortable with labels but with carefully timed lunch breaks and painstakingly crafted texts, Jane works her way into her life. Meanwhile, Jane’s free-spirited artist roommate tries to keep her from falling for a straight girl by dragging Jane to gay bars and queer Shabbat dinners, where she meets the decidedly uncool and morally righteous musician, Addy.

Caught between Addy’s readiness to commit and Madeline’s alluring unpredictability, Jane is pulled down a slippery path of lies and deceit, leading to a plane ticket that threatens to take everything down in one fell swoop.]]> 256 Erica Peplin 1668050870 emma 0 4.25 2025 Work Nights
author: Erica Peplin
name: emma
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, arc, contemporary, from-publisher-author, lgbt-plus, non-ya, owned, tbr-arc, tbr-owned
review:

]]> Worry 176443441
It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy is a year out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, and as she searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn, Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.

Then the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls� mother—a newly devout Messianic Jew—starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. A trip home to Florida ends in disaster. Amy Klobuchar may or may not have rabies. And Jules struggles halfheartedly to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly coming to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, permanent fixtures in each other’s lives—must ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.

Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 304 Alexandra Tanner 1668018616 emma 4
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the copy)]]> 3.32 2024 Worry
author: Alexandra Tanner
name: emma
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: non-ya, literary-fiction, owned, from-publisher-author, 4-and-a-half-stars, to-review, recommend, funny
review:
i know a low average rating hates to see my superiority complex coming

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the copy)
]]> Molly 101137620 A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century.

Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents.

Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.

A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love.

Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.]]> 320 Blake Butler 1648230377 emma 0 to-read 3.60 2023 Molly
author: Blake Butler
name: emma
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Very Nice Girl 60231073 A bitingly honest, darkly funny debut about ambition, sex, power, and love, Imogen Crimp's A Very Nice Girl cracks open the timeless questions of what it is to be young, what it is to want to be wanted, and what it is to find your calling but lose your way to it.

Anna doesn’t fit in. Not with her wealthy classmates at the selective London Conservatory where she unexpectedly wins a place after university, not with the family she left behind, and definitely not with Max, a man she meets in the bar where she sings for cash. He’s everything she’s not—rich, tailored to precision, impossible to read—and before long Anna is hooked, desperate to hold his attention, and determined to ignore the warning signs that this might be a toxic relationship.

As Anna shuttles from grueling rehearsals to brutal auditions, she finds herself torn between two conflicting desires: the drive to nurture her fledgling singing career, which requires her undivided attention, and the longing for human connection. When the stakes increase, and the roles she’s playing—both on stage and off—begin to feel all-consuming, Anna must reckon with the fact that, in carefully performing what’s expected of her as a woman, she risks losing sight of herself completely.

Both exceedingly contemporary and classic, A Very Nice Girl reminds us that even once we have taken possession of our destinies we still have the power to set all we hold dear on fire.]]> 352 Imogen Crimp emma 1
You may be saying, emma, that should not be surprising. It has a low average rating and just because you saw its pretty cover illuminated as if from heaven by the sunlight streaming in a newly discovered cute indie bookstore doesn't mean you were universally preordained to like it.

And to that hypothetical statement from a person I just made up, I say:
1) it should, and
2) I like lit fic with low averages all the time.

But in this case - possibly the first time I have allowed myself to break my only-buy-books-you-have-read-and-liked rule in several years, meaning I spent $28 to have this deeply unpleasant experience - that did not apply.

This was not for me, which is a nice way of saying I hated it and think it sucks.

But I'm not saying that, because I'm polite.

In this book, we follow a girl whose name I don't remember - Anna, oops - who wants to be an opera singer. She's in school for it, but she's Not Like Other Opera Students, because she is not rich. She lives with a perfect best friend, Laurie, she has overly strict and clingy parents who Just Don't Get It, and sometimes she has to work at a jazz club (also singing) in order to afford tuition and whatnot.

How she suffers.

She is also the worst.

(As someone who had to work through college, like a normal person, having a job within the field you're passionate about that you have to do, like, 2 nights a week sounds like a goddamn daydream.) (But whatever.)

Soon she meets a rich handsome older guy at said jazz situation, and, shock of shocks, begins a toxic and financially dependent relationship with him that will ultimately be her downfall.

Point for point, plot for plot, this is a worse, deluded version of Conversations with Friends that manages to miss the entire intention of Conversations with Friends.

I learned the "Not every book about a younger woman and an older, handsome, captivating man embarking on an all-encompassing and toxic romance that talks about what it is to be an adult, in a young woman's body, and mentally ill along the way can be Sally Rooney quality!" lesson all over again.

Let's get into the specifics:
- This book has a terrible main character, which can be fine and even good for me. I love evil women. I'm the same girl who once sided with an ex's mean girl roommate solely because she was mean and a girl. But Anna is not really complicated, or nuanced - she is mostly just an annoying theater kid. And that is unforgivable.

- Worse, we can never escape Anna, because THIS BOOK IS IN THE FIRST PERSON. Usually when people make a comment in a review like "this is first person present and I hate first person present!!" I am impressed, because my brain rarely works in perspective like that. But now, I get it. Now I hate first person, and it's Anna's fault. I pray for the sweet mercy of distance provided by third.

- I couldn't get into the writing. I had my pen in hand, ready to underline some outstanding passage or poetic turn of phrase or relatable moment, and that pen went unused entirely. A cap-on situation from page one.

- So much hypocrisy! I think there's intended to be a bit of questioning here, as Anna judges other women (especially my sweet angel Laurie) for not being feminist enough, but she also points out that this random play she sees isn't, even as she remains the most anti-feminist character I have ever encountered. Thankfully this book is going to be largely unread, because if it was in the hands of the general public, it would single-handedly set back the rights of women by a half-century or so.

- At one point, we pause to indulge Anna on a whiny soliloquy - the likes of which, in point of fact, makes up roughly 90% of this book as we spend it all tortuously subjected to the contents of her head - on the state of opera. I don't want opera to be like this! she says. I don't want it all to be slutty women, hurt women, assaulted women, tragedies occurring to women. And then we continue on with the book, which is completely and entirely about the exact same goddamn thing. Anna's life imitating her art, I suppose.

- There is so much selfishness and entitlement in this book. If you cannot really sit down and suspend your disbelief and buy into the idea that the single worst thing going on in the world today is that opera is a bit elitist, you won't have a good time.

- What was the point of any of this? I can try to buy into the idea that any of these awful things were intentional, but if I do, they don't provide any clarity on what we're doing here. By the end, we remain immersed in a toxic wasteland of middling happiness and repeated mistakes, trapped in a watery and half-baked ideology that is neither how I see the world nor how I want to.

- The ending pissed me off. Bad. Permanently.

I think I'm done complaining, but in a much more real way I will be hating on this for the rest of my life.

Bottom line: Least enjoyable book I've read in recent memory! A fun superlative.

---------------
tbr review

they wrote a book about me :)

okay fine. no one has ever called me nice]]> 3.49 2022 A Very Nice Girl
author: Imogen Crimp
name: emma
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2022/04/28
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: literary-fiction, non-ya, 1-star, unpopular-opinion, nope, reviewed
review:
Actually stunned by how much I hated this.

You may be saying, emma, that should not be surprising. It has a low average rating and just because you saw its pretty cover illuminated as if from heaven by the sunlight streaming in a newly discovered cute indie bookstore doesn't mean you were universally preordained to like it.

And to that hypothetical statement from a person I just made up, I say:
1) it should, and
2) I like lit fic with low averages all the time.

But in this case - possibly the first time I have allowed myself to break my only-buy-books-you-have-read-and-liked rule in several years, meaning I spent $28 to have this deeply unpleasant experience - that did not apply.

This was not for me, which is a nice way of saying I hated it and think it sucks.

But I'm not saying that, because I'm polite.

In this book, we follow a girl whose name I don't remember - Anna, oops - who wants to be an opera singer. She's in school for it, but she's Not Like Other Opera Students, because she is not rich. She lives with a perfect best friend, Laurie, she has overly strict and clingy parents who Just Don't Get It, and sometimes she has to work at a jazz club (also singing) in order to afford tuition and whatnot.

How she suffers.

She is also the worst.

(As someone who had to work through college, like a normal person, having a job within the field you're passionate about that you have to do, like, 2 nights a week sounds like a goddamn daydream.) (But whatever.)

Soon she meets a rich handsome older guy at said jazz situation, and, shock of shocks, begins a toxic and financially dependent relationship with him that will ultimately be her downfall.

Point for point, plot for plot, this is a worse, deluded version of Conversations with Friends that manages to miss the entire intention of Conversations with Friends.

I learned the "Not every book about a younger woman and an older, handsome, captivating man embarking on an all-encompassing and toxic romance that talks about what it is to be an adult, in a young woman's body, and mentally ill along the way can be Sally Rooney quality!" lesson all over again.

Let's get into the specifics:
- This book has a terrible main character, which can be fine and even good for me. I love evil women. I'm the same girl who once sided with an ex's mean girl roommate solely because she was mean and a girl. But Anna is not really complicated, or nuanced - she is mostly just an annoying theater kid. And that is unforgivable.

- Worse, we can never escape Anna, because THIS BOOK IS IN THE FIRST PERSON. Usually when people make a comment in a review like "this is first person present and I hate first person present!!" I am impressed, because my brain rarely works in perspective like that. But now, I get it. Now I hate first person, and it's Anna's fault. I pray for the sweet mercy of distance provided by third.

- I couldn't get into the writing. I had my pen in hand, ready to underline some outstanding passage or poetic turn of phrase or relatable moment, and that pen went unused entirely. A cap-on situation from page one.

- So much hypocrisy! I think there's intended to be a bit of questioning here, as Anna judges other women (especially my sweet angel Laurie) for not being feminist enough, but she also points out that this random play she sees isn't, even as she remains the most anti-feminist character I have ever encountered. Thankfully this book is going to be largely unread, because if it was in the hands of the general public, it would single-handedly set back the rights of women by a half-century or so.

- At one point, we pause to indulge Anna on a whiny soliloquy - the likes of which, in point of fact, makes up roughly 90% of this book as we spend it all tortuously subjected to the contents of her head - on the state of opera. I don't want opera to be like this! she says. I don't want it all to be slutty women, hurt women, assaulted women, tragedies occurring to women. And then we continue on with the book, which is completely and entirely about the exact same goddamn thing. Anna's life imitating her art, I suppose.

- There is so much selfishness and entitlement in this book. If you cannot really sit down and suspend your disbelief and buy into the idea that the single worst thing going on in the world today is that opera is a bit elitist, you won't have a good time.

- What was the point of any of this? I can try to buy into the idea that any of these awful things were intentional, but if I do, they don't provide any clarity on what we're doing here. By the end, we remain immersed in a toxic wasteland of middling happiness and repeated mistakes, trapped in a watery and half-baked ideology that is neither how I see the world nor how I want to.

- The ending pissed me off. Bad. Permanently.

I think I'm done complaining, but in a much more real way I will be hating on this for the rest of my life.

Bottom line: Least enjoyable book I've read in recent memory! A fun superlative.

---------------
tbr review

they wrote a book about me :)

okay fine. no one has ever called me nice
]]> <![CDATA[Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Wayward Children, #10)]]> 57185878 Giant turtles, impossible ships, and tidal rivers ridden by a Drowned girl in search of a family in the latest in the bestselling Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Wayward Children series from Seanan McGuire.

Nadya had three mothers: the one who bore her, the country that poisoned her, and the one who adopted her.

Nadya never considered herself less than whole, not until her adoptive parents fitted her with a prosthetic arm against her will, seeking to replace the one she'd been missing from birth.

It was cumbersome; it was uncomfortable; it was wrong.

It wasn't her.

Frustrated and unable to express why, Nadya began to wander, until the day she fell through a door into Belyyreka, the Land Beneath the Lake--and found herself in a world of water, filled with child-eating amphibians, majestic giant turtles, and impossible ships that sailed as happily beneath the surface as on top. In Belyyreka, she found herself understood for who she was: a Drowned Girl, who had made her way to her real home, accepted by the river and its people.

But even in Belyyreka, there are dangers, and trials, and Nadya would soon find herself fighting to keep hold of everything she had come to treasure.]]> 160 Seanan McGuire emma 3
it seems like this one might. don't get me wrong: i'm glad that books in this series keep on coming. but it seems like we might be running out of ideas.

this installment follows nadya, a russian orphan who loves turtles and talking about figurative mothers. (this sums up most of her personality.) she also was born with one arm, and when she's adopted and taken to colorado (a fate worse than death, so i sympathize), her parents fit her with a prosthetic that she hates because it isn't her.

i can't say whether that is good representation, but it felt nuanced and uniqueand interesting to me. until she steps through a door that takes her to a land of turtles (like i said: most of her personality) and is given a magic arm by the river, which she loves.

then it seems like it's undoing some of the good representation. but what do i know.

i do know that i did not like the pacing here [spoilers removed].

bottom line: in the 3 months that have passed since i read this book, i am mostly left with a residual shock that so much of it was exclusively about turtles.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 4.03 2025 Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Wayward Children, #10)
author: Seanan McGuire
name: emma
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: non-ya, lgbt-plus, fantasy, diverse, 2-and-a-half-stars, unpopular-opinion, eh, reviewed
review:
every series i like should just go on forever.

it seems like this one might. don't get me wrong: i'm glad that books in this series keep on coming. but it seems like we might be running out of ideas.

this installment follows nadya, a russian orphan who loves turtles and talking about figurative mothers. (this sums up most of her personality.) she also was born with one arm, and when she's adopted and taken to colorado (a fate worse than death, so i sympathize), her parents fit her with a prosthetic that she hates because it isn't her.

i can't say whether that is good representation, but it felt nuanced and uniqueand interesting to me. until she steps through a door that takes her to a land of turtles (like i said: most of her personality) and is given a magic arm by the river, which she loves.

then it seems like it's undoing some of the good representation. but what do i know.

i do know that i did not like the pacing here [spoilers removed].

bottom line: in the 3 months that have passed since i read this book, i am mostly left with a residual shock that so much of it was exclusively about turtles.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> The Snares 215805843 A Punjabi American lawyer at a mysterious new federal intelligence agency fights to keep his career, marriage, and morality intact in this gripping post-9/11 drama from a thrilling new voice.


“Are you happy where you are? Toiling in the trenches of the Justice Department?�

In the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency, Neel Chima, a former Naval officer and federal prosecutor, is recruited to join a new federal intelligence agency—one with greater-than-usual powers and fewer-than-usual restrictions. Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and the selection of foreigners for drone assassination—men who often look just like his Sikh family members. As both his ambitions and moral qualms mount, he is drawn further and further away from his wife and two young daughters. When he makes a critical mistake at work, he is left vulnerable to shadowy figures in the intelligence world who seek to use him in their own, still more radical counterterrorism missions. If he agrees, the world of power will open up even wider to him. If he doesn’t . . .

Is Neel an insider or an outsider? The hunter or the hunted? An idealist or a mercenary? What truths, and whose lives, is he willing to sacrifice? The novel plunges readers into the human turmoil behind the faceless operations—the torture, secret assassinations, and drone strikes—of the American security state, creating an eye-opening meditation on morality, violence, and the price of a human soul.]]> 320 Rav Grewal-Kök 0593446038 emma 3
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.77 2025 The Snares
author: Rav Grewal-Kök
name: emma
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: authors-of-color, arc, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, non-ya, literary-fiction, historical, mystery-thriller-horror-etc
review:
seems timely!

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> Oddbody: Stories 220161342 Striking, visceral, and brutally honest, Rose Keating’s Oddbody is a captivating short story collection that delves into the weirdness of bodies and of existence itself through the voices of social outsiders and outcasts.

In her debut collection, Rose Keating takes you on a bold journey through the intricacies of sex, shame, and womanhood. With ten enchanting short stories, she crafts an emotional masterpiece that challenges us to reflect on the movement and needs of our bodies. Strange yet utterly mesmerizing, Oddbody is a provocative exploration that feels both surprising and sincerely authentic.

In “Oddbody,� a woman finds herself navigating a codependent relationship with a ghost, while “Squirm� portrays a daughter tending to her father as he devours himself from the inside out. “Pineapple� introduces us to a woman who opts to have feather wings surgically attached to her back. In “Eggshells,� a waitress gives birth to an egg during her breakfast shift. Each narrative in this collection is immersive, bizarre, and deeply empathetic, shining a light on women who dare to defy societal norms and invite you to question the conventions and milestones that determine success.]]> 208 Rose Keating 1668061503 emma 0 relatable 3.75 Oddbody: Stories
author: Rose Keating
name: emma
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, non-ya, literary-fiction, arc
review:
relatable
]]> The Möbius Book 217388128 A genre-bending story about breaking―both of the heart and form itself―from the author of Biography of X.

Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. She soon realized that she was writing about her relationship with faith. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. Bending form, she and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, griefdriven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.

A hybrid work across fiction and nonfiction with no beginning or ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s inherent danger.]]> 240 Catherine Lacey 0374615403 emma 0 to-read, unreleased 4.07 2025 The Möbius Book
author: Catherine Lacey
name: emma
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: to-read, unreleased
review:

]]> She's Always Hungry 201033505
A woman welcomes a parasite into her body.

A teenager longs for perfect skin.

A scientist tends to fragile alien flora.

A young man takes the night into his own hands.

Unsettling, revelatory, and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark’s debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger.]]> 240 Eliza Clark 0063393263 emma 3
mini-reviews for each story:


BUILD A BODY LIKE MINE
at this point i may dedicate my life to seeking out eating disorder-related fiction that is at all unique. i will even accept interesting.

we are not there yet.
rating: 3


THE PROBLEM SOLVER
this one also is not anything extremely not-done-before, but it is very sociopolitically accurate, so you have to give it props for that.
rating: 3.5


SHE’S ALWAYS HUNGRY
title story alert!

all of the jokes i could make about this are spoilers. bummer.
rating: 3.5


THE SHADOW OVER LITTLE CHITALY
this one is about a combination chinese / italian restaurant that makes evil pizza with apples and chow mein in it. fun.
rating: 3.5


HOLLOW BONES
gross!
rating: 3.5


GOTH GF
the american dream.

okay that was very literal. in hindsight i don’t know what i expected.
rating: 3


EXTINCT EVENTS
the theme of this is mostly “weird plant starfish creatures are people too, you know.� but no they aren’t. you can’t fool me.
rating: 3


NIGHTSTALKERS
not to be confused with the one that’s jake gyllenhaal.
rating: 3.5


SHAKE WELL
i recommend this story for people who like dr. pimple popper. i do not like dr. pimple popper.
rating: 3


THE KING
i didn’t want to say it. i was trying not to saying it. but by naming it ironically herself, eliza clark has forced me to say it:this book is fun, but it’s not particularly clever or novel. it’s mostly online edgelord bullsh*t.
rating: 2.5


COMPANY MAN
ܰ.
rating: 3


OVERALL
there were some fun ones in this, but nothing as crazy or out-there or unique or edgy as it seemed to think it was.
rating: 3

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.80 2024 She's Always Hungry
author: Eliza Clark
name: emma
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: literary-fiction, non-ya, arc, mystery-thriller-horror-etc, 3-stars, unpopular-opinion, eh, reviewed
review:
relatable.

mini-reviews for each story:


BUILD A BODY LIKE MINE
at this point i may dedicate my life to seeking out eating disorder-related fiction that is at all unique. i will even accept interesting.

we are not there yet.
rating: 3


THE PROBLEM SOLVER
this one also is not anything extremely not-done-before, but it is very sociopolitically accurate, so you have to give it props for that.
rating: 3.5


SHE’S ALWAYS HUNGRY
title story alert!

all of the jokes i could make about this are spoilers. bummer.
rating: 3.5


THE SHADOW OVER LITTLE CHITALY
this one is about a combination chinese / italian restaurant that makes evil pizza with apples and chow mein in it. fun.
rating: 3.5


HOLLOW BONES
gross!
rating: 3.5


GOTH GF
the american dream.

okay that was very literal. in hindsight i don’t know what i expected.
rating: 3


EXTINCT EVENTS
the theme of this is mostly “weird plant starfish creatures are people too, you know.� but no they aren’t. you can’t fool me.
rating: 3


NIGHTSTALKERS
not to be confused with the one that’s jake gyllenhaal.
rating: 3.5


SHAKE WELL
i recommend this story for people who like dr. pimple popper. i do not like dr. pimple popper.
rating: 3


THE KING
i didn’t want to say it. i was trying not to saying it. but by naming it ironically herself, eliza clark has forced me to say it:this book is fun, but it’s not particularly clever or novel. it’s mostly online edgelord bullsh*t.
rating: 2.5


COMPANY MAN
ܰ.
rating: 3


OVERALL
there were some fun ones in this, but nothing as crazy or out-there or unique or edgy as it seemed to think it was.
rating: 3

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> Ghost Fish 222139784 A tender coming-of-age novel about a young woman haunted by her sister’s death, who starts to believe that her beloved sibling has returned to her—in the form of a ghost fish, for fans of Sweetbitter and Our Wives Under the Sea.

Alison is mired in loneliness and grief. Freshly twenty-three and mourning the loss of her younger sister, who has drowned at sea, she’s moved out of her hometown and into a cramped apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. Now she’s living the cliché, barely making rent as a restaurant hostess and avoiding her roommates, while watching the bright, busy passersby from her bubble of grief. She doesn’t need originality; she just needs to be alive. So why does she feel she isn’t truly living?

Until late one night, when she rounds the corner and sees a shape in the air—a ghost. And how strange, it looks like a fish. What is it? Alison knows, without hesitation: it is her beloved sister, finally returned to her side. Safe in a pickle jar filled with water, the ghost fish goes wherever Alison does: in an alcove at the restaurant; in a tote bag on the subway; in her room at night as her roommates chatter outside. She knows she has to keep her safe from the world, the way she didn’t before. She knows that, together, they will never be lonely again. But as Alison’s new life in New York begins to grow, and as she navigates the murky waters of dating, friendship, and desire, she must ask: what if her sister is keeping her away from a life outwardly lived?

With tenderness and heart, stretching from New York, New York to Key West, Florida, Ghost Fish is a meditation on grief, loneliness, and the strange, kaleidoscopic ways we help ourselves—and those we love� through it.]]> 256 Stuart Pennebaker 031658763X emma 0 4.20 Ghost Fish
author: Stuart Pennebaker
name: emma
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: to-read, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, non-ya, arc
review:

]]> Authority: Essays 211934956 A bold, provocative collection of essays on one of the most urgent questions of our What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?

Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,� the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. As a critic, Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler’s science fiction as a parable of slavery; teases out the ideology behind Hillary Clinton’s (fictional) sex life; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.

Criticism is in a crisis of authority—or rather, that’s what critics have been saying ever since the Enlightenment. In a magisterial new essay, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this supposed crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in eighteenth-century aesthetics all the way to its present form in the age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today.]]> 288 Andrea Long Chu 0374600333 emma 4
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.99 2025 Authority: Essays
author: Andrea Long Chu
name: emma
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: non-ya, nonfiction, authors-of-color, diverse, arc, 3-and-a-half-stars, to-review, recommend
review:
call me biased, but i love a mean book review

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> The Influencers 216522650 A social media influencer's empire is burned to the ground—literally. The top suspects? The five daughters who made her famous.

"Mother May I" Iverson has spent the past twenty years building a massively successful influencer empire with endearing videos featuring her five mixed-race daughters. But the girls are all grown up now, and the ramifications of having their entire childhoods commodified start to spill over into public view, especially in light of the pivotal Who killed May’s newlywed husband and then torched her mansion to cover it up?

April is a businesswoman feuding with her mother over IP; twins June and July are influencers themselves, threatening to overtake May’s spotlight; January is a theater tech who steers clear of her mother and the limelight; and the youngest…well, March has somehow completely disappeared. As the days pass post-murder, everyone has an opinion—the sisters, May, a mysterious "friend of the family," and the collective voice of the online audience watching the family’s every move—with suspicion flying every direction.

A campy and escapist exploration of race, gender, sexuality, and class, The Influencers is an evisceration of influencer culture and how alienating traditional expectations can be, ripe for the current moment when the first generation of children made famous by their parents are, now, all grown up—and looking for retribution.]]> 448 Anna-Marie McLemore 059372917X emma 0
(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.41 The Influencers
author: Anna-Marie McLemore
name: emma
average rating: 3.41
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: tbr-arc, tbr-owned, arc, from-publisher-author, mystery-thriller-horror-etc, authors-of-color, diverse, currently-reading
review:
what could be more horrifying

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> A Tale for the Time Being 15811545
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.]]> 432 Ruth Ozeki 0670026638 emma 0 to-read 4.06 2013 A Tale for the Time Being
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: emma
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> LIVEBLOG 36895893 707 Megan Boyle 099921862X emma 0 to-read 4.34 2015 LIVEBLOG
author: Megan Boyle
name: emma
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Anna Karenina 29779251
«Nos capítulos iniciais de Anna Karénina, somos conduzidos, uma e outra vez, a um sentido de analogia musical. Há efeitos de contraponto e harmonia no desenvolvimento das principais tramas do “prelúdio Oblonski� (o acidente na estação ferroviária, a zombadora discussão sobre o divórcio entre Vronski e a baronesa Chilton, o deslumbramento do fogo vermelho diante dos olhos de Anna). O método de Tolstoi é polifónico; mas as harmonias principais desen- volvem-se com uma tremenda força e amplitude. As técnicas musicais e linguísticas não podem comparar-se de um modo exato. Mas como poderíamos elucidar de outro modo o sentimento de que as novelas de Tolstoi surgem de um princípio interior de ordem e vitalidade, enquanto as dos escritores menos importantes parecem alinhavadas?»

«Anna Karénina morre no mundo do romance; mas cada vez que lemos o livro ela ressuscita, e mesmo depois de o termos acabado adquire outra vida na nossa recordação. Em cada personagem literária existe algo da Fénix imortal. Através das vidas perduráveis das suas personagens, a própria existência de Tolstoi teve a sua eternidade.» [George Steiner, Tolstoi ou Dostoievski]]]> 963 Leo Tolstoy 1784871958 emma 4
it's the start of the month (kinda). i've attempted a (reprehensible) pun on a book title (to everyone's chagrin). there is a notoriously long classic on my currently reading (ill-advisedly).

you know what that means.

IT'S PROJECT LONG CLASSIC TIME, the fan favorite in which i read a very long book divided up into little bits over the course of the month, and usually i drag elle along with me except this month i'm planning something truly nightmarish so i'm starting while she's asleep as an act of terror / peer pressure.

let's do this.


DAY 1: PAGES 1-25
my tbr review of this was "sometimes i like to pretend i'm capable of reading thousand-page books. just for fun," and in this case that pretending includes starting 2 days early and doubling up eventually so that i can read in 25 page chunks.

i'm cool like that.

damn! that opening line! we are off to the races.


DAY 2: PAGES 26-75
didn't even intend to make today my bonus day but this is just so readable. why didn't anyone tell me the 900 page classic from 150 years ago is unputdownable??

i fear i may adore all of these characters.


DAY 3: 76-100
in a state of bliss right now in which i look forward to reading this every day but am relishing it so much that dividing it into sections works perfectly.


DAY 4: 101-125
literally any book is doable in teeny chunks like this. i had negative free time (and a negative interest) today but boom. easy money.


DAY 5: 126-150
the descriptions of emotions in this...sheesh. excellence.


DAY 6: 151-175
and here we have the farming sections i've heard so much about...

in truth if they're like this every time i can handle it. i like poetic descriptions of the descent of springtime as much as the next annoying girl.


DAY 7: 176-200
i am absolutely indulging in vronsky's downfall here. finding pleasure in his every misfortune. his sadness and disappointment spark joy for me.

hate that guy.


DAY 8: 201-225
well jesus anna! we're only at the 25% mark, we can't act like this already!


DAY 10: 226-250
i missed a day. i'm a nightmare person.

now i have to see how many pages i can manage in, generously, 20 minutes.

perhaps unsurprisingly it took 25 and i'm not caught up.


DAY 11: PAGES 251-275
something fun that the universe and i are doing is that we've set up the last three weeks of the year so that i don't only have to finish 24 books, complete two projects, and remain active on seemingly 100 accounts, but i also have the busiest work week(s) i have had in (without exaggeration) 2 years.

without the depressive episode that made the last time so fun.

anyway i may never catch up on this.


DAY 13: PAGES 276-300
guess who's behind. behind again. emma's behind. except she never caught up in the first place so now she's just...50 pages behind instead of 25.

or i guess 75 since i haven't actually read any yet today.

okay NOW 50. why is this book so good??


DAY 14: PAGES 301-350
well, well, well. look who decided to catch up.

biiiiig farming chapters.


DAY 15: PAGES 351-375
part four alert. we pray for mercy from agricultural labor bureaucracy content.

and our prayers are heard <3


DAY 16: PAGES 376-400
KITTY AND LEVIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

wow i am so invested in this. even dozens of pages about farming and politics can't divest me. i am in it.


DAY 17: PAGES 401-425
way, way, way too much is happening. it's the halfway point, people! this is no time for climaxes OR happily ever afters, let alone both! we have 400+ pages to cover!


DAY 18: PAGES 426-450
i am uncomfortable with how high stakes everything is. THERE IS SO MUCH LEFT. WHEN I HEFT THIS UNWIELDY VOLUME I AM ONLY AT THE HALFWAY POINT EVEN STILL. I THINK. EVEN THOUGH I'VE BEEN SAYING THAT FOR SEEMINGLY DAYS.


DAY 19: 451-475
honestly i care less about the Christian Art than the farming. sheesh.


DAY 20: 476-500
it's the circleeee of lifeee...


DAY 21: 501-525
what a moral quandary we find ourselves in!


DAY 22: 526-550
okay phew, i'm back on board with being obsessed with anna. it makes me uncomfortable to not like a female character who is constantly committing moral wrongs...feels unnatural.

part 5 done!


DAY 23: 551-575
i'm internally titling this one twenty-five page chunk number 23: the tangled webs we weave. get it together, folks! it's like a sally rooney novel in here.


DAY 24: 576-600
this too realistically conveyed the feeling of being clinically annoyed by a friend of a friend. i feel irritable now.


DAY 28: 601-650
it's the most wonderful time of the year...

read: it's actually december 26, meaning we have actually skipped right to day 28, and i am extremely behind just in time for the end of the year to be right around the corner.

but i'm also behind on my other project, and i'm also behind on my actual literal reading challenge, so we're just going to ignore that for today. no time for worrying, only time for reading.

actually read 50 pages anyway because i am perfect and infallible.


DAY 31: PAGES 651-700
being very brave and reading 50 pages again and also pretending anna isn't on my damn nerves. GIRL STAND UP.

we find ourselves heading into part 7.

never mind. it's not hard to not be bugged by anna. she's the sh*t.


DAY 32: PAGES 701-750
anna is so evil and kitty is so perfect. i love them both.


DAY 33: PAGES 751-817
it appears it is time. hello and welcome to the last day of the anna karenina project.

oh man.


OVERALL
not only was i intimidated by this book's length, i was sure i'd find it unconquerable. even as i started it and found it a pleasure, i was waiting for the other shoe to drop. it never did! i enjoyed this every day, through farming and politics and religion and art.

readable and sweeping, stunning in its writing and its carrying across effortlessly of both the minutiae and the most important topics of life. it's insane how applicable, how of the moment this book is now, across languages and centuries.

read it! i can't believe how long i put it off.
rating: 4.5]]> 4.13 1878 Anna Karenina
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: emma
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1878
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/29
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: classics, non-ya, owned, project-clear-ur-sh-t-2, 4-and-a-half-stars, recommend, reviewed, project-long-classics
review:
welcome to...ANNA DECEMBERENINA!

it's the start of the month (kinda). i've attempted a (reprehensible) pun on a book title (to everyone's chagrin). there is a notoriously long classic on my currently reading (ill-advisedly).

you know what that means.

IT'S PROJECT LONG CLASSIC TIME, the fan favorite in which i read a very long book divided up into little bits over the course of the month, and usually i drag elle along with me except this month i'm planning something truly nightmarish so i'm starting while she's asleep as an act of terror / peer pressure.

let's do this.


DAY 1: PAGES 1-25
my tbr review of this was "sometimes i like to pretend i'm capable of reading thousand-page books. just for fun," and in this case that pretending includes starting 2 days early and doubling up eventually so that i can read in 25 page chunks.

i'm cool like that.

damn! that opening line! we are off to the races.


DAY 2: PAGES 26-75
didn't even intend to make today my bonus day but this is just so readable. why didn't anyone tell me the 900 page classic from 150 years ago is unputdownable??

i fear i may adore all of these characters.


DAY 3: 76-100
in a state of bliss right now in which i look forward to reading this every day but am relishing it so much that dividing it into sections works perfectly.


DAY 4: 101-125
literally any book is doable in teeny chunks like this. i had negative free time (and a negative interest) today but boom. easy money.


DAY 5: 126-150
the descriptions of emotions in this...sheesh. excellence.


DAY 6: 151-175
and here we have the farming sections i've heard so much about...

in truth if they're like this every time i can handle it. i like poetic descriptions of the descent of springtime as much as the next annoying girl.


DAY 7: 176-200
i am absolutely indulging in vronsky's downfall here. finding pleasure in his every misfortune. his sadness and disappointment spark joy for me.

hate that guy.


DAY 8: 201-225
well jesus anna! we're only at the 25% mark, we can't act like this already!


DAY 10: 226-250
i missed a day. i'm a nightmare person.

now i have to see how many pages i can manage in, generously, 20 minutes.

perhaps unsurprisingly it took 25 and i'm not caught up.


DAY 11: PAGES 251-275
something fun that the universe and i are doing is that we've set up the last three weeks of the year so that i don't only have to finish 24 books, complete two projects, and remain active on seemingly 100 accounts, but i also have the busiest work week(s) i have had in (without exaggeration) 2 years.

without the depressive episode that made the last time so fun.

anyway i may never catch up on this.


DAY 13: PAGES 276-300
guess who's behind. behind again. emma's behind. except she never caught up in the first place so now she's just...50 pages behind instead of 25.

or i guess 75 since i haven't actually read any yet today.

okay NOW 50. why is this book so good??


DAY 14: PAGES 301-350
well, well, well. look who decided to catch up.

biiiiig farming chapters.


DAY 15: PAGES 351-375
part four alert. we pray for mercy from agricultural labor bureaucracy content.

and our prayers are heard <3


DAY 16: PAGES 376-400
KITTY AND LEVIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

wow i am so invested in this. even dozens of pages about farming and politics can't divest me. i am in it.


DAY 17: PAGES 401-425
way, way, way too much is happening. it's the halfway point, people! this is no time for climaxes OR happily ever afters, let alone both! we have 400+ pages to cover!


DAY 18: PAGES 426-450
i am uncomfortable with how high stakes everything is. THERE IS SO MUCH LEFT. WHEN I HEFT THIS UNWIELDY VOLUME I AM ONLY AT THE HALFWAY POINT EVEN STILL. I THINK. EVEN THOUGH I'VE BEEN SAYING THAT FOR SEEMINGLY DAYS.


DAY 19: 451-475
honestly i care less about the Christian Art than the farming. sheesh.


DAY 20: 476-500
it's the circleeee of lifeee...


DAY 21: 501-525
what a moral quandary we find ourselves in!


DAY 22: 526-550
okay phew, i'm back on board with being obsessed with anna. it makes me uncomfortable to not like a female character who is constantly committing moral wrongs...feels unnatural.

part 5 done!


DAY 23: 551-575
i'm internally titling this one twenty-five page chunk number 23: the tangled webs we weave. get it together, folks! it's like a sally rooney novel in here.


DAY 24: 576-600
this too realistically conveyed the feeling of being clinically annoyed by a friend of a friend. i feel irritable now.


DAY 28: 601-650
it's the most wonderful time of the year...

read: it's actually december 26, meaning we have actually skipped right to day 28, and i am extremely behind just in time for the end of the year to be right around the corner.

but i'm also behind on my other project, and i'm also behind on my actual literal reading challenge, so we're just going to ignore that for today. no time for worrying, only time for reading.

actually read 50 pages anyway because i am perfect and infallible.


DAY 31: PAGES 651-700
being very brave and reading 50 pages again and also pretending anna isn't on my damn nerves. GIRL STAND UP.

we find ourselves heading into part 7.

never mind. it's not hard to not be bugged by anna. she's the sh*t.


DAY 32: PAGES 701-750
anna is so evil and kitty is so perfect. i love them both.


DAY 33: PAGES 751-817
it appears it is time. hello and welcome to the last day of the anna karenina project.

oh man.


OVERALL
not only was i intimidated by this book's length, i was sure i'd find it unconquerable. even as i started it and found it a pleasure, i was waiting for the other shoe to drop. it never did! i enjoyed this every day, through farming and politics and religion and art.

readable and sweeping, stunning in its writing and its carrying across effortlessly of both the minutiae and the most important topics of life. it's insane how applicable, how of the moment this book is now, across languages and centuries.

read it! i can't believe how long i put it off.
rating: 4.5
]]> The Usual Desire to Kill 214151924 An often hilarious, surprisingly moving portrait of a long-married couple, seen through the eyes of their wickedly observant daughter—for fans of A Man Called Ove and The Royal Tenenbaums.

Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of food dating back to 1982.

Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Her mother likes to bring conversation back to the War, although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of each visit, she reports “the usual desire to kill.�

A wry, propulsive, exquisitely observed story of a singularly eccentric family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them. This is an extraordinary debut novel from a seasoned playwright with a flare for dialogue and, in the end, immense empathy.]]> 256 Camilla Barnes 1668062836 emma 3
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the copy)]]> 3.59 2025 The Usual Desire to Kill
author: Camilla Barnes
name: emma
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/22
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: owned, arc, from-publisher-author, non-ya, literary-fiction, 3-stars, to-review, unpopular-opinion, eh
review:
i know it well

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the copy)
]]> <![CDATA[The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood]]> 214151357
She felt like an imposter in her own body. She grew distant from her friends and husband. She suffered from anxiety, fear, guilt, and shame. She also experienced trauma at the hands of one of her doctors—a stark trigger. And eventually, when her son was born, there was no� joy. Instead, she felt “disoriented, lonely, and like none of my clothes fit.� Why was she seeing and hearing things that weren’t there? Why was she so angry and miserable when she had everything she thought she wanted? Why was the life she’d built falling apart?

It took her months to discover that she was suffering from severe postpartum depression. And it took even longer to trace all the threads that came to inform her experience.

At its core, The Motherload> is about learning to forgive yourself for not being what you’ve been told you must be and for not loving the way you’ve been told you should. It’s about the uniquely female experience of constantly grappling with expectation versus reality, no matter your circumstance, and a rejection of the cultural idea of the mother as a perfect being. It is a moving, exciting, roller coaster ride, and a propulsive addition to the canon of women’s literature.]]> 352 Sarah Hoover 1668010135 emma 2
this was a very, very honest book, but not a very reflective one.

i didn't know going into this that it's by the sarah hoover who is married to tom sachs, whose ill-advised job posting for an "executive assistant" involved 24/7 nannying and pooper-scooperingand so on led to his being exposed as a pretty sh*t boss among other things.

i just thought it was by a sarah hoover, a pretty common name, exploring the realities of post-partum depression and pregnancy and childbirth and mothering in a misogynistic society.

i had no awareness that her version of all of the above was that of the 1%, and that there were only about 3 days between nannies when that process didn't involve constant, live-in help.

post-partum depression (and all of the other issues mentioned above) are under-discussed and critical, but there was just no self awareness here. every time i would begin to root for sarah, she'd include another crazy moment of unrecognized privilege: crying over how much she hates the 15 minutes a day she makes herself spend in her baby's company, refusing to go into one of the world's best hospitals where her husband is paying the cost of a fancy hotel for her private room, writing at length about how her sister's horrifically traumatic stillbirth affected her.

this isn't to say that wealth can buy your way out of subjugation or trauma or mental illness, but that an acknowledgment (or god forbid, a single grain of salt) would be nice.

i'm complaining a lot, but i didn't hate reading this book. it just left a bad taste in my mouth.

and i thought all of that before i learned that she repeatedly lied and used her sister's trauma without permission.

bottom line: this is a necessary book. it's just that it shouldn't have been sarah hoover writing it.

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)]]> 3.83 The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood
author: Sarah Hoover
name: emma
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: nonfiction, non-ya, owned, memoir, from-publisher-author, arc, unpopular-opinion, eh, 2-and-a-half-stars, reviewed
review:
i reach my mid-twenties and suddenly i'm interested in books about being a mom...biology is a hell of a drug.

this was a very, very honest book, but not a very reflective one.

i didn't know going into this that it's by the sarah hoover who is married to tom sachs, whose ill-advised job posting for an "executive assistant" involved 24/7 nannying and pooper-scooperingand so on led to his being exposed as a pretty sh*t boss among other things.

i just thought it was by a sarah hoover, a pretty common name, exploring the realities of post-partum depression and pregnancy and childbirth and mothering in a misogynistic society.

i had no awareness that her version of all of the above was that of the 1%, and that there were only about 3 days between nannies when that process didn't involve constant, live-in help.

post-partum depression (and all of the other issues mentioned above) are under-discussed and critical, but there was just no self awareness here. every time i would begin to root for sarah, she'd include another crazy moment of unrecognized privilege: crying over how much she hates the 15 minutes a day she makes herself spend in her baby's company, refusing to go into one of the world's best hospitals where her husband is paying the cost of a fancy hotel for her private room, writing at length about how her sister's horrifically traumatic stillbirth affected her.

this isn't to say that wealth can buy your way out of subjugation or trauma or mental illness, but that an acknowledgment (or god forbid, a single grain of salt) would be nice.

i'm complaining a lot, but i didn't hate reading this book. it just left a bad taste in my mouth.

and i thought all of that before i learned that she repeatedly lied and used her sister's trauma without permission.

bottom line: this is a necessary book. it's just that it shouldn't have been sarah hoover writing it.

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)
]]> When the Harvest Comes 216522695 A young Black gay man reckoning with the death of his father must confront his painful past—and his deepest desires around gender, love, and sex.

The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man’s name with tenderness.

But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Ohio for a freer life in New York City, won’t be there to walk him down the aisle. All Davis needs to be happy in this life is Everett, his new family, and his burgeoning career as an award-winning violist.

When Davis learns during the wedding reception that his father has died in a terrible car accident, years of childhood trauma and unspoken emotion resurface. Davis must revisit everything that went wrong between them, his fledgling marriage and irresistible self-confidence spiraling into a pit of despair.

In resplendent prose, Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes fearlessly reveals the pain of inheritance and the heroic power of love, reminding us that in the end we are more than the men who came before us.]]> 304 Denne Michele Norris 0593729609 emma 4
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 4.06 2025 When the Harvest Comes
author: Denne Michele Norris
name: emma
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: non-ya, literary-fiction, arc, authors-of-color, diverse, 3-and-a-half-stars, to-review, recommend
review:
i'm a sucker for a heart wrenching debut novel

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> Good Girl 195644142
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

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

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

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.]]> 368 Aria Aber emma 4
this is a grimy, twisty, frustrating book, full of mistakes and violence, thoughtlessness and party drugs, clubs at dawn and unclean apartments.

we follow nila as she reckons with all the burdens life can give: her mother's untimely death, her father's grief, the heavy expectations of her family, addiction chasing her, hate crimes in her neighborhood, a toxic and abusive relationship, the questioning of her sexuality, the desire to escape from her world, her identity, herself.

and the whole goddamn time she's either thinking about wanting to be a photographer or doing drugs.

you want to shake nila for a lot of this book and tell her to get her sh*t together, and then you wonder why you're doing that. what does it mean to be a good girl, anyway? and why shouldn't she be permitted to figure it out?

bottom line: angering and worthwhile.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.72 2025 Good Girl
author: Aria Aber
name: emma
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: arc, authors-of-color, diverse, literary-fiction, non-ya, 4-stars, to-buy, recommend, reviewed
review:
"a portrait of the artist as a young woman" <3

this is a grimy, twisty, frustrating book, full of mistakes and violence, thoughtlessness and party drugs, clubs at dawn and unclean apartments.

we follow nila as she reckons with all the burdens life can give: her mother's untimely death, her father's grief, the heavy expectations of her family, addiction chasing her, hate crimes in her neighborhood, a toxic and abusive relationship, the questioning of her sexuality, the desire to escape from her world, her identity, herself.

and the whole goddamn time she's either thinking about wanting to be a photographer or doing drugs.

you want to shake nila for a lot of this book and tell her to get her sh*t together, and then you wonder why you're doing that. what does it mean to be a good girl, anyway? and why shouldn't she be permitted to figure it out?

bottom line: angering and worthwhile.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> The Family Recipe 214151418 A whip-smart family dramedy about estranged siblings competing to inherit their father’s Vietnamese sandwich franchise and unravel family mysteries.

Duc Tran, the eccentric founder of the national Vietnamese sandwich chain Duc’s Sandwiches, has decided to retire. With the help of the shady family lawyer, he informs his five estranged adult children that to get their inheritance, they must revitalize run-down shops in undesirable, old-school Little Saigon locations across Houston, San Jose, New Orleans, and Philadelphia—within a year. The only one without a shop is the bachelor son, but if he gets married before the year’s up, the inheritance goes to him.

Each daughter is stuck in a new city they don’t want to be in, battling gentrification, declining ethnic enclaves, messy love lives, and struggling to modernize their father’s American dream. The son wonders if he wants to marry for love or for money. As Duc’s children continue to work, family mysteries begin to unravel along the way as they learn the real intention behind the inheritance scheme.

The Family Recipe is about rediscovering one’s roots, different types of fatherly love, familial legacy, and finding one’s place in a divided country where the only commonality among your neighbors is the universal love of sandwiches.]]> 320 Carolyn Huynh 1668033046 emma 3
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the arc)]]> 3.76 2025 The Family Recipe
author: Carolyn Huynh
name: emma
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: authors-of-color, arc, contemporary, diverse, non-ya, 2-and-a-half-stars, to-review, unpopular-opinion, eh
review:
i've done crazier things for a good sandwich than battle "gentrification, declining ethnic enclaves, messy love lives, and the american dream"

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the arc)
]]> There's No Turning Back 214151526 Discover the astonishingly powerful debut novel by the beloved feminist author of the “brilliant� (The Wall Street Journal) Forbidden Notebook and the “courageous� (The Washington Post) Her Side of the Story that was so subversive, it was banned by the Italian Fascist regime when it was first published in 1938.

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

Considered experimental and revolutionary at the time, this novel established Alba de Céspedes as a powerful new voice in the 20th century. Translated by Ann Goldstein, There’s No Turning Back demonstrates why de Céspedes deserves “an important place in the canon of women’s literature� (Chicago Review of Books).]]> 304 Alba de Céspedes 1668083639 emma 4
and immediately, writing like this proved me right:
"Here we're still looking: looking for our true way of being."
"You think we'll stop looking for it, once we're outside?"
"No, but here we have the illusion of not searching alone."

this book follows the girls of the Grimaldi, a college in Rome overseen by aging nuns of varying degreesof strictness. it's hard to sum it up better than the above. at school, the students try to come of age, whether through academics, marriage, love affairs, career goals, or motherhood, only to find once they leave that their hard-won sense of identity isn't waiting for them, or worse, isn't what they thought it wouldbe.

this works better for some characters than others but it manages to always be interesting, sharp, and true.

bottom line: i love when my gut feelings work out.

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)]]> 3.93 1938 There's No Turning Back
author: Alba de Céspedes
name: emma
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1938
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: arc, non-ya, literary-fiction, diverse, 4-stars, recommend, reviewed, owned
review:
sometimes i'm so convinced i'm going to love an author i forget i haven't read anything by them yet.

and immediately, writing like this proved me right:
"Here we're still looking: looking for our true way of being."
"You think we'll stop looking for it, once we're outside?"
"No, but here we have the illusion of not searching alone."

this book follows the girls of the Grimaldi, a college in Rome overseen by aging nuns of varying degreesof strictness. it's hard to sum it up better than the above. at school, the students try to come of age, whether through academics, marriage, love affairs, career goals, or motherhood, only to find once they leave that their hard-won sense of identity isn't waiting for them, or worse, isn't what they thought it wouldbe.

this works better for some characters than others but it manages to always be interesting, sharp, and true.

bottom line: i love when my gut feelings work out.

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)
]]> Fun for the Whole Family 216522634 A breathtaking, joy-filled novel about the people we love, the secrets we keep, and the enduring power of family, from the bestselling author of The Unsinkable Greta James.

The four Endicott siblings—Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude—were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country.

Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven’t spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in North Dakota. They’re each at a crossroads: Gemma, who put her own ambitions aside to raise the others, now isn’t sure if she wants to be a mother herself; Connor, a celebrated novelist, is floundering after his recent divorce and suffering from an epic case of writer’s block; and Roddy, at the tail end of a professional soccer career, is dangerously close to losing his future husband for the chance at one last season.

Jude is the only Endicott who seems to have it all together—but appearances can be deceiving. As the weekend unfolds, and the siblings wrestle with their shared past and uncertain futures, they’ll discover that Jude has been keeping three secrets . . . each of which could change everything.

A captivating journey and an ode to forgiveness that takes readers across all fifty states, Fun for the Whole Family brims with heart and resonates long after the final page.]]> 368 Jennifer E. Smith 0593358309 emma 4
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 4.23 2025 Fun for the Whole Family
author: Jennifer E. Smith
name: emma
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: non-ya, arc, contemporary, 3-and-a-half-stars, to-review, recommend
review:
my name is emma and my secret talent is tracking down books about siblings

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> The Devourer 196408002
But her plans are thwarted. A sudden surplus of magic in the world is causing ancient sea monsters to awaken. Worse yet, Adra discovers that the ship she's been chasing for almost a year now is captained by a girl who’s been impersonating Cameron, while Cameron himself is missing.

The two pirate captains will have to work together if they are to find Cameron, but before they can do so, they must vanquish the beast―known as The Devourer―that is sinking ships and causing so much fear. Adra will have to descend leagues beneath the sea to the creature’s lair to strike a deal with her, but she’ll discover she isn’t the only one looking for her brother―and what he stole.]]> 400 Alison Ames emma 4
alison ames has this speciality blend of banter / gore / horror / disgusting images / sapphic romance / quirky teens that no one else is doing. she has cornered the market.

this one turned down the horror scale in favor of piracy, which is not a trade i'm mad at.

it was VERY convincingly pirate vibes, although for some reason the price of admission to a ship populated solely by vengeful youth (free band name idea) appears to be that the romance wasn't so great. nor the character development. nor the other relationships.

but it had villainous fish-creatures and awful magic and consuming revenge plots and that's good enough for me!

bottom line: give alison ames her flowers.

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)]]> 3.59 2025 The Devourer
author: Alison Ames
name: emma
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: ya, mystery-thriller-horror-etc, owned, from-publisher-author, arc, 3-and-a-half-stars, recommend, fantasy, reviewed
review:
new ideal niche subgenre alert: bantery indie sapphic horror with perfect covers.

alison ames has this speciality blend of banter / gore / horror / disgusting images / sapphic romance / quirky teens that no one else is doing. she has cornered the market.

this one turned down the horror scale in favor of piracy, which is not a trade i'm mad at.

it was VERY convincingly pirate vibes, although for some reason the price of admission to a ship populated solely by vengeful youth (free band name idea) appears to be that the romance wasn't so great. nor the character development. nor the other relationships.

but it had villainous fish-creatures and awful magic and consuming revenge plots and that's good enough for me!

bottom line: give alison ames her flowers.

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)
]]> Madonna in a Fur Coat 27793819 The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.



'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.'

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul.



'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian]]> 168 Sabahattin Ali 014198127X emma 0 to-read 4.19 1943 Madonna in a Fur Coat
author: Sabahattin Ali
name: emma
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 14891 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.]]> 496 Betty Smith 0061120073 emma 0 to-read 4.29 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
author: Betty Smith
name: emma
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The English Understand Wool 59468833 Maman was exigeante—there is no English word–and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?]]> 69 Helen DeWitt 0811230074 emma 0 to-read 4.06 2022 The English Understand Wool
author: Helen DeWitt
name: emma
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mayra 220458596 An eerie, hypnotic debut about friendship, desire, and memory set against the sultry backdrop of Florida’s swamplands

It's been years since Ingrid has heard from her childhood best friend, Mayra, a fearless rebel who fled their hometown of Hialeah, a Cuban neighborhood just west of Miami, for college in the Northeast. But when Mayra calls out of the blue to invite Ingrid to a weekend getaway at a house in the Everglades, she impulsively accepts.

From the moment Ingrid sets out for the house, danger looms: The directions are difficult, she’s out of reach of cell service, and as she drives deeper into the Everglades, the wet maw of the swamp threatens to swallow her whole. But once Ingrid arrives, Mayra is, in many ways, just as she remembers—with her sharp tongue and effortless, seductive beauty, still thumbing her nose at the world.

Before they can fully settle into the familiar intimacy of each other's company, their reunion is spoiled by the reemergence of past disagreements and the unexpected presence of Mayra's new boyfriend, Benji. The trio spend their hours eating lavish meals and exploring the labyrinthine house, which holds as much mystery and danger as the swamp itself. Indoors and on the grounds, time itself seems to expand, and Ingrid begins to lose a sense of the outside world, and herself.

Against this disquieting setting, where lizards dart in and out of porches and alligators peek up from dark waters, Gonzalez weaves a surreal, unforgettable story about the dizzying power of early friendship and the lengths we'll go to earn love and acceptance—even at the risk of losing ourselves entirely.]]> 240 Nicky Gonzalez 0593731557 emma 0 3.65 2025 Mayra
author: Nicky Gonzalez
name: emma
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: to-read, tbr-owned, tbr-arc, authors-of-color, arc, diverse, mystery-thriller-horror-etc, non-ya
review:
is there any creature more horrifying and powerful than an ex best friend
]]> Wish You Weren't Here 62601376
At least, not in the way teen movies say she should hate the hot popular girl. They don’t do cat fights, love triangles, or betrayal. To survive their intertwined small town lives, they agree to a truce: complete group projects without fighting, don’t gossip to mutual friends, and stand on opposite sides of photos so it’s easy to crop each other out.

Priya seems to have everything during the school year—social media stardom, the handsome track captain boyfriend, and millions of adoring fans. And Juliette is at peace with that, because she has Fogridge Sleepaway Camp, the one place she never feels like “too much.�

But Juliette’s dreams of five Priya-free weeks in paradise are shattered when her rival shows up on move-in day... as her cabinmate, no less. Juliette is determined to enjoy her final summer at camp, even if it means (gag) tolerating Priya Pendley, but fate seems has other plans. If Juliette can’t find something to like about her situation—and about Priya—she risks hating the only home she’s ever had, right before she says goodbye to it forever.]]> 304 Erin Baldwin 0593622693 emma 4
this reminded me why i love them! it's a fun, fluffy, summery romance with lots of character development and quirky dialogue.

at the beginning, i wasn't sure i would like this book. it was an immediate lurch into a high-energy, inconsistency-riddled world of carnival-like birthday partiesfor rich and famousteenage influencers and strict families of prodigy children run like circuses by doctors with very hyphenated last names.

but then we went off to camp and everything chilled out.

i love seasonally immersive books, whether they be autumnal halloween-y stories or cozy christmassytales or summery s'mores-y fluffballs like this one.

bottom line: i had a good time!

(thanks to the author for the copy)]]> 3.97 2024 Wish You Weren't Here
author: Erin Baldwin
name: emma
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: ya, contemporary, from-publisher-author, authors-of-color, diverse, lgbt-plus, 3-and-a-half-stars, recommend, reviewed
review:
my first love: ya contemporaries.

this reminded me why i love them! it's a fun, fluffy, summery romance with lots of character development and quirky dialogue.

at the beginning, i wasn't sure i would like this book. it was an immediate lurch into a high-energy, inconsistency-riddled world of carnival-like birthday partiesfor rich and famousteenage influencers and strict families of prodigy children run like circuses by doctors with very hyphenated last names.

but then we went off to camp and everything chilled out.

i love seasonally immersive books, whether they be autumnal halloween-y stories or cozy christmassytales or summery s'mores-y fluffballs like this one.

bottom line: i had a good time!

(thanks to the author for the copy)
]]> Jamaica Road 219302228 A transformative love story about two best friends who fall for each other, fall apart, and try to find their way back together in their tight-knit British-Jamaican community.

South London, 1981: Daphne is the only Black girl in her class. All she wants is to keep her head down, preferably in a book. The easiest way to survive is to go unnoticed.

Daphne’s attempts at invisibility are upended when a boy named Connie Small arrives from Jamaica. Connie is the opposite of small in every lanky, outgoing, and unapologetically himself. Daphne tries to keep her distance, but Connie is magnetic, and they form an intense bond. As they navigate growing up in a volatile, rapidly changing city, their families become close, and their friendship begins to shift into something more complicated. When Connie reveals that he and his mother “nuh land”—meaning they’re in England illegally—Daphne realizes that she is dangerously entangled in Connie’s fragile home life. Soon, long-buried secrets in both families threaten to tear them apart permanently.

Spanning one tumultuous decade, from the industrial docklands of the Thames to the sandy beaches of Calabash Bay, Jamaica Road is a deftly plotted and emotionally expansive debut novel about race and class, the family you’re born with and the family you choose, and the limits of what true love can really conquer.]]> 448 Lisa Smith 0593537661 emma 0 4.22 Jamaica Road
author: Lisa Smith
name: emma
average rating: 4.22
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read, tbr-owned, tbr-arc, non-ya, literary-fiction, arc, authors-of-color, diverse
review:
once a year i allow myself to read a heart-wrenching devastating love story and then promise i'll never do it again
]]> Vanishing World 219300660 From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.

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

As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated� in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system� by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage—sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest—Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only “Kodomo-chan.� Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?]]> 240 Sayaka Murata 0802164668 emma 3
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.51 2015 Vanishing World
author: Sayaka Murata
name: emma
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: authors-of-color, diverse, literary-fiction, 3-stars, to-review, unpopular-opinion, eh, sci-fi
review:
new sayaka murata! i can't wait to finish this and just stare off into space for 6 hours

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> Reservoir Bitches 210678433
Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.

In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.]]> 160 Dahlia de la Cerda 1761385992 emma 0 to-read 4.12 2019 Reservoir Bitches
author: Dahlia de la Cerda
name: emma
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Gifted & Talented 211004124 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes the story of three siblings who, upon the death of their father, are forced to reckon with their long-festering rivalries, dangerous abilities, and the crushing weight of all their unrealized adolescent potential.

Where there’s a will, there’s a war.

Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.

Or at least, so they like to think.

Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You're welcome! If only her father's fortune wasn't her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud.

Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he's losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.

Eilidh, once the world's most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth—by confirming she'd been his favorite all along.

On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins—but which Wren will come out on top?]]> 512 Olivie Blake 1250883407 emma 3
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.85 2025 Gifted & Talented
author: Olivie Blake
name: emma
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/15
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: arc, fantasy, non-ya, 2-and-a-half-stars, to-review, eh, unpopular-opinion
review:
this sounds like magic succession

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> Human Acts 30091914 A riveting, poetic, and fearless portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice by the acclaimed author of The Vegetarian.

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.

The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend, who meets his own fateful end, to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, both suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother, their collective heartbreak and acts of hope tell the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of a historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.]]> 218 Han Kang 1101906723 emma 4
And that you should read it.

Bottom line: Stop reading my dumb words when Han Kang's are much better.

------------
pre-review

a masterpiece.

review to come / approx 4.5

------------
tbr review

han kang hive rise up]]> 4.26 2014 Human Acts
author: Han Kang
name: emma
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2020/12/09
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: diverse, historical, literary-fiction, non-ya, recommend, 4-and-a-half-stars, reviewed, owned, authors-of-color, favorite-authors
review:
I don't have much to say about this book, beyond you should read it, and it's a wrenching masterwork, and it has so much to say on the subject of pain and suffering and war and power and empire and the evil that humans are capable of.

And that you should read it.

Bottom line: Stop reading my dumb words when Han Kang's are much better.

------------
pre-review

a masterpiece.

review to come / approx 4.5

------------
tbr review

han kang hive rise up
]]> Sula 29226182 Alternate cover edition of 0099760010 / 9780099760016

In Sula, Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, tells the story of two women--friends since childhood, separated in young adulthood, and reunited as grown women. Nel Wright grows up to become a wife and mother, happy to remain in her hometown of Medallion, Ohio. Sula Peace leaves Medallion to experience college, men, and life in the big city, an exceptional choice for a black woman to make in the late 1920s.

As girls, Nel and Sula are the best of friends, only children who find in each other a kindred spirit to share in each girl's loneliness and imagination. When they meet again as adults, it's clear that Nel has chosen a life of acceptance and accommodation, while Sula must fight to defend her seemingly unconventional choices and beliefs. But regardless of the physical and emotional distance that threatens this extraordinary friendship, the bond between the women remains unbreakable: "Her old friend had come home.... Sula, whose past she had lived through and with whom the present was a constant sharing of perceptions. Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself."

Lyrical and gripping, Sula is an honest look at the power of friendship amid a backdrop of family, love, race, and the human condition. --Gisele Toueg

]]> 208 Toni Morrison emma 5
it was a yearin which i read my first toni morrison book, and then i read 6 more of them.

there is nobody, absolutely nobody, like her.

morrison's writing is up in the clouds, filled with turns of phrase and plot that in any other narrative would be nonsensical, and yet it is unceasingly, unmercifully, constantly grounded in reality. the ways in which it moves toward the fantastical serve only to tell us in full detail of the pain of life � the selfish foolishness of people, the cruel machinations of an unequalsociety, the moving target of contentment.

i'm writing having finished her most canonical works, having5 starred her four most read masterpieces all in a row. i have never in my life encountered an author i feel this way about.
my lesson of 2024 is that toni morrison is the great american author.

bottom line: all i can say is do what i did: read everything.]]> 4.01 1973 Sula
author: Toni Morrison
name: emma
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: non-ya, literary-fiction, authors-of-color, diverse, 5-stars, to-buy, favorites-2024, recommend, reviewed, favorite-authors
review:
every book i read this year that isn't by toni morrison is against my will.

it was a yearin which i read my first toni morrison book, and then i read 6 more of them.

there is nobody, absolutely nobody, like her.

morrison's writing is up in the clouds, filled with turns of phrase and plot that in any other narrative would be nonsensical, and yet it is unceasingly, unmercifully, constantly grounded in reality. the ways in which it moves toward the fantastical serve only to tell us in full detail of the pain of life � the selfish foolishness of people, the cruel machinations of an unequalsociety, the moving target of contentment.

i'm writing having finished her most canonical works, having5 starred her four most read masterpieces all in a row. i have never in my life encountered an author i feel this way about.
my lesson of 2024 is that toni morrison is the great american author.

bottom line: all i can say is do what i did: read everything.
]]> Apartment Women 203648169 From the New York Times Notable author of The Old Woman with the Knife comes a bracingly original story of family, marriage and the cultural expectations of motherhood, about four women whose lives intersect in dramatic and unexpected ways at a government-run apartment complex outside Seoul.

When Yojin moves with her husband and daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she’s ready for a fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her neighbors, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next ten years.

Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as communal child care begins and the other parents show their true colors. Apartment Women traces the lives of four women in the apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs. Will they find a way to live peacefully? Or are the cultural expectations around parenthood stacked against them from the start?

A trenchant social novel from an award-winning author, Apartment Women incisively illuminates the unspoken imbalance of women’s parenting labor, challenging the age-old assumption that “it takes a village� to raise a child.]]> 224 Gu Byeong-mo 1335050078 emma 3
this book, about four families living in a communal apartment building, convinced me that we need to wait for men to die out and then start society over.

the writing is simple and abrupt, as is the ending...and the plot...but this successfully made me feel some type of way about the family unit.

and that's more than some can say!

bottom line: the system is broken!!! at least within this fictional story.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.40 2018 Apartment Women
author: Gu Byeong-mo
name: emma
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: arc, non-ya, literary-fiction, diverse, authors-of-color, 3-stars, eh, reviewed
review:
me and my friends.

this book, about four families living in a communal apartment building, convinced me that we need to wait for men to die out and then start society over.

the writing is simple and abrupt, as is the ending...and the plot...but this successfully made me feel some type of way about the family unit.

and that's more than some can say!

bottom line: the system is broken!!! at least within this fictional story.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> Sweet Heat 220217814 MEG CABOT
'Romantic, sexy, fun, delicious and important' MARIAN KEYES
'A triumph' BETH O'LEARY

🔥🔥🔥



The most hotly-anticipated romcom of 2025, from the author of Reese's Book Club Pick and TikTok Book Awards winner Honey & Spice...

Not every relationship makes it out of university.
But Kiki and Malakai were supposed to be forever.
Everything was perfect, until it all went up in flames.

Three years after their epic break-up, Kiki's worked hard to forget her first love. But just as she thinks she's got her life under control - jumping into the distractions of her romance-by-calendar-invite boyfriend, and plans for her best friend, Aminah's, wedding - Kiki's career implodes, the family business teeters on collapse, and Malakai returns . . .

As Malakai takes up his role as Best Man opposite her Maid of Honour, suddenly Kiki can think of nothing their simmering chemistry, what went wrong, and why it is now impossible to act normal around each other.

Juggling a new job, the prospect of her parents' restaurant being sold, and keeping her best friend from going full bridezilla, dealing with The Ex is the last thing she needs. But somehow the spark between them is only getting hotter - and threatening to ruin everything.

They just have to get through the wedding, so why does it feel like playing with fire?

Heart-melting, hilarious and completely addictive, Kiki and Malakai return in this standalone second novel from Sunday Times bestselling author Bolu Babalola.

💖 LOVE FOR BOLU BABALOLA'S WRITING 💖

'Rarely is love expressed this richly, this vividly, or this artfully' CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS

'Bolu understands desire better than anyone else' ANNIE LORD

'Incisively funny' ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

'Absolutely intoxicating' CASEY MCQUISTON

'Everything you could ever want from a romance and more - the vibes are simply immaculate' ZOELLA

'Babalola's writing shines' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

'Breathes new life into the genre with its vibrant characters and sexy, authentic voice' RED

'Romance will never be dead, as long as Bolu is writing it' JESSIE BURTON]]> 496 Bolu Babalola 0063306964 emma 0 4.23 2025 Sweet Heat
author: Bolu Babalola
name: emma
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, authors-of-color, non-ya, romance, diverse
review:

]]> <![CDATA[If You Love It, Let It Kill You]]> 217387666 A refreshingly irreverent novel about art, desire, domesticity, freedom, and the intricacies of the twenty-first-century female experience, by the acclaimed novelist Hannah Pittard

Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P. has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the flagship university, living with her boyfriend ( a fellow academic ) and helping raise his pre-teen daughter. Her sister’s sprawling family lives just across the street, and their long-divorced, deeply complicated parents have also recently moved to town.

One day, Hana learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently—and soon—in her ex-husband’s debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news—she cooks, runs, teaches, entertains—but the morning after baking mac ’n� cheese from scratch for her nephew’s sixth birthday, she wakes up changed. The contentment she’s long enjoyed is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous midlife crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat, a visit to the dean’s office, a shadowy figure from the past, a Greek chorus of indignant students whose primary complaints concern Hana’s autofictional narrative, and a game called Dead Body.

Steeped in the subtleties and strangeness of contemporary life, If You Love It, Let It Kill You is a deeply nuanced and disturbingly funny examination of memory, ownership, and artistic expression for readers of Miranda July’s All Fours and Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend.]]> 304 Hannah Pittard 1250910277 emma 0 sounds good to me! 4.02 2025 If You Love It, Let It Kill You
author: Hannah Pittard
name: emma
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read, arc, tbr-owned, tbr-arc, non-ya, literary-fiction
review:
sounds good to me!
]]> War and Peace 28010569
At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon's army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace, Tolstoy entwines grand themes - conflict and love, birth and death, free will and faith - with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur.

Anthony Briggs's superb translation combines stirring, accessible prose with fidelity to Tolstoy's original, while Orlando Figes's afterword discusses the novel's vast scope and depiction of Russian identity. This edition also contains appendices, notes, a list of prominent characters and maps.]]> 1440 Leo Tolstoy 0241265541 emma 0
folks. it's with great sadness that i inform you that whenyou're asked "when did you know you were seeing emma's downfall" you can tell them september 1, 2024.

today i begin the project that will surely bring about my mortal end.

on this day, elle and i will read one chapter of tolstoy's war and peace, and then we will do that again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and so on and so forth for the following 357 days, shaking our heads to show we disagree with war and nodding to show we agree with peace.

it's project long classics like you've never seen it before.

(because this book has 361 chapters, and because goodreads has a character limit, i'll only be updating this periodically. don't worry. you'll see me daily in other places annoying the sh*t out of you.)



VOLUME I, PART I
hello again. we're 25 days and a hundred pages into this project and essentially haven't made a dent.

how to summarize...there's war, there's peace. there are a lot of descriptions of mouths and beautiful princesses. people have died, people have been disinherited, people have inherited. guys are shipped off and girls are knocked up. eventful, and yet this has been 99% people going to each other's houses.


VOLUME I, PART II
coming to you live from 6 weeks and 200 pages into this to tell you: we have stopped going to people's houses and we have gone to war. it's bad vibes here. no one seems to be having much fun at this point. even people who get to ride on top of a tank (fun) are only doing so because they're severely wounded and being dragged out of battle (bad vibes).


VOLUME I, PART III
i thought we might get a complex look at the psychology behind war in this book, but i didn't expect the insight would be "all the soldier guys have huge crushes on the tsar and are showing off for him."


VOLUME II, PART I
it's pretty nice that in this version of war, you get to go home for as long as you want to hang out and lose your family fortune at cards and make impromptu rejected proposals of marriage. the war parts are really boring so i'm happy to mix it up.


VOLUME II, PART II
another thing about war i didn't expect: these guys are seeing napoleon and tsar alexander all the time. if i'm either of them i'm eating grapes in a tent somewhere and having people give me live updates, not sharing some dialogue on the front lines.


VOLUME II, PART III
532 pages in. four months have passed. we've spent so much time in these pages that a character has abandoned one wife, lost her to "death," mourned, become an asshole, healed himself spiritually, met a much younger woman, determined that he has never felt like this before and it's totally not because she's young and hot, and gotten re-engaged. and we're not even close to halfway done.


VOLUME II, PART IV
i really didn't expect engagements would be such a bad vibe in this book. i don't think we've come across a single grand declaration of love that was treated like "oh, nice! good news!"


VOLUME II, PART V
"With every fibre of his being he was convinced of what his instincts told him: there was no other way to live than the way he was living, and he had never done anything wrong in his life." okay me af!


VOLUME III, PART I
we're over halfway done this book both in pages read (755) and in time elapsed (more than 6 months), and i'm ready to call it. this is tsar fanfiction.


VOLUME III, PART II
if you are a historian who has ever once dared to weigh in on whether or not napoleon and the tsar and their groups of war-planning friends were smart...you are ON NOTICE. we just spent 150 pages (and, for me, a month and a half) being told how wrong you are.]]> 4.38 1869 War and Peace
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: emma
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1869
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-buy, non-ya, classics, currently-reading, project-long-classics, owned
review:
welcome to...YEAR AND PEACE.

folks. it's with great sadness that i inform you that whenyou're asked "when did you know you were seeing emma's downfall" you can tell them september 1, 2024.

today i begin the project that will surely bring about my mortal end.

on this day, elle and i will read one chapter of tolstoy's war and peace, and then we will do that again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and so on and so forth for the following 357 days, shaking our heads to show we disagree with war and nodding to show we agree with peace.

it's project long classics like you've never seen it before.

(because this book has 361 chapters, and because goodreads has a character limit, i'll only be updating this periodically. don't worry. you'll see me daily in other places annoying the sh*t out of you.)



VOLUME I, PART I
hello again. we're 25 days and a hundred pages into this project and essentially haven't made a dent.

how to summarize...there's war, there's peace. there are a lot of descriptions of mouths and beautiful princesses. people have died, people have been disinherited, people have inherited. guys are shipped off and girls are knocked up. eventful, and yet this has been 99% people going to each other's houses.


VOLUME I, PART II
coming to you live from 6 weeks and 200 pages into this to tell you: we have stopped going to people's houses and we have gone to war. it's bad vibes here. no one seems to be having much fun at this point. even people who get to ride on top of a tank (fun) are only doing so because they're severely wounded and being dragged out of battle (bad vibes).


VOLUME I, PART III
i thought we might get a complex look at the psychology behind war in this book, but i didn't expect the insight would be "all the soldier guys have huge crushes on the tsar and are showing off for him."


VOLUME II, PART I
it's pretty nice that in this version of war, you get to go home for as long as you want to hang out and lose your family fortune at cards and make impromptu rejected proposals of marriage. the war parts are really boring so i'm happy to mix it up.


VOLUME II, PART II
another thing about war i didn't expect: these guys are seeing napoleon and tsar alexander all the time. if i'm either of them i'm eating grapes in a tent somewhere and having people give me live updates, not sharing some dialogue on the front lines.


VOLUME II, PART III
532 pages in. four months have passed. we've spent so much time in these pages that a character has abandoned one wife, lost her to "death," mourned, become an asshole, healed himself spiritually, met a much younger woman, determined that he has never felt like this before and it's totally not because she's young and hot, and gotten re-engaged. and we're not even close to halfway done.


VOLUME II, PART IV
i really didn't expect engagements would be such a bad vibe in this book. i don't think we've come across a single grand declaration of love that was treated like "oh, nice! good news!"


VOLUME II, PART V
"With every fibre of his being he was convinced of what his instincts told him: there was no other way to live than the way he was living, and he had never done anything wrong in his life." okay me af!


VOLUME III, PART I
we're over halfway done this book both in pages read (755) and in time elapsed (more than 6 months), and i'm ready to call it. this is tsar fanfiction.


VOLUME III, PART II
if you are a historian who has ever once dared to weigh in on whether or not napoleon and the tsar and their groups of war-planning friends were smart...you are ON NOTICE. we just spent 150 pages (and, for me, a month and a half) being told how wrong you are.
]]> Slaveroad 207293895 224 John Edgar Wideman 1668057212 emma 3
once i'd finished, i both got it and didn't.

the whole time i was reading this book, my main thought was "i shouldn't be readingthis book."

john edgar wideman is under-read on goodreads, but was one of the most critically acclaimedauthors of the 80s and the first to win the pen/faulkner award twice. his most widely read books and his award winners are 40 years old.

i maybe should not have started here, with an unknown new release.

there was a lot of brilliance here, but it never quite coalesced into brilliance itself. in my unease at reading a book of almosts, i kept googling the author, reading interviews and excerpts and his wikipedia page.

this armed me for the back half of this book, which dissolves without comment into memoir.

wideman sets up a group of real people, and an interesting theory in the "slaveroad," but he fails to put it all together. even the ultimate pivot into his own memoriescould've served it, but the book abruptly ends without much to say.

bottom line: a less-brilliant work by a still-brilliant author.

(thanks to the publisher for the copy)]]> 3.54 Slaveroad
author: John Edgar Wideman
name: emma
average rating: 3.54
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: arc, diverse, from-publisher-author, authors-of-color, non-ya, nonfiction, owned, 3-stars, unpopular-opinion, eh, reviewed
review:
i wanted to read this since before it came out, so i was shocked it's one of the least read books i've ever seen on goodreads.

once i'd finished, i both got it and didn't.

the whole time i was reading this book, my main thought was "i shouldn't be readingthis book."

john edgar wideman is under-read on goodreads, but was one of the most critically acclaimedauthors of the 80s and the first to win the pen/faulkner award twice. his most widely read books and his award winners are 40 years old.

i maybe should not have started here, with an unknown new release.

there was a lot of brilliance here, but it never quite coalesced into brilliance itself. in my unease at reading a book of almosts, i kept googling the author, reading interviews and excerpts and his wikipedia page.

this armed me for the back half of this book, which dissolves without comment into memoir.

wideman sets up a group of real people, and an interesting theory in the "slaveroad," but he fails to put it all together. even the ultimate pivot into his own memoriescould've served it, but the book abruptly ends without much to say.

bottom line: a less-brilliant work by a still-brilliant author.

(thanks to the publisher for the copy)
]]> Ministry of Moral Panic 17238889 The Unbeatables.

Heartfelt and sexy, the stories of Amanda Lee Koe encompass a skewed world fraught with prestige anxiety, moral relativism, sexual frankness, and the improbable necessity of human connection. Told in strikingly original prose, these are fictions that plough, relentlessly, the possibilities of understanding Singapore and her denizens discursively, off-centre. Ministry of Moral Panic is an extraordinary debut collection and the introduction of a revelatory new voice.]]> 208 Amanda Lee Koe 9810757328 emma 0 new dream workplace unlocked 4.17 2013 Ministry of Moral Panic
author: Amanda Lee Koe
name: emma
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-read, non-ya, library, literary-fiction, authors-of-color, diverse
review:
new dream workplace unlocked
]]> <![CDATA[The Folklore of Forever (Moonville, #2)]]> 216536383 From the acclaimed author of Old Flames and New Fortunes comesa steamy enemies-to-lovers romantasy about a paranormal skeptic who is roped into a ghost hunting romp by the charming boy next door . . . who might just show her what real fantasies are made of.

Paranormal skeptic Zelda Tempest is hoping for a much-needed creativity boost for a new paranormal mystery novel. But despite the alleged magic of her hometown, Moonville, Ohio, she’s as stuck as ever.

With two witch sisters, not believing in magic is strange for a Tempest, but no one is more disappointed than Morgan Angelopoulos, the charming man next door. So, to cure her of her writer's block and her disbelief in magic, Morgan ropes her into a ghost-hunting romp, only for Zelda to discover something else bizarre, never-before-seen creatures that appear as ordinary pets to everyone else.

Curious about what else might be lurking in Moonville's woods, Zelda and Morgan embark on a quest to uncover the true magic that lies in their midsts . . . and perhaps, just maybe, they will find that the magic they're searching for has been with them all along.]]> 397 Sarah Hogle 059371508X emma 3
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.28 2025 The Folklore of Forever (Moonville, #2)
author: Sarah Hogle
name: emma
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: non-ya, romance, arc, 2-and-a-half-stars, to-review, eh
review:
sarah hogle!!!!!!!!!

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> Sister Snake 199531653 A glittering, bold, darkly funny novel about two sisters—one in New York, one in Singapore—who are bound by an ancient secret.

Sisterhood is difficult for Su and Emerald. Su leads a sheltered, moneyed life as the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Emerald is a nihilistic sugar baby in New York, living from whim to whim as she freely uses her beauty and charms to make ends meet. But they share a secret; once they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang Dynasty China.

A thousand years later, their mysterious history is the only thing still binding them together. When Emerald experiences a violent encounter in Central Park and Su boards the next flight to New York, the two reach a tenuous reconciliation for the first time in decades. Su convinces Emerald to move to Singapore so she can keep an eye on her—but she soon begins to worry that Emerald’s irrepressible behavior will out them both, in a sparkling, affluent city where everything runs like clockwork and any deviation from the norm is automatically suspect.

Razor-sharp, hilarious, and raw in emotion, Sister Snake explores chosen family, queerness, passing, and the struggle against conformity. Reimagining the Chinese folktale “The Legend of the White Snake,� this is a novel about being seen for who you are—and, ultimately, how to live free.]]> 272 Amanda Lee Koe 006335506X emma 4
even betterif the sisters in question are hot violent scary snake-women.

i had limited familiarity with the folk tale that inspired this retelling, but that didn't stop me from having a damn good time.

this book is over-the-top crazy, featuring hyperbolically beautiful and rich and charming women, and everything it does is wild. still, somehow, the core of it feels almost realistic: the way that your sister is the person you love the most who also deeply infuriates you, even if the infuriating thing is murder instead of stealing your clothes. complicated love stories. friendships and crushes. the singaporeannanny state.

it's an almost goofy book, and yet it holds itself back when it has to.

in other words, it's really fun.

bottom line: even if you're an immortal mythical creature your family gets on your nerves.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.79 2024 Sister Snake
author: Amanda Lee Koe
name: emma
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: authors-of-color, diverse, arc, non-ya, 3-and-a-half-stars, recommend, to-buy, fantasy, reviewed
review:
the surefire way to get me to read a book is to make it about sisters.

even betterif the sisters in question are hot violent scary snake-women.

i had limited familiarity with the folk tale that inspired this retelling, but that didn't stop me from having a damn good time.

this book is over-the-top crazy, featuring hyperbolically beautiful and rich and charming women, and everything it does is wild. still, somehow, the core of it feels almost realistic: the way that your sister is the person you love the most who also deeply infuriates you, even if the infuriating thing is murder instead of stealing your clothes. complicated love stories. friendships and crushes. the singaporeannanny state.

it's an almost goofy book, and yet it holds itself back when it has to.

in other words, it's really fun.

bottom line: even if you're an immortal mythical creature your family gets on your nerves.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> Sounds Like Love 219301746 A hitmaking songwriter and a bitter musician share a startling and inexplicable connection that they’ll do anything to shake, in the next sparkling, magical book from Ashley Poston.

Joni Lark is living the dream. She’s one of the most coveted songwriters in LA…and she can’t seem to write. There’s an emptiness inside her, and nothing seems to fill it.

When she returns to her hometown of Vienna Shores, North Carolina, she hopes that the sand, the surf, and the concerts at The Revelry, her family’s music venue, will spark her inspiration. But when she gets there, nothing is how she left it. Her best friend is avoiding her, her mother’s memories are fading fast, and The Revelry is closing.

How can she think about writing her next song when everything is changing without her?

Until she hears it. A melody in her head, lyric-less and half-formed, and an alluring and addictive voice to go with it—belonging, apparently, to a wry musician with hangups of his own.

Surely, he’s a figment of her overworked imagination.

But then the very real man attached to the voice shows up in Vienna Shores. He’s aggravating and gruff on the outside—nothing like the sweet, funny voice in Joni’s head—and he has a plan:

They’ll finish the song haunting them both, break their connection, and hope they don’t risk their hearts in the process.

Because that song stuck in their heads? Maybe it’s there for a reason.]]> 384 Ashley Poston 0593641000 emma 0 4.20 2025 Sounds Like Love
author: Ashley Poston
name: emma
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: to-read, unreleased, non-ya, romance
review:
ashley poston should release books every week
]]> Thirst Trap 221188099 Sometimes friends hold you together.
Sometimes they’re why you’re falling apart.

Maggie, Harley and Róise are friends on the of triumph, catastrophe, or maybe just finally growing up. Their crumbling Belfast houseshare has been witness to their roaring twenties, filled with questionable one-night stands and ruthless hangovers. But now fault-lines are beginning to show.

The three girls are still grieving the tragic death of their friend, Lydia, whose room remains untouched. Their last big fight hangs heavy over their heads, unspoken since the accident. And now they are all beginning to unravel.

Thirst Trap by Gráinne O'Hare is a blazing, bittersweet, bitingly funny, and painfully relatable story about the friendships that endure through the very best and the very worst of times.]]> 288 Grainne O'Hare 1035046229 emma 0 to-read, unreleased 4.16 2025 Thirst Trap
author: Grainne O'Hare
name: emma
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read, unreleased
review:
sometimes i feel like a cigarette in a barbie shoe
]]> Native Son 15622 Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.

Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.]]> 504 Richard Wright emma 0 to-read 4.03 1940 Native Son
author: Richard Wright
name: emma
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1940
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Waves 46114 The Waves introduces six characters—three men and three women—who are grappling with the death of a beloved friend, Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature’s trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf’s theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.]]> 297 Virginia Woolf 0156949601 emma 0 to-read 4.17 1931 The Waves
author: Virginia Woolf
name: emma
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1931
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Great Big Beautiful Life 218559595 Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.

Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years--or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.

When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.

One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.

Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication

Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.

But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.

And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.]]> 432 Emily Henry emma 4
(review to come / thank you to libro.fm for the alc!!!)]]> 4.22 2025 Great Big Beautiful Life
author: Emily Henry
name: emma
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: romance, non-ya, arc, 3-and-a-half-stars, to-review, recommend, to-buy
review:
life is just the great big beautiful wait between emily henry releases

(review to come / thank you to libro.fm for the alc!!!)
]]> Hard Copy 203579301 This is a story of girl meets printer.

A customer service assistant spends her long workdays printing letters. Her one friend is the printer and, in the dark confines of her office, she begins to open up to him, talking about her fears, her past, her hopes and dreams.

To her, it seems like a beautiful friendship is blossoming. To her boss, it seems like she's losing her mind.

Diagnosed with burnout and placed on leave, she faces severance and - worse - separation from her beloved printer. But she's not about to give up on her only friend without a fight. And, it turns out, neither is he...]]> 256 Fien Veldman 1035906449 emma 3
honestly, capitalism is so brutal and weird, it's like...who can blame her.

this is a book in 4 parts. 3 out of 4 of those are from the perspective of a very underpaid girl with a dark secret and a very thankless job. 1 is from the perspective of a printer.

anyone who has ever had to try to print something, in their home or at work or in a ups store for 18 cents a sheet, knows that attemptingto make a document take physical form is likely a circle of hell. so of all the office products to fall in love with (gel pens? post-it notes? an ergonomic stapler?) i can't say i agree with the choice.

nor can i agree with the choice to tell even part of this story as a printer, which necessitates without exaggeration dozens of pages of quasi-explanation for how a hunk of plastic is god-like or at least omniscient.

but i really did like a lot about our depressing, scared protagonist's navigation through stupid dumb modern life.

bottom line: the anti-capitalist love letter to outdated office technology we didn't know we needed. (we probably don't.)

(thanks to the publisher for the copy)]]> 3.21 2023 Hard Copy
author: Fien Veldman
name: emma
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: arc, from-publisher-author, owned, literary-fiction, 3-and-a-half-stars, unpopular-opinion, recommend, reviewed
review:
the natural conclusion of seeking out weird books is to end up reading about a girl who falls in love with a printer.

honestly, capitalism is so brutal and weird, it's like...who can blame her.

this is a book in 4 parts. 3 out of 4 of those are from the perspective of a very underpaid girl with a dark secret and a very thankless job. 1 is from the perspective of a printer.

anyone who has ever had to try to print something, in their home or at work or in a ups store for 18 cents a sheet, knows that attemptingto make a document take physical form is likely a circle of hell. so of all the office products to fall in love with (gel pens? post-it notes? an ergonomic stapler?) i can't say i agree with the choice.

nor can i agree with the choice to tell even part of this story as a printer, which necessitates without exaggeration dozens of pages of quasi-explanation for how a hunk of plastic is god-like or at least omniscient.

but i really did like a lot about our depressing, scared protagonist's navigation through stupid dumb modern life.

bottom line: the anti-capitalist love letter to outdated office technology we didn't know we needed. (we probably don't.)

(thanks to the publisher for the copy)
]]> The Great Gatsby 6519719 182 F. Scott Fitzgerald emma 5
today i realized goodreads deleted it!

read the only one of my 2000+ reviews that goodreads has simply straight up taken down here, where it's safe: ]]> 4.05 1925 The Great Gatsby
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: emma
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1925
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: 5-stars, classics, non-ya, owned, recommend, beautifully-written, reviewed
review:
once upon a time, i had a very long, very passionate review of this book uploaded, with very long, very passionate pages of comments, and generally it was one of my favorite reviews (and of one of my favorite books) with one of my favorite ensuing discussions.

today i realized goodreads deleted it!

read the only one of my 2000+ reviews that goodreads has simply straight up taken down here, where it's safe:
]]> <![CDATA[Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys]]> 222683982 An enchanting, illuminating, highly personal tour of some of the most iconic cemeteries of the world—part travelogue, part memoir, part hauntology by the author of Our Share of Night and "Buenos Aires's sorceress" (TheNew York Times)

"Enriquez is a queen of horror."�Los Angeles Times
"One of Latin America’s most exciting authors."—Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Mariana Enriquez has been fascinated by the haunting beauty of cemeteries since she was a teenager, visiting them frequently, a goth flaneur taking notes on her aesthetic obsession as she walked among the headstones. But in 2013, when the body of a friend's mother who was dissapeared during Argentina's military dictatorship was found in a common grave, she began to examine more deeply the complex meanings of cemeteries and where our bodies come to rest.

In this vivid, cinematic book, Enriquez travels North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting the catacombs of Paris, Prague's Old Jewish Cemetery, Elvis's grave at Graceland, the above-ground mausoleums of New Orleans, her hometown of Buenos Aires's Recoleta, and more. She investigates each cemetery's history, architecture, its dead (famous and not), its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors. Weaving personal stories with reportage, interviews, folklore, musicology, and literature, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is memoir channeled through Enriquez's obsession with cemeteries,revealing as much about her own life and unique sensibility as the graveyards and tombstones she walks among. Exhilarating, unsettling, and unlike anything else, Enriquez's first work of nonfiction is as original and enthralling as the stories and novels for which she's become so admired and beloved.]]> 336 Mariana Enríquez 0593733517 emma 0 5.00 Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys
author: Mariana Enríquez
name: emma
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read, unreleased, authors-of-color, diverse, literary-fiction, non-ya
review:
even mariana enriquez's titles are creepy fantastical one of a kind
]]> Awake in the Floating City 217453585 An utterly transporting debut novel about the unexpected relationship between an artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for—two of the last people living in a flooded San Francisco of the future, the home neither is ready to leave.

“An astonishing work of art…This is the kind of book that changes you, that leaves you seeing more vividly, and living more fully, in its wake.� —Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape—but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay.

Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she’d abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to become entangled with Bo’s own, she’s struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Then Mia’s health turns, and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who’s brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever.]]> 320 Susanna Kwan 0593701402 emma 0 3.92 2025 Awake in the Floating City
author: Susanna Kwan
name: emma
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read, arc, authors-of-color, diverse, sci-fi, dystopian, tbr-arc, tbr-owned
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Adam and Evie's Matchmaking Tour]]> 212113202 A rollicking, unforgettable romance about two strangers finding love despite their best efforts as they embark on a sweeping matchmaking tour through Việt Nam.

Evie Lang's life is in shambles. On the heels of losing her beloved aunt, she's unceremoniously fired from her poetry professorship. Lacking income and inspiration, she has no idea how to move forward - until hope arrives in the form of a surprising letter.

Auntie Hảo has left her house in San Francisco to Evie. The catch? To inherit, she must go on a pre-arranged matchmaking tour in Việt Nam.

Adam Quyền has a chip on his shoulder. He's working for his sister's elite matchmaking company and desperate to prove himself, so when she challenges him to join the first tour, he reluctantly agrees.

Adam thinks Evie is chaotic and unpredictable. Evie thinks Adam is grumpy and uptight. But their chemistry is undeniable, their animosity charged with attraction. Will they find their perfect match in the last place they thought to look?

An enemies-to-lovers romcom for everyone who's lost their faith in love.]]> 306 Nora Nguyen 1529440335 emma 3
this is maybe not a great romance. the male lead is too much of an asshole, the female lead too quirky. it is also maybe not my favorite writing � of the kind where it feels like a bunch of words are the synonyms of the word the author was actually looking for.

but i loved reading about vietnam and amazing food and glorious sites.

so a good romcom, no. but a pretty entertaining travel guide.

bottom line: yet another case of liking everything except the romance in a romance.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.31 2024 Adam and Evie's Matchmaking Tour
author: Nora Nguyen
name: emma
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: non-ya, romance, arc, diverse, authors-of-color, 3-stars, eh, reviewed
review:
my fiancé and i are also planning a whirlwind tour through vietnam, so this is basically studying.

this is maybe not a great romance. the male lead is too much of an asshole, the female lead too quirky. it is also maybe not my favorite writing � of the kind where it feels like a bunch of words are the synonyms of the word the author was actually looking for.

but i loved reading about vietnam and amazing food and glorious sites.

so a good romcom, no. but a pretty entertaining travel guide.

bottom line: yet another case of liking everything except the romance in a romance.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> Cake Eater 228618447 For fans of raw celebrity memoirs, Bravo Summer House star Carl Radke gives readers a look into his unfiltered journey of recovery, resilience and transformation.

Sober Carl Isn’t Fun—Or Is He?

Carl Radke’s path from reality TV’s party-loving star to a life centered around recovery has been anything but straightforward. Famous for his role on Summer House, Carl’s journey in the spotlight has forced him to confront personal battles under public scrutiny. Beyond the cameras, he’s faced struggles with addiction, the weight of toxic masculinity, the heartbreaking loss of his brother, and a quest to find real joy in a world that equates fun with alcohol.

In this candid memoir, Carl opens up about a side of his life few have seen. With unfiltered honesty, he takes readers through the highs and lows, from career shifts and family dynamics to finding peace in his recovery. Each chapter dives into the hard-earned lessons he’s gathered, proving that life can be fulfilling—even without a drink. His story shows that fun and authenticity aren’t only compatible with sobriety; they can thrive because of it.

Whether processing grief, navigating sober relationships, or confronting the public’s perceptions, Carl’s journey is one of resilience, growth, and self-discovery. Through vulnerability and humor, Carl redefines “fun,� reminding readers that the most meaningful transformations come from within. This memoir is a must-read for anyone seeking the courage to redefine their own path.]]> Carl Radke emma 0 to-read, unreleased 0.0 Cake Eater
author: Carl Radke
name: emma
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read, unreleased
review:

]]> Questions Without Answers 216971309 Pondering the questions only kids would think to ask, this hilarious, poignant collection captures the wonder of a child's imagination, brought to life by beloved New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck.

“This book is for anyone who has secret questions in their mind they are too embarrassed to ask out loud. In other words, this book is for everyone.”—Lemony Snicket, bestselling author of A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions

Does the rain know that people love to play in the rain? Are the bubbles in drinks their thoughts? Do dogs have chins? What does it feel like on the last day you’re a child?

What’s the best question a kid ever asked you? WhenSarah Manguso opened a Twitter account and posted this single (and only) tweet, she immediately received hundreds of answers. Many, she discovered, were intelligent, intuitive, inventive, and philosophical. In the process of assembling them, the questions seemed to form a“choral philosophy� that she believes disappears from most people’s lives in kindergarten.As Sarah Manguso says in her illuminating foreword,“These questions are cute by the word’s original definition, swift and piercing. They cut to the quick.�

Gathering a hundred of the best questions from this poll, as well as her own experience as a mom, and bringing them brilliantly to life with illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck, Questions Without Answers ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime--encompassing birth, death, poop, dinosaurs, and everything in between--to show us the wit and wisdom of little people in all their wondrous glory.]]> 176 Sarah Manguso 0593733622 emma 0 5.00 Questions Without Answers
author: Sarah Manguso
name: emma
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read, unreleased, non-ya, nonfiction
review:
i love the random things kids say. so yeah i'm down to read a book of them
]]> Cursed Daughters 223955096 No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace...

So goes the family curse, long handed down from generation to generation, ruining families and breaking hearts. And now it's Eniiyi's turn - who, due to her uncanny resemblance to her dead aunt, Monife, is already used to her family's strange beliefs, as well as their insistence that she is a reincarnation. Still, when she falls in love with the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family's history. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak, or can she escape the family curse and the mysterious fate that befell her aunt?]]> Oyinkan Braithwaite 1805463373 emma 0 to-read, unreleased 4.40 2025 Cursed Daughters
author: Oyinkan Braithwaite
name: emma
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read, unreleased
review:

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

Frankenstein by way of Heathers, We Love You, Bunny is both a prequel and a sequel, and an unabashedly wild and totally complete stand-alone novel. Open your hearts, Bunny, to another dazzlingly original and darkly hilarious romp in the Bunny-verse from the queen of the fever-dream, Mona Awad.]]> Mona Awad emma 0 to-read, unreleased 4.59 2025 We Love You, Bunny (Bunny, #2)
author: Mona Awad
name: emma
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read, unreleased
review:

]]> Don't Sleep with the Dead 211004130 Don't Sleep with the Dead, a standalone companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, her acclaimed reimagining of The Great Gatsby.

Nick Carraway―paper soldier and novelist―has found a life and a living watching the mad magical spectacle of New York high society in the late thirties. He's good at watching, and he's even better at pretending: pretending to be straight, pretending to be human, pretending he's forgotten the events of that summer in 1922.

On the eve of the second World War, however, Nick learns that someone's been watching him pretend and that memory goes both ways. When he sees a familiar face at a club one night, it quickly becomes clear that dead or not, damned or not, Jay Gatsby isn't done with him.

In all paper there is memory, and Nick's ghost has come home.]]> 112 Nghi Vo 125036261X emma 3
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.72 2025 Don't Sleep with the Dead
author: Nghi Vo
name: emma
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: arc, authors-of-color, diverse, fantasy, historical, lgbt-plus, non-ya, 2-and-a-half-stars, to-review, unpopular-opinion, eh
review:
every year nghi vo writes 2 wacky short gay fantasy books for me specifically

(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> Passion and Affect: Stories 164410 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780060958954

Within these fourteen hilarious and insightful tales of urban life by Laurie Colwin, critically acclaimed author of Happy All the Time and Home Cooking, you'll meet:

Raiford Phelps, an ornithologist who discovers new patterns of animal behavior when he meets Mary Leibnitz.
Benno Morna, a temporary bachelor, free to indulge in TV, junk food, and Greenie Frenzel when his wholesome wife is out of town.
Vincent Cadworthy and Guido Morris, whose elegant friendship is suddenly disrupted by Misty Berkowitz.
Elizabeth Bayard, whose passion for order and civility does constant battle with her unruly loves.
They are buffeted by the pressures of their jobs, imposed upon by their families and their surroundings, and remain ever hopeful of making sense of their lives. With compassion and biting wit, Laurie Colwinhas created a new sort of comedy of manners.]]> 192 Laurie Colwin emma 0 to-read 4.08 1974 Passion and Affect: Stories
author: Laurie Colwin
name: emma
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Lone Pilgrim 164403 224 Laurie Colwin 0060958936 emma 0 to-read 4.20 1981 The Lone Pilgrim
author: Laurie Colwin
name: emma
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object]]> 59557244 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

From the critically acclaimed author of Happy All the Time and Home Cooking, a wise and witty tale of a woman struggling to overcome her grief and find her future.

When Sam Bax, a charming daredevil of a Boston lawyer, sails his boat into a storm off the coast of Maine, Elizabeth "Olly" Bax, his wife, is widowed at twenty-seven. With no pretense of courage, and a vague dislike for what she feels is the cheap availability of her emotions, Olly grieves the husband she probably would have divorced, while coping with the warmth and awkwardness of family trying (and failing) to distract her from their own grief. As she learns to rethink her life and her love, she becomes close to Sam's brother, Patrick—and begins to realize Sam's recklessness and passion may not be as foreign to her as she thought.

Laurie Colwin depicts Olly—the “More Life Widow of the More Life Kid”—with humor, compassion, and a decided lack of sentimentality, creating a real heroine who tries to remain true to her heart while keeping her head.

This edition features cover art by Olivia McGiff.]]> 192 Laurie Colwin 0060958960 emma 0 to-read 3.64 1975 Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object
author: Laurie Colwin
name: emma
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Another Marvelous Thing 164402 Another Marvelous Thing is perfect for anyone who knows firsthand that opposites actually do attract. These spare and unsentimental stories display how two very different people -- a tough-minded and tenderhearted woman and an urbane, old-fashioned older man -- fall in love despite their differences, get married, and give birth to a child.

8 stories:
Frank and Billy
French Movie
A Little Something
Another Marvelous Thing
A Country Wedding
A Couple of Old Flames [originally titled Old Flames]
Swan Song
My Mistress]]> 144 Laurie Colwin 0060958944 emma 0 to-read 4.05 Another Marvelous Thing
author: Laurie Colwin
name: emma
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Material 199928287
Its teachers and students all know how bits work—in theory, at least. They know that there's a line between sharp and cruel, that sad becomes funny at the right angle, that the worst is the best, the truth is the worst, and any moment of your life that isn’t a punchline will either get you to a punchline or force you to be one.

They’re all afraid to be one.

Artie may be too handsome for standup, Olivia too reluctant to examine her own life, and Phil too afraid to cause harm. Kruger may be too vanilla to command his students� respect, Ashbee too detached. And then we have Dorothy—the only woman on the program’s faculty—who though preparing to launch a comeback tour can’t tell if she’s too abiding, too ambitious, or too ambivalent.

Whether a visiting professor—the high-profile, controversy-steeped comedian, Manny Reinhardt—will do more to help or harm their cause remains to be seen. But he’s on his way. He’ll be arriving sooner than anyone thinks.

Riffing keenly across a diverse array of precision-cut perspectives, The Material examines life through the eyes of a reluctantly assembled ensemble, a band of outsiders bound together by the need to laugh, and the longing to make others laugh even harder.]]> 288 Camille Bordas 0593729846 emma 2
but the title of this book is apt. this isn’t the good stuff, nor is it the bad stuff. it’s just literally everything. it doesn’t make a judgment call on what is or isn’t interesting or worth including � it just throws all of it in there for you to decide.

that means paragraphs of internal monologue followed by “he didn’t actually think that.� that means an omniscient narrator and a thousand characters with interiority. that means unbelievably stale-feeling (as in stale to the point that it seems more likely that an alien wrote these based on studying the world from 2013 to 2018 than an author would find them worthy of transcription last year) observations about life, comedy, love, happiness, political correctness.

in spite of the fact that all of that significantly outweighed the moments that this was evocative or funny or even notable, i didn't hate this book.

i mean, not quite.

bottom line: net neutral.

(2.5 / thanks to the publisher for the copy)]]> 3.33 2024 The Material
author: Camille Bordas
name: emma
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: owned, non-ya, literary-fiction, from-publisher-author, arc, eh, 2-and-a-half-stars, reviewed
review:
i like books and i like comedy. surely, i thought, i'd like a combination of the two.

but the title of this book is apt. this isn’t the good stuff, nor is it the bad stuff. it’s just literally everything. it doesn’t make a judgment call on what is or isn’t interesting or worth including � it just throws all of it in there for you to decide.

that means paragraphs of internal monologue followed by “he didn’t actually think that.� that means an omniscient narrator and a thousand characters with interiority. that means unbelievably stale-feeling (as in stale to the point that it seems more likely that an alien wrote these based on studying the world from 2013 to 2018 than an author would find them worthy of transcription last year) observations about life, comedy, love, happiness, political correctness.

in spite of the fact that all of that significantly outweighed the moments that this was evocative or funny or even notable, i didn't hate this book.

i mean, not quite.

bottom line: net neutral.

(2.5 / thanks to the publisher for the copy)
]]> Family Happiness: A Novel 56913183 A modern classic from Laurie Colwin (Home Cooking), one of the most beloved romantic comedy authors of all time; the story of a woman who has everything... at least on the surface.

Polly Solo-Miller Demarest has it all: a dashing lawyer husband, two beautiful children, and a cushy Uptown apartment. And yet... she feels trapped. Trapped by the pressure to be the perfect daughter to a distinguished family. Trapped in her marriage. Which is why Polly, much to her own shock, finds herself embarking on a thrilling affair with a painter--and a search to discover what she really wants from life. A thoroughly charming novel about finding balance and content, Family Happiness is a delightful yet thought provoking work of romantic comedy from an author at the peak of her powers.

The cover for this 2021 reissue is by Olivia McGiff.]]> 288 Laurie Colwin 0593313542 emma 4
(3.5 / review to come)]]> 3.75 1982 Family Happiness: A Novel
author: Laurie Colwin
name: emma
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: owned, non-ya, literary-fiction, 3-and-a-half-stars, to-review, recommend
review:
laurie colwin books are all about family happiness. and i love them all!

(3.5 / review to come)
]]> Creep: A Love Story 216497102 From a blistering new voice in dark literary fiction, an unsettling portrait of loneliness, obsession, and identity which asks: if a stranger was left alone in your house, how well could they truly get to know you—enough to fall in love with you?

Alice and Tom are made for each other. Deeply connected, they share a flat in London, go to galleries together, enjoy the same books and wine. They even share a toothbrush. It’s all picture perfect.

Except Alice and Tom have never met.

Alice has been cleaning Tom’s apartment every Wednesday for a year. With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every multivitamin counted in the jar, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation, imagining a love so powerful it might erase a lifetime of self-hatred and loneliness.

But as Alice prepares for the moment when she and Tom will finally meet face-to-face, she discovers that love might not be the cure she thought it was. Instead, their coming together sets off a chain of events that shatters everything Alice thought she knew and burns her world to the ground.

Told in Alice’s compelling, deliciously acidic voice, Creep is a literary study of unreliability and unlikability. Exploring alienation and loneliness, class and race, it's a skilled debut with resonance in the way that we view women, mental health, and the lost in society.]]> 256 Emma van Straaten 0063411016 emma 0 to-read 3.53 2025 Creep: A Love Story
author: Emma van Straaten
name: emma
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The City and Its Uncertain Walls]]> 209192695 From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.]]> 449 Haruki Murakami 0593801970 emma 3
i want to note two things before i fully review this: that synopsis is actually not that far off, and yet i still liked it.

this book is simultaneously two things:
- a book about a teenager whose brief high school love story ruins his life to the point that he, in middle age,gives up his existence and shadow to move to a made-up town and analyze dreams in the company of a still-16-year-old version of his girlfriend from a million years ago, and
- a slow, withholding, uneventful, challenging read about childhood and memory, dreaming and nostalgia, introversion and success, love and humanity.

it was the best of times and the worst of times, uneven in its moments of brilliance and of typical murakami cringe. this is an adaptation of a novella that he had already previously adapted into a different book, and i think that shows in good ways and in bad.

murakami has one of our generation's most magical and inventive minds when it comes to creating new forms of strangeness towards women and creating whole mythical narratives to excuse them.
but you can't deny he really is magical and inventive.

bottom line: as always, pros and cons. but slightly more pros.

(3.5 / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)]]> 3.72 2023 The City and Its Uncertain Walls
author: Haruki Murakami
name: emma
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: non-ya, magical-realist-urban-whatever, literary-fiction, diverse, arc, authors-of-color, 3-and-a-half-stars, recommend, reviewed
review:
i haven't read the synopsis of this but i'm going to guess a bumbling man descends into a fantasy version of our own world in which a scary sexy woman becomes obsessed with him

i want to note two things before i fully review this: that synopsis is actually not that far off, and yet i still liked it.

this book is simultaneously two things:
- a book about a teenager whose brief high school love story ruins his life to the point that he, in middle age,gives up his existence and shadow to move to a made-up town and analyze dreams in the company of a still-16-year-old version of his girlfriend from a million years ago, and
- a slow, withholding, uneventful, challenging read about childhood and memory, dreaming and nostalgia, introversion and success, love and humanity.

it was the best of times and the worst of times, uneven in its moments of brilliance and of typical murakami cringe. this is an adaptation of a novella that he had already previously adapted into a different book, and i think that shows in good ways and in bad.

murakami has one of our generation's most magical and inventive minds when it comes to creating new forms of strangeness towards women and creating whole mythical narratives to excuse them.
but you can't deny he really is magical and inventive.

bottom line: as always, pros and cons. but slightly more pros.

(3.5 / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
]]> This Is Your Mother: A Memoir 220160116 From “a writer who’s absolutely going places� (Roxane Gay), a remarkable, inventive debut memoir about a mother-daughter relationship across cycles of poverty, separation, and illness, exploring how we forge identity in the face of imminent loss.

Growing up, Erika Simpson’s mother loomed large, almost biblical in her life. A daughter of sharecroppers, middle child of ten, her origin story served as a kind of Genesis. Her departure from home and a cheating husband, pursuing higher education along the way a kind of Exodus. Her rules for survival, often repeated like the Ten Commandments, guided Erika’s own journey into adulthood. And the most important rule? Throughout her life, Sallie Carol preached the power of a testimony—which often proved useful in talking her way out of a bind with bill collectors.

But where does a mother’s story end and a daughter’s begin? In this brave, illuminating memoir, Erika offers a joint recollection of their lives as they navigate times of poverty and stability, separation and togetherness, illness and remission. Her mother’s uncanny ability to endure Job-like trials and manifest New Testament–style miracles made her seem invincible. But while those who raise us may start out as gods in our lives, through her mother’s final months and fifth battle with cancer, Erika captures the moment you realize that parents are just people.

Weaving together a dual timeline and elements from both scripture and pop culture, Erika explores how the lessons, dreams, and patterns we inherit influence our future, for better and worse. Powerful, moving, and unforgettable, This Is Your Mother is a gorgeously rendered story of a mother’s life through a daughter’s eyes as she navigates through grief to a place of clarity where she can see who she is without her mom—and because of her.]]> 224 Erika J. Simpson 1668024039 emma 0 4.59 This Is Your Mother: A Memoir
author: Erika J. Simpson
name: emma
average rating: 4.59
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read, arc, authors-of-color, diverse, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, owned, non-ya, memoir, from-publisher-author
review:
is there any relationship more interesting than mothers and daughters
]]> Just So You Know 201379112 You Deserve Each Other Christmas short story set years into the future. Found in Sarah Hogle's website.]]> 26 Sarah Hogle emma 0 3.84 Just So You Know
author: Sarah Hogle
name: emma
average rating: 3.84
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read, non-ya, romance, library
review:
even 26 pages of you deserve each other bonus content is superior to most other books
]]> The Compound 218460337
All of you are young, all beautiful, all keen to escape the grinding poverty, political unrest and environmental catastrophe of the outside world.

You realise that cameras are tracking your every move, broadcasting to millions of reality TV fans.

Soon, ten men will arrive on foot � if they all survive the journey.

What will you have to do to win?

And what happens to the losers?

LORD OF THE FLIES meets LOVE ISLAND in this explosive, addictive debut novel, as bingeable as the best reality TV, with dark undercurrents of literary dystopia and consumerist satire. ]]> 304 Aisling Rawle 0593977270 emma 0 3.96 2025 The Compound
author: Aisling Rawle
name: emma
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, arc, non-ya, mystery-thriller-horror-etc
review:

]]> L.A. Women 221251764 An electrifying novel about the complicated friendship between two ambitious and talented female writers in 1960s Los Angeles and the ultimate artistic one writes a book based on the other's life� from the author of Reese's Book Club Pick Before We Were Innocent.

After a steady descent from literary stardom, Lane Warren is back. She’s secured a new book deal based off the life of her sometimes friend and more often rival, notorious free spirit and muse, Gala Margolis. Lane’s only problem is that Gala has been missing for months…nobody can find her.

Ten years earlier, Gala was a charming socialite and Lane was a Hollywood outsider amidst the glittering 1960’s LA party scene. Though never best friends, Lane found Gala sharp and compelling. Gala liked that Lane took her seriously. They were both writers. They were drawn to each other.

That is until Gala’s star began to rise, and Lane grew more envious. Then Lane decided to do something that she wouldn’t ever be able to take back…changing the trajectory of both their lives.]]> 416 Ella Berman 0593639154 emma 0 3.81 2025 L.A. Women
author: Ella Berman
name: emma
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, non-ya, literary-fiction, arc
review:

]]> The Wilderness 222658339 "Wonderfully ambitious.... Flournoy explores the complexity of friendship, family, and home in a voice that is expansive yet intimate, humorous yet devastating. I loved this book."—Brit Bennett, author ofThe Vanishing HalfandThe Mothers

An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife—in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.

Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good� man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.

As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.]]> 304 Angela Flournoy 0063318776 emma 0 4.21 The Wilderness
author: Angela Flournoy
name: emma
average rating: 4.21
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read, tbr-arc, tbr-owned, non-ya, literary-fiction, arc, from-publisher-author
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You]]> 52220686 Stamped from the Beginning for ages 12 and up.

A timely, crucial, and empowering exploration of racism--and antiracism--in America.

This is NOT a history book.
This is a book about the here and now.
A book to help us better understand why we are where we are.
A book about race.

The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This is a remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, winner of a National Book Award. It reveals the history of racist ideas in America and inspires hope for an antiracist future.

Stamped takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.

Through a gripping, fast-paced, and energizing narrative, Jason Reynolds shines a light on the many insidious forms of racist ideas--and on ways readers can identify and stamp out racist thoughts in their daily lives.]]> 294 Jason Reynolds 0316453692 emma 5
everyone should read this book.

this is one of my favorite books of 2020. find the full list: ]]> 4.46 2020 Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You
author: Jason Reynolds
name: emma
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2020/11/29
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: diverse, non-ya, nonfiction, owned, favorites-2020, recommend, reviewed, authors-of-color, 4-and-a-half-stars
review:
if you take one recommendation from me this year, let it be this one.

everyone should read this book.

this is one of my favorite books of 2020. find the full list:
]]> <![CDATA[You Deserve Valentine's Day Brunch]]> 61153459 15 Sarah Hogle emma 0 4.44 You Deserve Valentine's Day Brunch
author: Sarah Hogle
name: emma
average rating: 4.44
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read, romance, non-ya, library
review:
you deserve each other supremacy
]]> Metamorphoses 20808817 723 Ovid 0141394617 emma 4
this is another installment of project long classics, in which i read intimidating books in small chunks over the course of a month in order to achieve three goals: a) seem smart, b) make puns, and c) have an excuse to buy penguin clothbound classics.

this one is slightly different because i already own it. brag alert: my boyfriend bought me my copy of this book when we were on a date in a closed bookstore.

anyway. i have no idea what this is about. it's divided into 15 books, so let's read half of one a day, shall we?


BOOK I, PART I
the GODS just MADE the WORLD and then FLOODED the HELL out of it. and the WRITING is BEAUTIFUL. i'm having so much fun already.


BOOK I, PART II
this part is mostly about really pretty girls catching the eye of gods and then being turned into trees and cows and stuff because of that bad luck.


BOOK II, PART I
since the dawn of time, when cars were chariots and dads were gods, teenage boys in media have been driving their fathers' rides without permission only to f*ck everything up immediately.


BOOK II, PART II
this section focuses on a variety of tattletale birds.


BOOK III, PART I
i did NOT know the tiresias tragic backstory (one time he was turned into a woman because he saw some snakes screwing and therefore was called on by jove and saturnia to settle who has more fun in bed and when he sided with jove and said women saturnia blinded him but then jove felt bad so he gave him the eternal gift of prophecy).


BOOK III, PART II
now we're getting to echo and narcissus. this is like the greco-roman greatest hits.


BOOK IV, PART I
taken aback to find the words "he clings to his misshapen ass" here.


BOOK IV, PART II
there's a girl walking around in a robe dripping blood wearing a live serpent as a belt throwing crazy-making snakes at people. and perseus is carrying medusa's head like a tote bag while he turns guys into mountains and saves fair maidens from sea monsters. this is in half of one chapter.


BOOK V, PART I
by and large a play by play of who hit who with a spear.


BOOK V, PART II
one of the most unforgivable crimes you could commit in the ancient world was being a tattletale. the phrase snitches get stitches has held true throughout time and space.


BOOK VI, PART I
we are never too busy for an exhaustive rundown of which people the gods have turned into which animals throughout time.


BOOK VI, PART II
i am a sister girl for life, but i am not sure i would kill my son and then cut him up and cook him and feed him to my traitor husband in order to avenge mine. revenge would definitely be had but i'm not convinced i would choose that specifically.


BOOK VII, PART I
oh how i love a witchy girl.


BOOK VII, PART II
this book is actually so interesting that i have to choose between 3+ jokes with every section. i hope you all appreciate my sacrifice.


BOOK VIII, PART I
i guess i don't know what i expected from the minotaur origin story, but it wasn't either "deeply disturbing" or "a straight line from the icarus sun incident."


BOOK VIII, PART II
this is so rich with detail that it's like, "a bunch of guys died in a boar incident. a woman sets a fire in vengeance. the fire kills a father. all the daughters of the father are super mournful and upset. diana turns all those girls into birds, except two. these two are hercules' wife and the future mother of one of the guys who pops out of the trojan horse."

and on top of all that i'm learning about stuff like "watch-geese." this is a perfect book.


BOOK IX, PART I
everybody has a name, a name from childhood, a name that's a reference to their dad, a name that's a reference to some kind of infidelity knowingly or unknowingly committed by their mom, and a nickname. this is fun and impossible!


BOOK IX, PART II
in most cases i think fleeing your homeland and literally starting a new city from scratch in order to escape someone who has an unrequited crush on you is a bit much. however, if that person is your sister...fair enough!


BOOK X, PART I
i know the whole orpheus and eurydice thing is supposed to be a great romance, as in he loved her too much to be able to turn his eye from her, but i think it's more of an illustration of the fact that men literally cannot listen.


BOOK X, PART II
tons of incest in this book. what is this, hbo?


BOOK XI, PART I
the fact that midas ASKED that everything he touched would turn to gold?? it's like if ella enchanted begged to be obedient before chasing lucinda all over kingdom come.


BOOK XI, PART II
at this point i'm ready to believe the gods are just looking for reasons to turn women into birds. call a goddess ugly: you're a bird now. sleep with a god: you're a bird now. don't sleep with a god: you're a bird now. have a talent: you're a bird now. witness morpheus dressed up like your husband's very wet ghost in order to tell you that he drowned via dream: you're a bird now. enough already!


BOOK XII, PART I
these guys are getting really creative with their choice of battle weapons.


BOOK XII, PART II
did not know they had crowbars in ancient times. (see above.)


BOOK XIII, PART I
i kind of love that ovid was like, oh, the legendary stories that would be the basis of the iliad and the odyssey? yeah. those are just chapters in my book.


BOOK XIII, PART II
three pages of the cyclops spitting straight game. telling your girl "i got you two bear cubs and it's actually good that i'm hairy, due to the ugliness" and then very quickly killing her boyfriend with a big rock could work on someone.


BOOK XIV, PART I
we just covered the events of the aeneid in a few paragraphs. ovid is showing off at this point!


BOOK XIV, PART II
i'm ready to adjust my earlier declaration re: gods turning women into birds. i'd like to clarify that they also turn them into trees.


BOOK XV, PART I
here i am all sad that this is the penultimate day of this project and now i'm getting lectured for pages because i'm not a vegetarian. they're saying i'm no better than the cyclops and telling me i should be fine since grapes exist.


BOOK XV, PART II
we conclude with caesar, marc antony, cleopatra, and augustus, and ovid promising us he will always be famous. we've covered it all.


OVERALL
clearly i had a blast reading this book. it's likely the most fun i've had in any installment of project long classics, and also really lends itself to this format. i enjoyed every crazy second of this action-packed book.
rating: 4.5]]> 4.17 8 Metamorphoses
author: Ovid
name: emma
average rating: 4.17
book published: 8
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: classics, owned, non-ya, project-long-classics, 4-and-a-half-stars, recommend, reviewed
review:
welcome to...METAMARCHOSES.

this is another installment of project long classics, in which i read intimidating books in small chunks over the course of a month in order to achieve three goals: a) seem smart, b) make puns, and c) have an excuse to buy penguin clothbound classics.

this one is slightly different because i already own it. brag alert: my boyfriend bought me my copy of this book when we were on a date in a closed bookstore.

anyway. i have no idea what this is about. it's divided into 15 books, so let's read half of one a day, shall we?


BOOK I, PART I
the GODS just MADE the WORLD and then FLOODED the HELL out of it. and the WRITING is BEAUTIFUL. i'm having so much fun already.


BOOK I, PART II
this part is mostly about really pretty girls catching the eye of gods and then being turned into trees and cows and stuff because of that bad luck.


BOOK II, PART I
since the dawn of time, when cars were chariots and dads were gods, teenage boys in media have been driving their fathers' rides without permission only to f*ck everything up immediately.


BOOK II, PART II
this section focuses on a variety of tattletale birds.


BOOK III, PART I
i did NOT know the tiresias tragic backstory (one time he was turned into a woman because he saw some snakes screwing and therefore was called on by jove and saturnia to settle who has more fun in bed and when he sided with jove and said women saturnia blinded him but then jove felt bad so he gave him the eternal gift of prophecy).


BOOK III, PART II
now we're getting to echo and narcissus. this is like the greco-roman greatest hits.


BOOK IV, PART I
taken aback to find the words "he clings to his misshapen ass" here.


BOOK IV, PART II
there's a girl walking around in a robe dripping blood wearing a live serpent as a belt throwing crazy-making snakes at people. and perseus is carrying medusa's head like a tote bag while he turns guys into mountains and saves fair maidens from sea monsters. this is in half of one chapter.


BOOK V, PART I
by and large a play by play of who hit who with a spear.


BOOK V, PART II
one of the most unforgivable crimes you could commit in the ancient world was being a tattletale. the phrase snitches get stitches has held true throughout time and space.


BOOK VI, PART I
we are never too busy for an exhaustive rundown of which people the gods have turned into which animals throughout time.


BOOK VI, PART II
i am a sister girl for life, but i am not sure i would kill my son and then cut him up and cook him and feed him to my traitor husband in order to avenge mine. revenge would definitely be had but i'm not convinced i would choose that specifically.


BOOK VII, PART I
oh how i love a witchy girl.


BOOK VII, PART II
this book is actually so interesting that i have to choose between 3+ jokes with every section. i hope you all appreciate my sacrifice.


BOOK VIII, PART I
i guess i don't know what i expected from the minotaur origin story, but it wasn't either "deeply disturbing" or "a straight line from the icarus sun incident."


BOOK VIII, PART II
this is so rich with detail that it's like, "a bunch of guys died in a boar incident. a woman sets a fire in vengeance. the fire kills a father. all the daughters of the father are super mournful and upset. diana turns all those girls into birds, except two. these two are hercules' wife and the future mother of one of the guys who pops out of the trojan horse."

and on top of all that i'm learning about stuff like "watch-geese." this is a perfect book.


BOOK IX, PART I
everybody has a name, a name from childhood, a name that's a reference to their dad, a name that's a reference to some kind of infidelity knowingly or unknowingly committed by their mom, and a nickname. this is fun and impossible!


BOOK IX, PART II
in most cases i think fleeing your homeland and literally starting a new city from scratch in order to escape someone who has an unrequited crush on you is a bit much. however, if that person is your sister...fair enough!


BOOK X, PART I
i know the whole orpheus and eurydice thing is supposed to be a great romance, as in he loved her too much to be able to turn his eye from her, but i think it's more of an illustration of the fact that men literally cannot listen.


BOOK X, PART II
tons of incest in this book. what is this, hbo?


BOOK XI, PART I
the fact that midas ASKED that everything he touched would turn to gold?? it's like if ella enchanted begged to be obedient before chasing lucinda all over kingdom come.


BOOK XI, PART II
at this point i'm ready to believe the gods are just looking for reasons to turn women into birds. call a goddess ugly: you're a bird now. sleep with a god: you're a bird now. don't sleep with a god: you're a bird now. have a talent: you're a bird now. witness morpheus dressed up like your husband's very wet ghost in order to tell you that he drowned via dream: you're a bird now. enough already!


BOOK XII, PART I
these guys are getting really creative with their choice of battle weapons.


BOOK XII, PART II
did not know they had crowbars in ancient times. (see above.)


BOOK XIII, PART I
i kind of love that ovid was like, oh, the legendary stories that would be the basis of the iliad and the odyssey? yeah. those are just chapters in my book.


BOOK XIII, PART II
three pages of the cyclops spitting straight game. telling your girl "i got you two bear cubs and it's actually good that i'm hairy, due to the ugliness" and then very quickly killing her boyfriend with a big rock could work on someone.


BOOK XIV, PART I
we just covered the events of the aeneid in a few paragraphs. ovid is showing off at this point!


BOOK XIV, PART II
i'm ready to adjust my earlier declaration re: gods turning women into birds. i'd like to clarify that they also turn them into trees.


BOOK XV, PART I
here i am all sad that this is the penultimate day of this project and now i'm getting lectured for pages because i'm not a vegetarian. they're saying i'm no better than the cyclops and telling me i should be fine since grapes exist.


BOOK XV, PART II
we conclude with caesar, marc antony, cleopatra, and augustus, and ovid promising us he will always be famous. we've covered it all.


OVERALL
clearly i had a blast reading this book. it's likely the most fun i've had in any installment of project long classics, and also really lends itself to this format. i enjoyed every crazy second of this action-packed book.
rating: 4.5
]]> How to Care for a Human Girl 62919766
Two years after the death of their mother, Jada and Maddy Battle both navigate unplanned pregnancies. Jada, a thirty-one-year-old psychology PhD student living in Pittsburgh, quietly obtains an abortion without telling her husband, but the secret causes turmoil in her already shaky marriage. Back home in rural Pennsylvania, nineteen-year-old Maddy, who spends her time caring for birds at a wildlife rehabilitation center, is paid off by the man who got her pregnant to get an abortion. But an unsettling visit to a crisis pregnancy center adds to her doubts about whether to go through with it.

Although Maddy still hasn’t forgiven Jada for a terrible betrayal, she goes to her for support, only to discover the cracks in the façade of her sister’s seemingly perfect life. As their past resentments boil over, the sisters must navigate the consequences of their choices and determine how best to care for themselves and each other.

With luminous prose and laser-sharp psychological insight, How to Care for a Human Girl is a compassionate and unforgettable examination of the complexities of choice, the special intimacy of sisterhood, and the bizarre ways our heated political moment manifests in daily life.]]> 352 Ashley Wurzbacher 1982157224 emma 2
this book takes on a lot, and then is just kind of like "okay! that's enough of that."

we follow two sisters, both alike in insufferability, who are each going through a life-changing borderline traumatic life change 18 months after the death of their mother.

they react to these very different moments in very different ways � one strikes her high school relationship back up, the other is radicalized into christianity (?) � but if you're confused, it's okay. neither are at all relevant to the suddenly idyllic ending.

bottom line: i kind of respect being like, whoops! i bit off more i can chew! let's stop here.

(2.5 / thanks to the publisher for the copy)]]> 3.39 2023 How to Care for a Human Girl
author: Ashley Wurzbacher
name: emma
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: owned, non-ya, literary-fiction, from-publisher-author, 2-and-a-half-stars, unpopular-opinion, eh, reviewed
review:
i could use instructions.

this book takes on a lot, and then is just kind of like "okay! that's enough of that."

we follow two sisters, both alike in insufferability, who are each going through a life-changing borderline traumatic life change 18 months after the death of their mother.

they react to these very different moments in very different ways � one strikes her high school relationship back up, the other is radicalized into christianity (?) � but if you're confused, it's okay. neither are at all relevant to the suddenly idyllic ending.

bottom line: i kind of respect being like, whoops! i bit off more i can chew! let's stop here.

(2.5 / thanks to the publisher for the copy)
]]> Hum 195791689 From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost?

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,� May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights� respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”]]> 262 Helen Phillips 1668008831 emma 3
that, and...nothing drives me crazy like books about people who don't have money spending excessive amounts of money. PLEASESTOP. I GREW UP UNDER CAPITALISM. DEBT IS MY BIGGEST FEAR.

this really was a terrifying look at the future � ads everywhere, personal data commodified for sales, ai creatures performing surgeries and then trying to sell you anti-aging hand cream,nature being packaged and sold like disney world, kids with phones physically sealed to their wrists.

it made for an unpleasant, highly realistic horror show. a lot of the time this is not very interesting, becauseit basically takes everything that already exists and just extends it to its natural end point, but it is scary and real and itsshort chapters will keep you breathlessly going.

bottom line: we are heading nowhere good!

(3.5 / thanks to the publisher for the copy)]]> 3.49 2024 Hum
author: Helen Phillips
name: emma
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: non-ya, owned, sci-fi, from-publisher-author, 3-and-a-half-stars, unpopular-opinion, recommend, reviewed
review:
thinking too much about ai also makes me feel insane!

that, and...nothing drives me crazy like books about people who don't have money spending excessive amounts of money. PLEASESTOP. I GREW UP UNDER CAPITALISM. DEBT IS MY BIGGEST FEAR.

this really was a terrifying look at the future � ads everywhere, personal data commodified for sales, ai creatures performing surgeries and then trying to sell you anti-aging hand cream,nature being packaged and sold like disney world, kids with phones physically sealed to their wrists.

it made for an unpleasant, highly realistic horror show. a lot of the time this is not very interesting, becauseit basically takes everything that already exists and just extends it to its natural end point, but it is scary and real and itsshort chapters will keep you breathlessly going.

bottom line: we are heading nowhere good!

(3.5 / thanks to the publisher for the copy)
]]> Flying Solo 59089710
Laurie is told that the duck has no financial value. But after it disappears under suspicious circumstances, she feels compelled to figure out why anyone would steal a wooden duck--and why Dot kept it hidden away in the first place. Suddenly Laurie finds herself swept up in a righteous caper that has her negotiating with antiques dealers and con artists, going on after-hours dates at the local library, and reconnecting with her oldest friend and first love. Desperate to uncover her great-aunt's secrets, Laurie must reckon with her past, her future, and ultimately embrace her own vision of flying solo.

A woman returns to her small Maine hometown, uncovering family secrets that take her on a journey of self-discovery and new love, in this warm and charming novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over.]]> 320 Linda Holmes 0525619275 emma 0 3.55 2022 Flying Solo
author: Linda Holmes
name: emma
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read, romance, non-ya, library
review:
don't jinx me. i'm chasing the high of liking a romance novel again
]]> <![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 emma 4
(review to come)]]> 4.62 2025 Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: emma
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: ya, dystopian, library, 3-and-a-half-stars, to-review, recommend, sci-fi
review:
i'm ready to be hurt again

(review to come)
]]> Selected Stories 21215108
This new selection, with an introduction by the novelist Emily Perkins, ranges across Mansfield's oeuvre and shows the New Zealander's dazzling brilliance.

The stories in this collection:

At the Bay
The Lady's Maid
Mr. and Mrs. Dove
The Garden Party
Marriage a la Mode
The Daughters of the Late Colonel
The Life of Ma Parker
Bliss
The Fly
The Doll's House
Her First Ball
An Ideal Family
The Escape
The Little Governess
Pictures
Mr. Reginald Peacock's Day
The Luft Bad
Miss Brill
A Birthday
Je ne parle pas francais
Psychology
A Dill Pickle
The Tiredness of Rosabel

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington in 1888 and left for London in 1903 to finish her schooling. After travelling in Europe she returned to New Zealand in 1906 and started writing stories. Two years later, intent on becoming a professional writer, she again went to London. The collection In a German Pension was published in 1911. Followed after the war by the acclaimed collections Bliss and The Garden Party. After her death more of her work was published, resulting in two volumes of stories, as well as collections of poetry, criticism, letters and journals.

Emily Perkins is the author of four novels, including Novel About My Wife, and a collection of short stories, Not Her Real Name. She teaches creative writing at the University of Auckland. Her latest book is The Forrests.

textclassics.com.au
]]> 416 Katherine Mansfield 1921961783 emma 0 brb becoming a genius 3.87 1948 Selected Stories
author: Katherine Mansfield
name: emma
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read, non-ya, library, classics
review:
brb becoming a genius
]]>