Britta's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 26 Apr 2025 12:56:13 -0700 60 Britta's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Catch the Rabbit 56064463
Sara hasn't seen or heard from Lejla in years. She's comfortable with her life in Dublin, with her partner, their avocado plant, and their naturist neighbour. But when Lejla calls and demands she come home to Bosnia, Sara finds that she can't say no.

What begins as a road trip becomes a journey through the past, as the two women set off to find Armin, Lejla's brother who disappeared towards the end of the Bosnian War. Presumed dead by everyone else, only Lejla and Sara believed Armin was still alive.

Confronted with the limits of memory, Sara is forced to reconsider the things she thought she understood as a girl: the best friend she loved, the first experiences they shared, but also the social and religious lines that separated them, that brought them such different lives.

In Catch the Rabbit, Lana Bastašic tells the story of how we place the ones we love on pedestals, and then wait for them to fall off, how loss marks us indelibly, and how the traumas of war echo down the years.]]> 272 Lana Bastašić 1529039606 Britta 0 3.82 2018 Catch the Rabbit
author: Lana Bastašić
name: Britta
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 1tbr-wit, 01-2025-booklist-europe, 01women1001, 01women1001-tbr, 00-current
review:

]]> The Age of Goodbyes 60830369 By one of Southeast Asia's most exciting writers, The Age of Goodbyes is a wildly inventive account of family history, political turmoil, and the redemptive grace of storytelling.

In the summer of 1969, in the wake of Malaysia's deadliest race riots, a woman named Du Li An secures her place in society by marrying a gangster. In a parallel narrative, a critic known only as The Third Person explores the work of a writer also named Du Li An. And a third storyline is in the second person; "you" are reading a novel titled The Age of Goodbyes. Floundering in the wake of "your" mother's death, "you" are trying to unpack the secrets surrounding "your" lineage.

The Age of Goodbyes—which begins on page 513, a reference to the riots of May 13, 1969—is the acclaimed debut by Li Zi Shu. The winner of multiple awards and a Taiwanese bestseller, this dazzling novel is a profound exploration of what happens to personal memory when official accounts of history distort and render it taboo.

]]> 360 Li Zi Shu 1952177693 Britta 0 3.48 2010 The Age of Goodbyes
author: Li Zi Shu
name: Britta
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, global-south, 1tbr-poc, 1tbr-wit, 2press-feminist, 01women1001, 01women1001-tbr, 1tbr-global-south, 01-2025-feminist-press, 00-2025-may-possibles
review:

]]> On Black Sisters' Street 7469830 On Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe—and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives.

Each night, Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce stand in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, promising to make men’s desires come true—if only for half an hour. Pledged to the fierce Madam and a mysterious pimp named Dele, the girls share an apartment but little else—they keep their heads down, knowing that one step out of line could cost them a week’s wages. They open their bodies to strangers but their hearts to no one, each focused on earning enough to get herself free, to send money home or save up for her own future.

Then, suddenly, a murder shatters the still surface of their lives. Drawn together by tragedy and the loss of one of their own, the women realize that they must choose between their secrets and their safety. As they begin to tell their stories, their confessions reveal the face in Efe’s hidden photograph, Ama’s lifelong search for a father, Joyce’s true name, and Sisi’s deepest secrets�-and all their tales of fear, displacement, and love, concluding in a chance meeting with a handsome, sinister stranger.]]> 304 Chika Unigwe 0099523949 Britta 0 3.94 2007 On Black Sisters' Street
author: Chika Unigwe
name: Britta
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 2english-language, 01-2025-spotlight-belgian, 01women1001-xpossibles, 01-2025-booklist-europe, 00-2025-may-possibles
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Modern Azerbaijani Women's Prose]]> 20831711 698 Vagif Sultanly 1490724680 Britta 0 4.89 2014 Modern Azerbaijani Women's Prose
author: Vagif Sultanly
name: Britta
average rating: 4.89
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 00-2025-may-possibles, 01-2025-booklist-europe
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Music for the Dead and Resurrected: Poems]]> 50403458 NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF 2020 BY The New York Times

In her book of letters to the dead, the prize-winning poet Valzhyna Mort relearns how to mourn those erased by violent history.

With shocking, unforgettable lyric force, Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead and Resurrected confronts the legacy of violent death in one family in Belarus. In these letters to the dead, the poet How do we mourn after a century of propaganda? Can private stories challenge the collective power of Soviet and American historical mythology?

Mort traces a route of devastation from the Chernobyl fallout and a school system controlled by ideology to the Soviet labor camps and the massacres of World War II. While musical form serves as a safe house for the poet’s voice, old trees speak to her as the only remaining witnesses, hosts to both radiation and memory.

Valzhyna Mort, born in Belarus and now living in the United States, conjures a searing, hallucinogenic ritual of rhythmic remembrance in a world where appeals to virtue and justice have irrevocably failed.]]> 112 Valzhyna Mort 0374252068 Britta 0 4.09 2020 Music for the Dead and Resurrected: Poems
author: Valzhyna Mort
name: Britta
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 01-2025-booklist-europe, 01women1001, 01women1001-tbr, 00-current
review:

]]> Clay's Ark (Patternist, #3) 60933
They discover Earth has been invaded by an alien microorganism. The deadly entity attacks like a virus, but survivors of the disease genetically bond with it, developing amazing powers, near-immortality, unnatural desires - and a need to spread the contagion and create a secret colony of the transformed. Now the meaning of "survival" changes. For the babies born in the colony are clearly, undeniably, not human...

]]> 213 Octavia E. Butler 0446603708 Britta 0 3.83 1984 Clay's Ark (Patternist, #3)
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Britta
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 01author-xoctavia-butler, 00-2025-may-possibles
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers, #4)]]> 53441154
At the Five-Hop One-Stop, long-haul spacers can stretch their legs (if they have legs, that is), and get fuel, transit permits, and assorted supplies. The Five-Hop is run by an enterprising alien and her sometimes helpful child, who work hard to provide a little piece of home to everyone passing through.

When a freak technological failure halts all traffic to and from Gora, three strangers—all different species with different aims—are thrown together at the Five-Hop. Grounded, with nothing to do but wait, the trio—an exiled artist with an appointment to keep, a cargo runner at a personal crossroads, and a mysterious individual doing her best to help those on the fringes—are compelled to confront where they’ve been, where they might go, and what they are, or could be, to each other.]]> 336 Becky Chambers 0062936042 Britta 0 4.44 2021 The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers, #4)
author: Becky Chambers
name: Britta
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 2sci-fi2021, 00-2025-may-possibles
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing]]> 44597065 Robert A. Caro is one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation, whose landmark biographies are widely hailed as masterpieces.This is the captivating account of his life as a writer, describing the sometimes staggering lengths to which he has gone in order to produce his books and offering priceless insights into the craft of non-fiction writing, be it the pursuit of truth, the writer's process, the art of interviewing or the creation of literature.Including several of Caro's most famous speeches and interviews as well as new material, this is the self-portrait of a man who knows the meaning and importance of great story-telling - and, like all his books, is an utterly riveting example of that too.]]> 221 Robert A. Caro Britta 0 to-read, 00-current 4.53 2019 Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Britta
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 00-current
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping]]> 52920818 Vulture Best Book of 2020

This genre-defying debut memoir by Betty Trask Prize winner, Samantha Harvey, weaves a tapestry of confessional anguish, flash fiction, cathartic poetry, and feverish observations on politics and psychology in a transcendent search for reality and truth.

In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help.

The Shapeless Unease is Harvey's darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and the will to survive, from "this generation's Virginia Woolf" (Telegraph).]]> 192 Samantha Harvey 0802148824 Britta 0 to-read, 00-current 3.66 2020 The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Britta
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 00-current
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World]]> 203767605 A thrilling tick-tock recounting one of the most harrowing hostage situations and daring rescue attempts of our time—from true-life espionage master and New York Times bestselling author of Operation Mincemeat and The Spy and the Traitor Ben Macintyre.

As the American hostage crisis in Iran boiled into its seventh month in the spring of 1980, six heavily armed gunman barged into the Iranian embassy in London, taking twenty-six hostages. What followed over the next six days was an increasingly tense standoff, one that threatened at any moment to spill into a bloodbath.

Policeman Trevor Lock was supposed to have gone to the theater that night. Instead, he found himself overpowered and whisked into the embassy. The terrorists never noticed the gun hidden in his jacket. The drama that ensued would force him to find reserves of courage he didn’t know he had. The gunmen themselves were hardly one-dimensional—all Arabs, some highly educated, who hoped to force Britain to take their side in their independence battle against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Behind the scenes lurked the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who had bankrolled the whole affair as a salvo against Iran.

As police negotiators pressed the gunmen, rival protestors clashed violently outside the embassy, and as MI6 and the CIA scrambled for intelligence, Britain’s special forces strike team, the SAS, laid plans for a dangerous rescue mission. Inside, Lock and his fellow hostages used all the cunning they possessed to outwit and outflank their captors. Finally, on the sixth day, after the terrorists executed the embassy press attaché and dumped his body on the front doorstep, the SAS raid began, sparking a deadly high-stakes climax.

A story of ordinary men and women under immense pressure, The Siege takes readers minute-by-thrilling-minute through an event that would echo across the next two decades and provide a direct historical link to the tragedy on 9/11. Drawing on exclusive interviews and a wealth of never-before-seen files, Macintyre brilliantly reconstructs a week in which every day minted a new hero and every second spelled the potential for doom.]]> 400 Ben Macintyre 0593728092 Britta 0 4.36 2024 The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World
author: Ben Macintyre
name: Britta
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 01-2025-xbtp-nonfiction, 00-2025-may
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes]]> 173404032 Slow Noodles will resonate with readers who loved the food and emotional truth of Michelle Zauner'sCrying in H Mart, and it has the staying power of Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father.

Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and one wholesale extermination. Subtract a reliable source of food, life savings, and family members, until all are gone. Shave down childhood dreams for approximately two decades, until only subsistence remains.

In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodia refugee who lost everything and everyone—her house, her country, her parents, her siblings, her friends—everything but the memories of her mother’s kitchen, the tastes and aromas of the foods her mother made before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart in the 1970s, killing millions of her compatriots. Nguon’s irrepressible spirit and determination come through in this emotional and poignantbut also lyrical and magical memoir that includes over 20 recipes for Khmer dishes like chicken lime soup, banh sung noodles, pâté de foie, curries, spring rolls, and stir-fries. For Nguon, recreating these dishes becomes an act of resistance, of reclaiming her place in the world, of upholding the values the Khmer Rouge sought to destroy, and of honoring the memory of her beloved mother.

From her idyllic early years in Battambang to hiding as a young girl in Phnom Penh as the country purges ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family, from her escape to Saigon to the deaths of mother and sister there, from the poverty and devastation she experiences in a war-ravaged Vietnam to her decision to flee the country. We follow Chantha on a harrowing river crossing into Thailand—part of the exodus that gave rise to the name “boat people”—and her decades in a refugee camp there, until finally, denied passage to the West, she returns to a forever changed Cambodia. Nguon survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture-nurse treating refugees abused by Thai authorities, and weaving silk. Through it all, Nguonrelies on her mother’s “slow noodles� approach to healing and to cooking, one that prioritizes time and care over expediency.Haunting and evocative, Slow Noodles is a testament to the power of culinary heritage to spark the rebirth of a young woman’s hopes for a beautiful life.]]> 304 Chantha Nguon 1643753495 Britta 0 4.33 2024 Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes
author: Chantha Nguon
name: Britta
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 01-2025-xbtp-nonfiction, 00-2025-may
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Believing the Lie (Inspector Lynley, #17)]]> 11737276
Deborah's investigation of the prime suspect-Bernard's prodigal son Nicholas, a recovering drug addict-leads her to Nicholas's wife, a woman with whom she feels a kinship, a woman as fiercely protective as she is beautiful. Lynley and Simon delve for information from the rest of the family, including the victim's bitter ex-wife and the man he left her for, and Bernard himself. As the investigation escalates, the Fairclough family's veneer cracks, with deception and self-delusion threatening to destroy everyone from the Fairclough patriarch to Tim, the troubled son Ian left behind.]]> 610 Elizabeth George 0525952586 Britta 0 3.76 2012 Believing the Lie (Inspector Lynley, #17)
author: Elizabeth George
name: Britta
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: 01lynley, to-read, 00-2025-may
review:

]]> Trieste 11812200 432 Daša Drndić 0857050222 Britta 0 4.15 2007 Trieste
author: Daša Drndić
name: Britta
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 1tbr-wit, 1tbr, 01women1001, 01women1001-tbr, 01books-best-25years, 00-2025-may
review:

]]> Delta of Venus 50233650 An alternative cover edition for this ASIN can be found here.


In Delta of Venus Ana's Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own 'language of the senses', she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning.

Contains a preface by the author, adapted from The Diary of Ana's Not, Volume III.

Her second volume of erotic writings, Little Birds, is also published by Penguin.

]]> 306 Anaïs Nin Britta 0 3.49 1977 Delta of Venus
author: Anaïs Nin
name: Britta
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read, 01women1001, 01women1001-tbr, 01-2025-women1001-sandy, 00-2025-may
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Auf der Straße heißen wir anders]]> 60160679
In Karlas Familie wissen alle, wie es sich anfühlt, nicht dazuzugehören. Karla erlebt es als Kind in Bremen-Nord. Ihr Vater Avi in einer Klosterschule in Jerusalem. Die Großmutter Maryam als Gastarbeiterin in Deutschland. Die Urgroßmutter Armine auf den Straßen von Istanbul. Einfühlsam und mit feinem Humor fächert Laura Cwiertnia die verzweigten Pfade einer armenischen Familie auf, deren Erfahrungen so tiefgreifend sind, dass sie noch Generationen später nachhallen.

Die Kinder aus der Hochhaussiedlung in Bremen-Nord kennen die Herkunftsorte ihrer Familien genau: Türkei, Russland, Albanien. Nur bei Karla ist alles etwas anders. Sie weiß zwar, dass die Großmutter in den 60ern als Gastarbeiterin aus Istanbul nach Deutschland kam, und auch, dass die Familie armenische Wurzeln hat, doch gesprochen wird darüber nicht. Als Karlas Großmutter stirbt, taucht der Name einer Frau auf, Lilit, samt einer Adresse in Armenien. Karla gelingt es, ihren Vater zu einer gemeinsamen Reise zu überreden � in eine Heimat, die beide noch nie betreten haben. Eindrücklich und bewegend erzählt Laura Cwiertnia davon, wie es sich anfühlt, am Rand einer Gesellschaft zu stehen. Und davon, wie es ist, keine Geschichte zu haben, die man mit anderen teilen kann.]]> 240 Laura Cwiertnia Britta 2 ]]> 4.04 2022 Auf der Straße heißen wir anders
author: Laura Cwiertnia
name: Britta
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025-1st-time-fiction, 2025europe, 2025german, 2reading-europe, debuts, femlit, fiction, fiction-literay
review:
Very interesting topic but not very well executed. Pity.

]]> <![CDATA[Fathoms: The World in the Whale]]> 52765413 Fathoms: The World in the Whale blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore: How do whales experience ecological change? Will our connection to these storied animals be transformed by technology? What can observing whales teach us about the complexity, splendour, and fragility of life? In Fathoms, we learn about whales so rare they have never been named, whale songs that sweep across hemispheres in annual waves of popularity, and whales that have modified the chemical composition of our planet’s atmosphere. We travel to Japan to board the ships that hunt whales and delve into the deepest seas to discover the plastic pollution now pervading the whale’s undersea environment.

In the spirit of Rachel Carson and Rebecca Solnit, Giggs gives us a vivid exploration of the natural world even as she addresses what it means to write about nature at a time of environmental crisis.]]> 352 Rebecca Giggs 198212069X Britta 4 Reread in 2025<br />4.5* 3.89 2020 Fathoms: The World in the Whale
author: Rebecca Giggs
name: Britta
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: 2021, 2021non-fiction, 2021tops, femlit, kindle-scribd, non-fiction, nonfiction-science-nature, 2buddy-reads, 01booknaturalist-bookclub, 2025, 2025non-fiction, 2025re-read, 2025tops
review:
Reread in 2025
4.5*
]]> <![CDATA[Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe]]> 34066562 379 Kapka Kassabova 1783782145 Britta 0 4.03 2017 Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
author: Kapka Kassabova
name: Britta
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, 1tbr-nonfic, 00-2025-may-possibles, 01-2025-booklist-europe
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum Letzten. Tagebücher 1933-1945]]> 2416551 1694 Victor Klemperer 3351023405 Britta 5 Reread 4.72 1995 Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum Letzten. Tagebücher 1933-1945
author: Victor Klemperer
name: Britta
average rating: 4.72
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: favs, memoirs, fiction-transl, non-fiction, 2024, 2024dudes, 2024german, 2024re-read, german
review:
Reread
]]> Unbowed 201111
Born in a rural village in 1940, Wangari Maathai was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most girls were uneducated. We see her studying with Catholic missionaries, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States, and becoming the first woman both to earn a PhD in East and Central Africa and to head a university department in Kenya. We witness her numerous run-ins with the brutal Moi government. She makes clear the political and personal reasons that compelled her, in 1977, to establish the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages. We see how Maathai’s extraordinary courage and determination helped transform Kenya’s government into the democracy in which she now serves as assistant minister for the environment and as a member of Parliament. And we are with her as she accepts the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in recognition of her “contribution to sustainable development, human rights, and peace.�

In Unbowed, Wangari Maathai offers an inspiring message of hope and prosperity through self-sufficiency.]]> 314 Wangari Maathai 0307263487 Britta 0 4.05 2006 Unbowed
author: Wangari Maathai
name: Britta
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: to-read, 1tbr-booktube-recs, 1tbr-global-south, 1tbr-nonfic, 1tbr-poc, 1tbr-feminism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York]]> 1111 The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today.

In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.]]> 1246 Robert A. Caro 0394720245 Britta 0 4.51 1974 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Britta
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: to-read, 1tbr-nonfic, 1tbr-nonfic-left
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Three Sisters (Oberon Modern Plays)]]> 40496211 106 Anton Chekhov Britta 0 to-read 3.00 Three Sisters (Oberon Modern Plays)
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Britta
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Wachs 228195227 186 Christine Wunnicke 3911327099 Britta 0 4.28 Wachs
author: Christine Wunnicke
name: Britta
average rating: 4.28
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: to-read, 1tbr, 1tbr-german, 1tbr-shorties, 2buchclub
review:

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

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

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

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

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 Britta 4 4.68 2025 One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Britta
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: 01new-release-2025, 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025dudes, 2025new-release, 2025non-fiction, 2025poc, 2025tops, favs, global-south, kindle-scribd, non-fiction, palestine, poc, racism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Poor: Grit, courage, and the life-changing value of self-belief]]> 86547006 320 Katriona O'Sullivan 1844886212 Britta 0 4.58 Poor: Grit, courage, and the life-changing value of self-belief
author: Katriona O'Sullivan
name: Britta
average rating: 4.58
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: to-read, 1tbr-booktube-recs, 1tbr-nonfic
review:

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

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Britta 2 Meh. 3.53 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Britta
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: 01prize-women2025-fiction, 01prize-carol-shields2025, 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025-1st-time-fiction, femlit, fiction, fiction-literay, older-woman
review:
Meh.
]]> Cloistered: My Years as a Nun 127305797
Cloistered takes the reader deep into the hidden world of a traditional Carmelite monastery as it approaches the third Millennium and tells the story of an intense personal journey into and out of an enclosed life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Finding an apparently perfect world at Akenside Priory, in Northumberland, Catherine trusts herself to a group of twenty silent women, believing she is trusting herself to God. As the beauty and mystery of an ancient way of life enfold her, she surrenders herself wholly to its power, quite unaware of the complexity and dangers that lie ahead.

Cut off from the wider world for decades, the community has managed to evade accountability to any authority beyond itself. When Sister Catherine realises that a mesmerising cult of the personality, with the distortions it entails, has replaced the ancient ideal of religious obedience, she is faced with a dilemma. Will she submit to this, or will she be forced to speak out?

An exploration of the limits of trust, Cloistered shows us how far youthful idealism can take us along the road of self-surrender, and of how much harm is done when institutional flaws go unacknowledged. Catherine’s honest account of her time in the monastery � and her dramatic flight from it � is both a love song to a lost community and an exploration of what is most compelling, yet most potentially destructive when closed human groups become laws unto themselves.]]> 328 Catherine Coldstream 1250323517 Britta 0 to-read, 1tbr-booktube-recs 3.53 2024 Cloistered: My Years as a Nun
author: Catherine Coldstream
name: Britta
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read, 1tbr-booktube-recs
review:

]]> Nach dem Gedächtnis 43233881 527 Maria Stepanova 3518759035 Britta 0 3.62 2017 Nach dem Gedächtnis
author: Maria Stepanova
name: Britta
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read, 01women1001, 1tbr-wit, 01women1001-tbr, 1tbr, 01presents, 2birthday2023, 01-2025-women1001
review:

]]> Het smelt 28358171 This is an alternate cover edition for 9789082410617

Wat als je wraak kunt nemen op een heel dorp?

Dertien jaar na een zomer die volledig uit de hand liep, keert Eva terug naar haar geboortedorp met een blok ijs in de kofferbak. Gaandeweg wordt duidelijk dat zij dit keer de plannen bepaalt.

In haar geboortejaar werden slechts twee andere kinderen geboren in het kleine Vlaamse Bovenmeer, twee jongens. De drie maken er hun hele jeugd samen maar het beste van. Tot de bloedhete zomer van 2002. Want jongens worden pubers en krijgen wrede plannen. De bedeesde Eva kan meedoen of oprotten. Die keuze is geen keuze — wie verraadt er nou z’n eigen vrienden?]]> 480 Lize Spit Britta 1 Misery porn with gratuitous violence is just not for me.]]> 3.68 2016 Het smelt
author: Lize Spit
name: Britta
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2016
rating: 1
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: 2025bail, 2reading-europe, 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025-1st-time-fiction, debuts, femlit, fiction, fiction-literay, one-star, wit, 2025transl
review:
Nope.
Misery porn with gratuitous violence is just not for me.
]]> Magdalena the Sinner 566200 320 Lilian Faschinger 0060186534 Britta 3 3.5* rounded down 3.76 1995 Magdalena the Sinner
author: Lilian Faschinger
name: Britta
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025-1st-time-fiction, 2025europe, 2025german, 2025women1001, 2buddy-reads, feminism-fiction, feminism, femlit, fiction, fiction-literay, german, unhinged, 2reading-europe
review:
3.5* rounded down
]]> <![CDATA[Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis]]> 145624514
Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. An overwhelming share of them come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, although many migrants come from farther away. Some are fleeing persecution, others crime or hunger. Very often it will not be their first attempt to cross. They may have already been deported from the United States, but it remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. Their homes have become uninhabitable. They will take their chances.

This vast and unremitting crisis did not spring up overnight. Indeed, as Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, it is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture for the first time.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is an odyssey of struggle and resilience. With astonishing nuance and detail, Blitzer tells an epic story about the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, and in doing so, he delves into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future.]]> 544 Jonathan Blitzer 1984880802 Britta 0 4.47 2024 Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
author: Jonathan Blitzer
name: Britta
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read, 01-2025-xbtp-nonfiction, 00-2025-may
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey through Opium's Hidden Histories]]> 131048198
Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir and an excursion into history, both economic and cultural. Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China, as well as on the world at large. Engineered by the British Empire, which exported opium from India to sell in China, the trade and its revenues were essential to the Empire's survival. Upon deeper exploration, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, several of America's most powerful families and institutions, and contemporary globalism itself. In India the long-term consequences were even more profound.

Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, Smoke and Ashes reveals the pivotal role one small plant has played in the making of the world as we know it - a world that is now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

---

'In thinking about the opium poppy's role in history it is hard to ignore the feeling of an intelligence at work. The single most important indication of this is the poppy's ability to create cycles of repetition, which manifest themselves in similar phenomena over time. What the opium poppy does is clearly not random; it builds symmetries that rhyme with each other.

It is important to recognize that these cycles will go on repeating, because the opium poppy is not going away anytime soon. In Mexico, for instance, despite intensive eradication efforts the acreage under poppy cultivation has continued to increase. Indeed, there is more opium being produced in the world today than at any time in the past.

Only by recognizing the power and intelligence of the opium poppy can we even begin to make peace with it.']]> 417 Amitav Ghosh 9356992665 Britta 0 4.09 2024 Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey through Opium's Hidden Histories
author: Amitav Ghosh
name: Britta
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read, 01-2025-xbtp-nonfiction, 00-2025-may
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals]]> 58261060 What if you stopped trying to do everything, so that you could finally get round to what counts?

We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction, and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks.

Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of the challenge. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything done,' it introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations. And it shows how the unhelpful ways we've come to think about time aren't inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we've made, as individuals and as a society. Its many revelations will transform the reader's worldview.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time - and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny.

Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.]]> 288 Oliver Burkeman 1784704008 Britta 4 3.5* rounded up 4.16 2021 Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
author: Oliver Burkeman
name: Britta
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025dudes, 2025non-fiction, non-fiction
review:
3.5* rounded up
]]> Under the Eye of the Big Bird 228017416
Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.]]> 288 Hiromi Kawakami 1803512350 Britta 4 3.88 2016 Under the Eye of the Big Bird
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Britta
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: 1tbr-poc, 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025-1st-time-fiction, 2025poc, 2025transl, femlit, fiction, scifi-fantasy, wit
review:

]]> The Dream Hotel 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Britta 2 3.66 2025 The Dream Hotel
author: Laila Lalami
name: Britta
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: 01prize-women2025-fiction, 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025-1st-time-fiction, 2025poc, fiction, femlit, poc, scifi-fantasy
review:
2.5* rounded down. There are so many plot-holes, I don't even know where to start...
]]> Brandy Sour 216120899 The Winner of the 2023 Cypriot National Book Prize

When it was built in the 1950s, nothing symbolised Cyprus entering the modern world like the Ledra Palace Hotel. In Constantia Soteriou's jewel of a novella, the ambitions and shortcomings of the island's turbulent twentieth century are played out by its occupants. Among them we meet the king in exile who needs to drown his sorrows with a drink disguised to look like tea; the porter who, among the English roses of the hotel's gardens, secretly plants a rose from his village to make his rosebud infusions; the UN officer who drinks lemonade to deal with the heat and the lies; and the cleaning lady who always carries her holy water with her. They are reluctant actors in history, evocatively captured in this moving, personal, and highly original portrait of civil strife and division.]]> 98 Constantia Soteriou 173844631X Britta 0 4.18 2022 Brandy Sour
author: Constantia Soteriou
name: Britta
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read, 01-2025-booklist-europe
review:

]]> The World After Gaza 216429016 From the award-winning writer and thinker, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza, its historical conditions, and moral and geopolitical ramifications

'Courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding' NAOMI KLEIN
'Mishra has made a powerful contribution to the moral history of the world' ANDREW O'HAGAN
'Urgent' HISHAM MATAR
'Brilliant' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe’s civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel’s policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world � the ‘darker peoples�, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s words � the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation � freedom from the white man’s world.

The World After Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism, and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the global majority's frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world’s population.

As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis � about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future.]]> 293 Pankaj Mishra 152995018X Britta 0 4.17 2025 The World After Gaza
author: Pankaj Mishra
name: Britta
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, 01new-release-2025, 1tbr-nonfic, 1tbr-palestine, 1tbr-poc
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball]]> 181346643
Pete Rose is a legend. A baseball god. He compiled more hits than anyone in the history of baseball, a record he set decades ago, which still stands. At the same time, he was a working-class white guy from Cincinnati who made it; less talented than tough, and rough around the edges. He was everything that America wanted and needed him to be, the American dream personified, until he wasn’t.

In the 1980s Pete Rose came to be at the center of the biggest scandal in baseball history. Baseball no longer needed Pete Rose, and he was magnificently, publicly cast out for betting on baseball and lying about it. The revelations that followed ruined Pete, changed life in Cincinnati, and forever altered the game.

Charlie Hustle tells the full story of one of America’s most epic tragedies, the rise and fall of Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Drawing on first-hand interviews with Pete himself, his associates, as well we on investigators, FBI and court records, archives, a mountain of press coverage, Keith O’Brien chronicles how Pete fell so far from being America’s “great white hope.� It is Rose as we've never seen before.

This is no ordinary sport biography, but cultural history at its finest. What O’Brien shows is that while Pete Rose didn’t change, America and baseball did. This is the story of that change.]]> 440 Keith O'Brien 0593317378 Britta 0 4.38 2024 Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball
author: Keith O'Brien
name: Britta
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, 01-2025-xbtp-nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder]]> 915978
To horrify is not Sereny's aim, though horror is inevitable. She is seeking an answer to the question which beggars reason: How were human beings turned into instruments of such overwhelming evil?]]> 380 Gitta Sereny 0712674470 Britta 0 4.45 1974 Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder
author: Gitta Sereny
name: Britta
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: femlit, fivestars, non-fiction, racism, 01women1001-read-nonfiction, 01women1001-read, 01women1001
review:

]]> The Case of Cem 165053140 560 Vera Mutafchieva 953351437X Britta 0 4.39 1966 The Case of Cem
author: Vera Mutafchieva
name: Britta
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read, 01women1001, 01women1001-tbr
review:

]]> Girl at War 23209971
Ten years later Ana is a college student in New York. She's been hiding her past from her boyfriend, her friends, and most especially herself. Haunted by the events that forever changed her family, she returns alone to Croatia, where she must rediscover the place that was once her home and search for the ghosts of those she's lost.]]> 320 Sara Nović 0812996348 Britta 0 3.99 2015 Girl at War
author: Sara Nović
name: Britta
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read, 01women1001-xpossibles, 01women1001, 01women1001-tbr
review:

]]> Hons and Rebels 43401 The American Way of Death.

Hons and Rebels is the hugely entertaining tale of Mitford's upbringing, which was, as she dryly remarks, not exactly conventional. . . Debo spent silent hours in the chicken house learning to do an exact imitation of the look of pained concentration that comes over a hen's face when it is laying an egg. . . . Unity and I made up a complete language called Boudledidge, unintelligible to any but ourselves, in which we translated various dirty songs (for safe singing in front of the grown-ups). But Mitford found her family's world as smothering as it was singular and, determined to escape it, she eloped with Esmond Romilly, Churchill's nephew, to go fight in the Spanish Civil War. The ensuing scandal, in which a British destroyer was dispatched to recover the two truants, inspires some of Mitford's funniest, and most pointed, pages.
A family portrait, a tale of youthful folly and high-spirited adventure, a study in social history, a love story, Hons and Rebels is a delightful contribution to the autobiographer's art.]]> 284 Jessica Mitford 1590171101 Britta 0 4.14 1960 Hons and Rebels
author: Jessica Mitford
name: Britta
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read, 1books1960, 01women1001-xpossibles
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Badly Behaved Women: The Story of Modern Feminism]]> 53437048 192 Anna-Marie Crowhurst 0233006222 Britta 0 4.27 Badly Behaved Women: The Story of Modern Feminism
author: Anna-Marie Crowhurst
name: Britta
average rating: 4.27
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read, 01secondshelf-tbr, 1tbr-nonfic, 1tbr-feminism, 01women1001-xpossibles
review:

]]> <![CDATA[All the Rebel Women: The Rise of the Fourth Wave of Feminism (Guardian Shorts)]]> 19387670
The second wave arose in the late-1960s, activists campaigning tirelessly for women’s liberation, organising around a wildly ambitious slate of issues � a struggle their daughters continued in the third wave that blossomed in the early-1990s.

Now, a hundred years on from the campaign for the vote, fifty years since the very first murmurs of the second wave movement, a new tide of feminist voices is rising. Scattered across the world, campaigning online as well as marching in the streets, women are making themselves heard in irresistible fashion.

They’re demonstrating against media sexism, domestic violence and sexual assault, fighting for equal pay, affordable childcare and abortion rights. Thousands are sharing their experiences through the Everyday Sexism project, marching in Slutwalk protests, joining demonstrations in the wake of the Delhi gang rape, challenging misogynist behaviour and language, online crusaders and ordinary people organising for the freedom of women everywhere.

Kira Cochrane’s 'All the Rebel Women' is an irrepressible exploration of today’s feminist landscape, asking how far we have come over the past century � and how far there still is to go. Whether engaging with leading feminists, describing the fight against rape culture or bringing immediate, powerful life to vital theories such as intersectionality, 'All the Rebel Women' binds everything together into one unstoppable idea. This is modern feminism. This is the fourth wave.]]> 71 Kira Cochrane 1783560363 Britta 0 3.86 2013 All the Rebel Women: The Rise of the Fourth Wave of Feminism (Guardian Shorts)
author: Kira Cochrane
name: Britta
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read, 01secondshelf-tbr, 1tbr-nonfic, 1tbr-feminism, 01women1001-xpossibles
review:

]]> Orbital 212343501 135 Samantha Harvey Britta 4 Last book of 2024 3.66 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Britta
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: 01-2025-winning-reads, 2024, 2024-1st-time, 2024-1st-time-fiction, 2buchclub, femlit, fiction, fiction-literay, fiction-shorties, 01women1001, 01women1001-read
review:
Last book of 2024
]]> <![CDATA[Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World]]> 58429506
In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.]]> 206 Leslie Kern 1788739825 Britta 4 3.81 2019 Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World
author: Leslie Kern
name: Britta
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/17
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: 2024, 2024-1st-time, 2024nonfiction, 2024tops, feminism, femlit, non-fiction, kindle-scribd, can-lit, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 01women1001-read-nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain]]> 40554115
Drawing oncutting edgeresearch in neuroscience and psychology, Rippon presents the latest evidence which she argues, finally proves that brains are like mosaics comprised of both male and femalecomponents,and that they remain plastic, adapting throughout the course of a person’s life.

Discernable gender identities, she asserts, are shaped bysocietywhere scientific misconceptions continue to be wielded and perpetuated to the detriment of our children, our own lives, and our culture.]]> 448 Gina Rippon 184792476X Britta 4 3.91 2019 The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain
author: Gina Rippon
name: Britta
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/15
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: brainproject, feminism, 2nonfiction-november2020, 01secondshelf-read, 2021, 2021non-fiction, femlit, non-fiction, nonfiction-science-nature, 2buddy-reads, 01-2025-women1001, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 01women1001-read-nonfiction, currently-reading
review:

]]> Ethan Frome 15994606
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's vivacious cousin enters their household as a hired girl, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read book.]]> 103 Edith Wharton 0141389400 Britta 4 Reread 3.66 1911 Ethan Frome
author: Edith Wharton
name: Britta
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1911
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: 2022, 2august2022-30books, classics, femlit, fiction, fiction-shorties, 2025, 2025re-read, 2buddy-reads
review:
Reread
]]> <![CDATA[Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice]]> 61111247 A haunting, unforgettable memoir about a beloved younger sister and the painful memory of her murder, from one of Mexico's greatest living writers (Jonathan Lethem).

Can you enjoy yourself while you are in pain? The question, which is not new, arises over and over again during that eternity that is mourning.



In the early hours of July 16, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. A life full of promise and hope, cut tragically short, Liliana's story instead became subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of domestic violence. With Liliana's case file abandoned by a corrupt criminal justice system, her family, including her older sister Cristina, was forced to process their grief and guilt in private, without any hope for justice.

In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. It traces the story of her childhood, her early romance with a handsome--but possessive and short-tempered--man, through the exhilarating weeks leading up to that fateful July morning, a summer when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.

Using her remarkable talents as a scholar, novelist, and poet, Cristina Rivera Garza returns to Mexico after decades of living in the United States to collect and curate evidence--handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, architectural blueprints--in order to render and understand a life beyond the crime itself. Tracing the full arc of their childhood and adolescence in central Mexico, through the painful and confusing years after Liliana's death, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister, and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is--and what she fights for--today.]]> 320 Cristina Rivera Garza 0593244095 Britta 0 3.98 2021 Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice
author: Cristina Rivera Garza
name: Britta
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read, 00-2025-may-possibles
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bitch: On the Female of the Species]]> 59228221 Afierce,funny,andrevolutionarylookatthequeensoftheanimalkingdom.

Studying zoology madeLucy Cookefeel like a sad freak. Not becausesheloved spiders or would root around in animalfeces:allherfriendsshared the same curious kinks.The problemwashersex. Being female meantshewas, by nature,a loser.

Since Charles Darwin,evolutionary biologistshave been convincedthatthemalesof the animalkingdomarethe interesting ones—dominatingandpromiscuous,whilefemalesaredull,passive,and devoted.

InBitch,Cooketells a new story.Whether investigatingsame-sexfemalealbatrosscouplesthat raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks,Cookeshows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male.Thisisn'tyourgrandfather's evolutionary biology.It's more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.]]> 400 Lucy Cooke 1541674898 Britta 5 Reread 4.45 2022 Bitch: On the Female of the Species
author: Lucy Cooke
name: Britta
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: 2birthday2022, 01presents, 2023, 2023nonfiction, 2023tops, 2buddy-reads, feminism, 2book-naturalists2023, femlit, favs, non-fiction, nonfiction-science-nature, fivestars, 01women1001-read-nonfiction, 01women1001-read, 01women1001, 2023-1st-time, 2024women1001, 2025, 2025non-fiction, 2025re-read, 2025tops
review:
Reread
]]> The Orphan Sky 22109866
Set in the Middle East, The Orphan Sky mirrors the ancient Azerbaijani Legend of Maiden Tower.

Once upon a time when the evil Shah of Darkness ruled over the Land of Fire,
when the orphan sky peered at the Caucasus Mountains from the black dome of sorrow...

A young piano prodigy Leila from a priviliged family meets a Bohemian artist and dissident Tahir. They create a clandestine salon of two, searching for new ways of creative expression and freedom, unveiling the ambiguities between music and art, friendship and love.

The relationship between Leila and Tahir has been revealed, and Leila faces an impossible choice. Will she compromise her heart? Will she allow darkness into her soul? Entrapped by her talent and her gender, how much will Leila sucrifice for her music, her beloved, her dream, freedom?]]> 368 Ella Leya 140229865X Britta 0 to-read 3.86 2015 The Orphan Sky
author: Ella Leya
name: Britta
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[An Unruled Body: A Poet's Memoir]]> 128123750 272 Ani Gjika 1632063409 Britta 3 Reading Europe #1 / Albania 4.49 An Unruled Body: A Poet's Memoir
author: Ani Gjika
name: Britta
average rating: 4.49
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 01women1001-read-nonfiction, 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025europe, 2025non-fiction, 2025women1001, culture-criticism, femlit, memoirs, non-fiction, 2reading-europe
review:
Reading Europe #1 / Albania
]]> The Gray House 32703696 The Gray House is an astounding tale of how what others understand as liabilities can be leveraged into strengths.

Bound to wheelchairs and dependent on prosthetic limbs, the physically disabled students living in the House are overlooked by the Outsides. Not that it matters to anyone living in the House, a hulking old structure that its residents know is alive. From the corridors and crawl spaces to the classrooms and dorms, the House is full of tribes, tinctures, scared teachers, and laws—all seen and understood through a prismatic array of teenagers� eyes.

But student deaths and mounting pressure from the Outsides put the time-defying order of the House in danger. As the tribe leaders struggle to maintain power, they defer to the awesome power of the House, attempting to make it through days and nights that pass in ways that clocks and watches cannot record.]]> 736 Mariam Petrosyan 1503997812 Britta 3 3.85 2009 The Gray House
author: Mariam Petrosyan
name: Britta
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025-1st-time-fiction, 2025europe, 2025poc, 2025transl, 2025women1001, debuts, favs, femlit, fiction, fiction-transl, scifi-fantasy, tomes, wit, 2reading-europe
review:
Interesting and 'different' but in the end, not quite my cup of tea.
]]> <![CDATA[Three Apples Fell from the Sky]]> 51551602 An unforgettable story of friendship and feuds in a remote Armenian mountain village

In an isolated village high in the Armenian mountains, a close-knit community bickers, gossips and laughs. Their only connection to the outside world is an ancient telegraph wire and a perilous mountain road that even goats struggle to navigate.

As they go about their daily lives � harvesting crops, making baklava, tidying houses � the villagers sustain one another through good times and bad. But sometimes all it takes is a spark of romance to turn life on its head, and a plot to bring two of Maran's most stubbornly single residents together soon gives the village something new to gossip about...

Three Apples Fell from the Sky is an enchanting fable that brilliantly captures the idiosyncrasy of a small community. Sparkling with sumptuous imagery and warm humour, this is a vibrant tale of resilience, bravery and the miracle of everyday friendship.]]> 231 Narine Abgaryan 1786077310 Britta 3 4.05 2015 Three Apples Fell from the Sky
author: Narine Abgaryan
name: Britta
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: 01women1001-xpossibles, 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025-1st-time-fiction, 2025europe, 2025transl, femlit, fiction, fiction-literay, fiction-transl, wit, global-south, 2reading-europe
review:

]]> The Stone Diaries 77554 The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling missed connections she discovers between. Daisy's struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.]]> 361 Carol Shields 014023313X Britta 5 3.89 1993 The Stone Diaries
author: Carol Shields
name: Britta
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2019/12/13
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: can-lit, 2buddy-reads, 2019, favs, femlit, fiction, fivestars, older-woman, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay, 01-2025-women1001-sandy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Doktor Faustus / Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus.]]> 4505832 828 Thomas Mann 3103481233 Britta 0 0.0 1949 Doktor Faustus / Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus.
author: Thomas Mann
name: Britta
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: classics, favs, fiction, fiction-literay, german, currently-reading
review:

]]> Bleak House 11840642 Bleak House is one of Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums.]]> 1037 Charles Dickens 0141198354 Britta 3 4.06 1853 Bleak House
author: Charles Dickens
name: Britta
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1853
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: 01-2025-classics-and-study, 2025, 2025-1st-time, 2025-1st-time-fiction, 2025dudes, classics, classics-victorian, fiction, tomes
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books]]> 7603 Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

]]> 356 Azar Nafisi 081297106X Britta 4 Re-read. 3.64 2003 Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
author: Azar Nafisi
name: Britta
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/04
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: non-fiction, favs, bookishbooks, memoirs, 2readwomen2021, 2021, 2021re-read, poc, 2021poc, 2021non-fiction, 2secondshelf-2021, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 01women1001-read-nonfiction, 01books-best-25years
review:
Re-read.
]]> What I Loved 125502 370 Siri Hustvedt Britta 4 4.10 2002 What I Loved
author: Siri Hustvedt
name: Britta
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: fiction, 2016, rereads, femlit, fiction-literay, 01books-best-25years
review:

]]> Based on a True Story 31451163
L. embodies everything Delphine has always secretly admired; she is a glittering image of feminine sophistication and spontaneity and she has an uncanny knack of always saying the right thing. Unusually intuitive, L. senses Delphine’s vulnerability and slowly but deliberately carves herself a niche in the writer’s life. However, as L. makes herself indispensable to Delphine, the intensity of this unexpected friendship manifests itself in increasingly sinister ways. As their lives become more and more entwined, L. threatens Delphine’s identity, both as a writer and as an individual.

This sophisticated psychological thriller skillfully blurs the line between fact and fiction, reality and artifice. Delphine de Vigan has crafted a terrifying, insidious, meta-fictional thriller; a haunting vision of seduction and betrayal; a book which in its hungering for truth implicates the reader, too—even as it holds us in its thrall.

Win a copy of the international sensation that sold half a million copies in France: a chilling work of true-crime literature about a friendship gone terrifyingly toxic and the very nature of reality.]]> 384 Delphine de Vigan 1632868156 Britta 4
4.5*]]> 3.56 2015 Based on a True Story
author: Delphine de Vigan
name: Britta
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2017/03/22
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2017, favs, femlit, fiction, kindle-scribd, netgalley, fiction-transl, 2017bw-read, wit, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay
review:
Thought-provoking and engrossing play with concepts like 'truth' and 'real life'.

4.5*
]]> Lullaby 35437614
The couple and nanny become more dependent on each other. But as jealousy, resentment and suspicions increase, Myriam and Paul's idyllic tableau is shattered...]]> 256 Leïla Slimani 0571337554 Britta 2 3.38 2016 Lullaby
author: Leïla Slimani
name: Britta
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2018/01/09
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2018, 2018bw-read, crime, femlit, poc, fiction, kindle-scribd, fiction-transl, wit, unhinged, fiction-literay, 01books-worst-25years
review:
"The baby is dead" is a gutpunching opening sentence if ever there was one. The novel about why a forty-year old nanny would turn into a child-killer has its strength, first and foremost the writing with its quiet tone and beautifully crafted sentences. And the character studies are mostly interesting but there are too many story-flaws for my taste (the fact that there would be no murder trial - like, ever - when the accused is in a coma being only one of them).
]]> Tender is the Flesh 51831237
Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans only no one calls them that. He works with numbers, consignments, processing. One day, he’s given a gift to seal a deal: a specimen of the finest quality. He leaves her in his barn, tied up, a problem to be disposed of later.

But the specimen haunts Marcos. Her trembling body, her eyes that watch him, that seem to understand. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost � and what might still be saved..]]> 224 Agustina Bazterrica 1782275576 Britta 4 3.78 2017 Tender is the Flesh
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Britta
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2020/03/07
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: fiction-transl, wit, 2020, 2020new-release, 2020trans-lit, femlit, fiction, scifi-fantasy, 2020tops, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, global-south, fiction-literay, 01books-best-25years
review:

]]> Minor Detail 52974301 Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.]]> 105 Adania Shibli 0811229076 Britta 4 4.22 2017 Minor Detail
author: Adania Shibli
name: Britta
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/03
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2021, 2021poc, 2021tl, femlit, fiction, poc, fiction-transl, wit, 2august2021-30books, fiction-shorties, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, global-south, 2press-new-directions, palestine, fiction-literay, feminism-fiction, 01books-best-25years
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country]]> 54359197 Grieving is Cristina Rivera Garza’s hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. Drawing together horror theory and historical analysis, she outlines how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking—culminating in the misnamed “war on drugs”—has shaped the political landscape on both sides of the border. Working from and against this context, Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistance against state violence, and that writing is a powerful mode of seeking social justice and embodying resilience.

She states: “As we write, as we work with language—the humblest and most powerful force available to us—we activate the potential of words, phrases, sentences. Writing as we grieve, grieving as we write: a practice able to create refuge from the open. Writing with others. Grieving like someone who takes refuge from the open. Grieving, which is always a radically different mode of writing.”]]> 168 Cristina Rivera Garza 1936932938 Britta 4 3.5* 4.23 2011 Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country
author: Cristina Rivera Garza
name: Britta
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/29
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2021, 2021non-fiction, 2021tl, 2021poc, 2buddy-reads, femlit, non-fiction, poc, wit, latinx, nonfiction-transl, global-south, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 01women1001-read-nonfiction, 01books-best-25years
review:
3.5*
]]> EEG 33401357 415 Daša Drndić Britta 0 4.18 2016 EEG
author: Daša Drndić
name: Britta
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:

]]> Out 25365
The ringleader of this cover-up, Masako Katori, emerges as the emotional heart of Out and as one of the shrewdest, most clear-eyed creations in recent fiction. Masako's own search for a way out of the straitjacket of a dead-end life leads her, too, to take drastic action.

The complex yet riveting narrative seamlessly combines a convincing glimpse into the grimy world of Japan's yakuza with a brilliant portrayal of the psychology of a violent crime and the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse between seasoned detectives and a group of determined but inexperienced criminals. Kirino has mastered a Thelma and Louise kind of graveyard humor that illuminates her stunning evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds and the friendship that bolsters them in the aftermath.]]> 400 Natsuo Kirino 1400078377 Britta 1
I have no idea why others would hail this as a feminist thriller. A book isn't feminist just because it features plenty of rape and marital abuse and mistreatment of women. Especially not if all female characters display the worst case of internalized misogyny I have encountered since I stopped reading Murakami.

And if that weren't enough: São Paolo?? Not once, but about 20 times. Like, really? Neither the author, nor the publisher, nor the translator can be bothered to check the spelling of one of Brazil's biggest cities? Shame on you! Also, there is no such thing as a fejioda. (The dish is called feijoada).]]> 3.95 1997 Out
author: Natsuo Kirino
name: Britta
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1997
rating: 1
read at: 2022/05/10
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2022, 2022tl, 2022poc, 2buddy-reads, femlit, fiction, fiction-transl, wit, fiction-literay, 01books-worst-25years, 01women1001-xremoved
review:
No, just, no.

I have no idea why others would hail this as a feminist thriller. A book isn't feminist just because it features plenty of rape and marital abuse and mistreatment of women. Especially not if all female characters display the worst case of internalized misogyny I have encountered since I stopped reading Murakami.

And if that weren't enough: São Paolo?? Not once, but about 20 times. Like, really? Neither the author, nor the publisher, nor the translator can be bothered to check the spelling of one of Brazil's biggest cities? Shame on you! Also, there is no such thing as a fejioda. (The dish is called feijoada).
]]> The Employees 58470819 The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.
Olga Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.]]> 144 Olga Ravn 0811231356 Britta 4 3.5* 3.65 2018 The Employees
author: Olga Ravn
name: Britta
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/20
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 01women1001, 2press-new-directions, 01women1001-read, 2023, 2023transl, femlit, fiction, fiction-shorties, fiction-transl, scifi-fantasy, wit, 2023-1st-time, 01books-best-25years
review:
3.5*
]]> Blonde 357734 Blonde is a sweeping epic that pays tribute to the elusive magic and devastation behind the creation of the great twentieth-century American star.]]> 738 Joyce Carol Oates 006093493X Britta 0 3.88 2000 Blonde
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: Britta
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: dnf, 2020bail, 01books-worst-25years
review:

]]> The Flamethrowers 15803141
The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. At its center is Kushner’s brilliantly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination.]]> 383 Rachel Kushner 1439142009 Britta 2 Not my cup of tea. 3.51 2013 The Flamethrowers
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Britta
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 01women1001, 2women1001-sandy2024, 01women1001-read, 2024, 2024-1st-time, 2024women1001, femlit, fiction, 2024-1st-time-fiction, 01books-worst-25years
review:
Not my cup of tea.
]]> What We Lose 33280160
Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor—someone, or something, to love.

In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood. Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman’s understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.]]> 213 Zinzi Clemmons 0735221715 Britta 1 3.59 2017 What We Lose
author: Zinzi Clemmons
name: Britta
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2017
rating: 1
read at: 2017/08/14
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: debuts, 2017, femlit, poc, netgalley, one-star, bhm
review:

]]> Motherhood 36203362 How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”�Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children.

In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation.

In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home.

Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.]]> 304 Sheila Heti 1627790772 Britta 1 3.66 2018 Motherhood
author: Sheila Heti
name: Britta
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2019/02/01
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 01secondshelf-read, 2019, femlit, fiction, memoirs, one-star, feminism, 2secondshelf-2021, fiction-literay, 01books-worst-25years
review:
"What is the main activity of a woman's life if not motherhood?" Seriously? SERIOUSLY?
]]> American Dirt 45046527
Lydia lives in Acapulco. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while cracks are beginning to show in Acapulco because of the cartels, Lydia’s life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. But after her husband’s tell-all profile of the newest drug lord is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.

Forced to flee, Lydia and Luca find themselves joining the countless people trying to reach the United States. Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?]]> 459 Jeanine Cummins Britta 1 Trite. 4.32 2020 American Dirt
author: Jeanine Cummins
name: Britta
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2020
rating: 1
read at: 2020/02/13
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2020, 2020new-release, femlit, fiction, one-star, kindle-scribd, 2buddy-reads, fiction-literay, 01books-worst-25years
review:
Trite.
]]> The Blazing World 25033088 With The Blazing World, internationally best­selling author Siri Hustvedt returns to the New York art world in her most masterful and urgent novel since What I Loved

Hustvedt, who has long been celebrated for her "beguiling, lyrical prose" (The Sunday Times Books, London), tells the provocative story of the artist Harriet Burden. After years of watching her work ignored or dismissed by critics, Burden conducts an experiment she calls "Maskings": she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.

The three solo shows are successful, but when Burden finally steps forward triumphantly to reveal herself as the artist behind the exhibitions, there are critics who doubt her. The public scandal turns on the final exhibition, initially shown as the work of acclaimed artist Rune, who denies Burden’s role in its creation. What no one doubts, however, is that the two artists were intensely involved with each other. As Burden’s journals reveal, she and Rune found themselves locked in a charged and dangerous game that ended with the man’s bizarre death.

Ingeniously presented as a collection of texts compiled after Burden’s death, The Blazing World unfolds from multiple perspectives. The exuberant Burden speaks—in all her joy and fury—through extracts from her own notebooks, while critics, fans, family members, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of who she was, and where the truth lies.

From one of the most ambitious and interna­tionally renowned writers of her generation, The Blazing World is a polyphonic tour de force. An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle, it explores the deceptive powers of prejudice, money, fame, and desire. Emotionally intense, intellectually rigorous, ironic, and playful, Hustvedt's new novel is a bold, rich masterpiece, one that will be remembered for years to come.]]> 384 Siri Hustvedt 1444779664 Britta 4 The novel touches on philosphical questions like perception, psychology of mind, and the value of memory. Told from various perspectives (Harry's notebooks, interviews with Harry's children, her best friend, her partner and the male masks, among others) the reader is left with many uncertainties. Which of the stories is true? What really happened between Harry and her 'masks'? A dense an intellectually challenging read, but worth it: 4.5*]]> 3.78 2014 The Blazing World
author: Siri Hustvedt
name: Britta
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2016/02/18
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2016, favs, fiction, femlit, older-woman, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay
review:
The novel is a contructed as a non-fiction account of the life of Harriet ("Harry") Burden, a recently widowed artist in her mid-fifties. The main theme of the book is Harry's 'mask-experiment', i.e Harry's use of three male artists as 'masks' to show her work for her.
The novel touches on philosphical questions like perception, psychology of mind, and the value of memory. Told from various perspectives (Harry's notebooks, interviews with Harry's children, her best friend, her partner and the male masks, among others) the reader is left with many uncertainties. Which of the stories is true? What really happened between Harry and her 'masks'? A dense an intellectually challenging read, but worth it: 4.5*
]]> Women Talking 37859267
Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. Eight women, all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their colony and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in, meet secretly in a hayloft with the intention of making a decision about how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. They have two days to make a plan, while the men of the colony are away in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists (not ghosts as it turns out but local men) and bring them home.

How should we live? How should we love? How should we treat one another? How should we organise our societies? These are questions the women in Women Talking ask one another-and Miriam Toews makes them the questions we must all ask ourselves.]]> 219 Miriam Toews Britta 5 3.73 2018 Women Talking
author: Miriam Toews
name: Britta
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2018/09/13
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2buddy-reads, 2018, 2018bw-read, femlit, favs, fiction, kindle-scribd, 2btp-2020, 2secondshelf-2021, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay, 01unhinged-book, feminism-fiction, 01books-best-25years
review:

]]> Tin Man 34666765
And then there are two boys, Ellis and Michael,
who are inseparable.
And the boys become men,
and then Annie walks into their lives,
and it changes nothing and everything.]]> 224 Sarah Winman 0755390970 Britta 5 3.98 2017 Tin Man
author: Sarah Winman
name: Britta
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2020/01/02
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2020, favs, femlit, fiction, fivestars, 2020tops, lgbtq, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay
review:

]]> The Bass Rock 43413011
In the early 1700s, Sarah, accused of being a witch, flees for her life.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Ruth navigates a new house, a new husband and the strange waters of the local community.

Six decades later, the house stands empty. Viv, mourning the death of her father, catalogues Ruth’s belongings and discovers her place in the past � and perhaps a way forward.

Each woman’s choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men in their lives. But in sisterhood there is the hope of survival and new life. Intricately crafted and compulsively readable, The Bass Rock burns bright with anger and love.]]> 362 Evie Wyld 191121439X Britta 5 3.70 2020 The Bass Rock
author: Evie Wyld
name: Britta
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/04/11
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2021, 2021tops, aussie-lit, favs, femlit, fiction, fivestars, 2secondshelf-2021, fiction-historical, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, unhinged, fiction-literay, 01unhinged-book, feminism-fiction, 01books-best-25years
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am]]> 11302989 147 Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold 1564787028 Britta 5 3.64 2009 The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am
author: Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold
name: Britta
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/09
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2invisible-city2022, 01women1001, 2022, 2022debut, 2022tl, 2022tops, older-woman, debuts, favs, femlit, fiction, fiction-shorties, fiction-transl, fivestars, wit, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay, 01books-best-25years
review:

]]> Creatures of Passage 39314725 With echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Yejidé’s novel explores a forgotten quadrant of Washington, DC, and the ghosts that haunt it.

Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying ill-fated passengers in a haunted car: a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River.

Unknown to Nephthys when the novel opens in 1977, her estranged great-nephew, ten-year-old Dash, is finding himself drawn to the banks of that very same river. It is there that Dash--reeling from having witnessed an act of molestation at his school, but still questioning what and who he saw--has charmed conversations with a mysterious figure he calls the "River Man," who somehow appears each time he goes there.

When Dash arrives unexpectedly at Nephthys's door one day bearing a cryptic note about his unusual conversations with the River Man, Nephthys must face both the family she abandoned and what frightens her most when she looks in the mirror.

Creatures of Passage beautifully threads together the stories of Nephthys, Dash, and others both living and dead. Morowa Yejidé's deeply captivating novel shows us an unseen Washington filled with otherworldly landscapes, flawed super-humans, and reluctant ghosts, and brings together a community intent on saving one young boy in order to reclaim themselves.]]> 304 Morowa Yejide 1617758760 Britta 5 4.5* rounded up.]]> 3.93 2021 Creatures of Passage
author: Morowa Yejide
name: Britta
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/03
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2prize-womens2022, kindle-scribd, 2022, 2022poc, 2022tops, bhm, femlit, fiction, favs, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay
review:
Wonderous.
4.5* rounded up.
]]> 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 Britta 4
After the re-read: 4.5*

Second re-read in 2023: still 4.5*. This time I enjoyed the part with 'Ruth' so much more than before. ]]> 4.06 2013 A Tale for the Time Being
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Britta
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/27
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2016, fiction, kindle-scribd, femlit, poc, rereads, 2017, 2017bw-read, can-lit, favs, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 2023, 2023poc, 2023re-read, 2023tops, fiction-literay, 2novels52, 01books-best-25years
review:
I am normally not a big fan of magical realism, but give me a story, beautifully written, a bit weird and with some quantum mechanical/zen buddhist magic thrown in and I am game.!

After the re-read: 4.5*

Second re-read in 2023: still 4.5*. This time I enjoyed the part with 'Ruth' so much more than before.
]]> To Be Taught, If Fortunate 48657666
Ariadne is one such explorer. As an astronaut on an extrasolar research vessel, she and her fellow crewmates sleep between worlds and wake up each time with different features. Her experience is one of fluid body and stable mind and of a unique perspective on the passage of time. Back on Earth, society changes dramatically from decade to decade, as it always does.

Ariadne may awaken to find that support for space exploration back home has waned, or that her country of birth no longer exists, or that a cult has arisen around their cosmic findings, only to dissolve once more by the next waking. But the moods of Earth have little bearing on their mission: to explore, to study, and to send their learnings home.

Carrying all the trademarks of her other beloved works, including brilliant writing, fantastic world-building and exceptional, diverse characters, Becky's first audiobook outside of the Wayfarers series is sure to capture the imagination of listeners all over the world.]]> 135 Becky Chambers 1473697182 Britta 5 30 Books in 30 Days / Book #20

Reread 2022]]> 4.27 2019 To Be Taught, If Fortunate
author: Becky Chambers
name: Britta
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/20
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2buddy-reads, 2019, 2019new-release, femlit, fiction, scifi-fantasy, favs, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 2022, 2022re-read, 2august2022-30books, 2023, 2023re-read, 2023tops, 2august2023-30books, fiction-shorties, fivestars, 01books-best-25years
review:
Reread 2023
30 Books in 30 Days / Book #20

Reread 2022
]]> Mornings in Jenin 9394255
The very precariousness of existence in the camps quickens life itself. Amal, the patriarch's bright granddaughter, feels this with certainty when she discovers the joys of young friendship and first love and especially when she loses her adored father, who read to her daily as a young girl in the quiet of the early dawn. Through Amal we get the stories of her twin brothers, one who is kidnapped by an Israeli soldier and raised Jewish; the other who sacrifices everything for the Palestinian cause. Amal's own dramatic story threads between the major Palestinian-Israeli clashes of three decades; it is one of love and loss, of childhood, marriage, and parenthood, and finally of the need to share her history with her daughter, to preserve the greatest love she has.

Previously published in a hardcover edition with a limited run under the title "The Scar of David," this powerful novel is now available in a fully revised, newly titled paperback edition. The deep and moving humanity of "Mornings in Jenin "forces us to take a fresh look at one of the defining political conflicts of our lifetimes.]]> 338 Susan Abulhawa 1408813556 Britta 5 4.5* rounded up 4.50 2006 Mornings in Jenin
author: Susan Abulhawa
name: Britta
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/11
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: fiction-historical, fiction, global-south, palestine, poc, debuts, 2024, 2024poc, 2024tops, favs, fivestars, 2024-1st-time, 2024-1st-time-fiction, 01books-best-25years
review:
4.5* rounded up
]]> From the Wreck 33267485 From the Wreck tells the remarkable story of George Hills, who survived the sinking of the steamship Admella off the South Australian coast in 1859. Haunted by his memories and the disappearance of a fellow survivor, George’s fractured life is intertwined with that of a woman from another dimension, seeking refuge on Earth. This is a novel imbued with beauty and feeling, filled both with existential loneliness and a deep awareness that all life is interdependent.]]> 267 Jane Rawson 0995359458 Britta 4 ReRead 3.60 2017 From the Wreck
author: Jane Rawson
name: Britta
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/23
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2019, favs, femlit, fiction, kindle-scribd, 2buddy-reads, aussie-lit, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, unhinged, 2024, 2024re-read, rereads, fiction-literay
review:
ReRead
]]> Milkman 36047860
Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.]]> 352 Anna Burns 0571338763 Britta 4 3.51 2018 Milkman
author: Anna Burns
name: Britta
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2018/07/24
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2prize-booker2018, 2018, 2018bw-read, bookprice, femlit, fiction, kindle-scribd, 2prize-women2019, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, fiction-historical, fiction-literay
review:

]]> The Girl on the Train 22557272
An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.]]> 336 Paula Hawkins 1594633665 Britta 2 femlit, 01books-worst-25years
It is a good, solid crime novel, and I would have given it 3 stars, but it annoyed me quite a bit that all the female characters (Rachel, Megan/Jess, Anna) were depicted as weak or needy (or both), depending on men to give context and meaning to their lives (husbands, ex-husbands, lovers) or at least explain life to them (therapist).

So in the end: 2,5*]]> 3.97 2015 The Girl on the Train
author: Paula Hawkins
name: Britta
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2015/11/26
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: femlit, 01books-worst-25years
review:
I picked this up because I felt like something not too demanding and entertaining, and it was. Not great or fantastic but a good, quick read. The plot (solving a murder mystery) is nothing you haven't read before but the structure of the story is quite fresh, and the premise (Rachel, the girl on the train, getting involved in the lives of strangers she sees from the train window) is intriguing and well executed. The pace got a bit 'saggy' in the middle but the book picked up speed again towards the end.

It is a good, solid crime novel, and I would have given it 3 stars, but it annoyed me quite a bit that all the female characters (Rachel, Megan/Jess, Anna) were depicted as weak or needy (or both), depending on men to give context and meaning to their lives (husbands, ex-husbands, lovers) or at least explain life to them (therapist).

So in the end: 2,5*
]]> H is for Hawk 18803640
When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.

Destined to be a classic of nature writing, "H is for Hawk" is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for "The Once and Future King." It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.]]> 300 Helen Macdonald 0224097008 Britta 1 Praised by many but not a book for me. Should have known, though. Celebrating the caging/drilling of animals always makes me cringe; why you would want to 'train' (quite the euphemism, by the way) a wild bird for your own pleasure is simply beyond me. It just seems archaic and cruel. And the writing didn't appeal to me either (why use only one adjective when you can add five more?).]]> 3.73 2014 H is for Hawk
author: Helen Macdonald
name: Britta
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2014
rating: 1
read at: 2019/07/02
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2019, debuts, femlit, kindle-scribd, memoirs, non-fiction, 01books-worst-25years
review:
Nope.
Praised by many but not a book for me. Should have known, though. Celebrating the caging/drilling of animals always makes me cringe; why you would want to 'train' (quite the euphemism, by the way) a wild bird for your own pleasure is simply beyond me. It just seems archaic and cruel. And the writing didn't appeal to me either (why use only one adjective when you can add five more?).
]]> A Little Life 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 Britta 2
First, the easy stuff: the book is beautifully written, and it has the reader literally glued to the text. You just can't stop reading until you are finished (at 3am in the morning...). Also, the novel raises important and difficult moral issues concerning illness and self-determination: Do we have to try and 'fix' a person who is broken and doesn't want to live anymore? Are we morally obligated to prevent self-harm and suicide? If a person chooses to harm himself do we consider this person mentally ill and not suitable to look after himself? In other words, what are the moral limits regarding self determination? These issues are all dealt with convincingly and without oozing moral superiority.

But there were aspects in the book that I found less convincing. Jude's past for example, the way the abuse just kept 'piling up', it was as if Yanagihara was afraid that the reader wouldn't believe a life-long suffering if the abuse had stopped after the monastery. Was what happend to Jude there not already horrible enough? And Jude's encounter with Caleb: is it really believable that Jude who was so afraid of physical contact would take somebody home and have sex after he had just met him? And lastly, I felt that the friends surrounding Jude were, in the end, just too good to be true. Not once did one of them say: enough is enough, I can't deal with this any longer.
Also, I felt some parts of the story too steroetyped to be entirely believable (Jude not only being an orphan but being found next to a garbage bin, the workoholic lawyers, the drug-using artists, the 'good' social worker who then died very quickly of cancer) and at times the story unnecessarily bordered on the melodramatic (Willem's death just when things seemed to go well for Jude). And I found the repetitiveness of the pattern in the relationship between Jude and his friends (trying to get closer to Jude, coming to know him and his past, Jude's subsequent withdrawal and apologies) was overdone. I am sure the reader would have understood this pattern without it being made explicit quite so often.

2.5*
]]> 4.28 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Britta
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2015/09/29
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: fiction, kindle-scribd, femlit, lgbtq, poc, fiction-literay, 01books-worst-25years
review:
I don't quite know what to say about this book, or rather there is so much to say, that I don't know where to start.

First, the easy stuff: the book is beautifully written, and it has the reader literally glued to the text. You just can't stop reading until you are finished (at 3am in the morning...). Also, the novel raises important and difficult moral issues concerning illness and self-determination: Do we have to try and 'fix' a person who is broken and doesn't want to live anymore? Are we morally obligated to prevent self-harm and suicide? If a person chooses to harm himself do we consider this person mentally ill and not suitable to look after himself? In other words, what are the moral limits regarding self determination? These issues are all dealt with convincingly and without oozing moral superiority.

But there were aspects in the book that I found less convincing. Jude's past for example, the way the abuse just kept 'piling up', it was as if Yanagihara was afraid that the reader wouldn't believe a life-long suffering if the abuse had stopped after the monastery. Was what happend to Jude there not already horrible enough? And Jude's encounter with Caleb: is it really believable that Jude who was so afraid of physical contact would take somebody home and have sex after he had just met him? And lastly, I felt that the friends surrounding Jude were, in the end, just too good to be true. Not once did one of them say: enough is enough, I can't deal with this any longer.
Also, I felt some parts of the story too steroetyped to be entirely believable (Jude not only being an orphan but being found next to a garbage bin, the workoholic lawyers, the drug-using artists, the 'good' social worker who then died very quickly of cancer) and at times the story unnecessarily bordered on the melodramatic (Willem's death just when things seemed to go well for Jude). And I found the repetitiveness of the pattern in the relationship between Jude and his friends (trying to get closer to Jude, coming to know him and his past, Jude's subsequent withdrawal and apologies) was overdone. I am sure the reader would have understood this pattern without it being made explicit quite so often.

2.5*

]]> Circe 41045102
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. Circe is a strange child - not powerful and terrible, like her father, nor gorgeous and mercenary like her mother. Scorned and rejected, Circe grows up in the shadows, at home in neither the world of gods or mortals. But Circe has a dark power of her own: witchcraft. When her gift threatens the gods, she is banished to the island of Aiaia where she hones her occult craft, casting spells, gathering strange herbs and taming wild beasts. Yet a woman who stands alone will never be left in peace for long - and among her island's guests is an unexpected visitor: the mortal Odysseus, for whom Circe will risk everything.

So Circe sets forth her tale, a vivid, mesmerizing epic of family rivalry, love and loss - the defiant, inextinguishable song of woman burning hot and bright through the darkness of a man's world.]]> 337 Madeline Miller 1408890046 Britta 4 4.5*]]> 4.16 2018 Circe
author: Madeline Miller
name: Britta
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/04/22
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2prize-women2019, 01secondshelf-read, 2019, femlit, fiction, kindle-scribd, retellings, 2buddy-reads, 2secondshelf-2021, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, unhinged, fiction-literay, fiction-historical, 01unhinged-book, feminism-fiction
review:
Circe is such a badass witch, loved it!
4.5*
]]> The Days of Abandonment 77810 The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.]]> 188 Elena Ferrante 1933372001 Britta 1 Yes, the writing was good, and Ferrante did an amazing job in capturing the thoughts & feelings of her main character, without any reservations or shame.
But: the story of the (stereo)typical 'woman scorned' (the housewife in her late thirties left by her husband for a much younger woman), followed by the (stereo)typical reaction of the wife and her husband, what can I say: big sigh, followed by an even bigger yawn... And the more I thought about it, the more the book annoyed me.




]]> 3.92 2002 The Days of Abandonment
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Britta
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2002
rating: 1
read at: 2016/02/04
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2016, fiction, fiction-transl, femlit, one-star, wit, fiction-literay
review:
So sorry, Ferrante-fans, but I didnt like this book. At all.
Yes, the writing was good, and Ferrante did an amazing job in capturing the thoughts & feelings of her main character, without any reservations or shame.
But: the story of the (stereo)typical 'woman scorned' (the housewife in her late thirties left by her husband for a much younger woman), followed by the (stereo)typical reaction of the wife and her husband, what can I say: big sigh, followed by an even bigger yawn... And the more I thought about it, the more the book annoyed me.





]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (My Brilliant Friend, #1)]]> 13586707 331 Elena Ferrante Britta 2 Although the book centres around the relationship between Lena and Lila, for me one of the best aspects of the novel was the way Ferrante was able to render a vidid picture of communal life in Naples after the war. She makes poverty and everyday violence palpable, although sometimes a bit 'overstressing' her point. Interesting, albeit somewhat disturbing, that Lena - although very intelligent - didn't seem to question male violence (within and outside of her family) and that her 'way out' (through education) is not her decision but is somewhat forced on her by outside influences.
]]> 3.91 2011 My Brilliant Friend (My Brilliant Friend, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Britta
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2016/02/10
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2016, fiction, kindle-scribd, femlit, fiction-transl, wit, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay, 01books-worst-25years
review:
The first part of a four book-series, this book - the story of two young girls growing up in the poor parts of Naples during the 1950ies - focusses on the friendship of and competition between the two main characters, Lena (the narrator) and Lila.
Although the book centres around the relationship between Lena and Lila, for me one of the best aspects of the novel was the way Ferrante was able to render a vidid picture of communal life in Naples after the war. She makes poverty and everyday violence palpable, although sometimes a bit 'overstressing' her point. Interesting, albeit somewhat disturbing, that Lena - although very intelligent - didn't seem to question male violence (within and outside of her family) and that her 'way out' (through education) is not her decision but is somewhat forced on her by outside influences.

]]> Detransition, Baby 48890225 A whipsmart debut about three women—transgender and cisgender—whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.

Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.

Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?

This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.]]> 337 Torrey Peters 0593133374 Britta 1 Frustratingly bad. 3.94 2021 Detransition, Baby
author: Torrey Peters
name: Britta
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2021/04/29
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2021, 2021debut, 2021new-release, bookprice, debuts, femlit, fiction, lgbtq, one-star, 2prize-womens2021, 2secondshelf-2021, 2readwomen2021, 01women1001, 2btp2022-fiction, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay, 01books-worst-25years
review:
Frustratingly bad.
]]> Three Women 42201100 A riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting.

Hailed as “a dazzling achievement� (Los Angeles Times) and “riveting page-turner that explores desire, heartbreak, and infatuation in all its messy, complicated nuance� (The Washington Post), Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women has captivated readers, booksellers, and critics—and topped bestseller lists—worldwide.

In suburban Indiana we meet Lina, a homemaker and mother of two whose marriage, after a decade, has lost its passion. Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks and, after reconnecting with an old flame through social media, embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. In North Dakota we meet Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student who allegedly has a clandestine physical relationship with her handsome, married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial will turn their quiet community upside down. Finally, in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, we meet Sloane—a gorgeous, successful, and refined restaurant owner—who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women.

Based on years of immersive reporting and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy. “A work of deep observation, long conversations, and a kind of journalistic alchemy� (Kate Tuttle, NPR), Three Women introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.]]> 306 Lisa Taddeo 1451642296 Britta 2 3.72 2019 Three Women
author: Lisa Taddeo
name: Britta
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2019/07/15
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2019, 2019new-release, 01secondshelf-read, debuts, femlit, kindle-scribd, non-fiction, feminism, 2secondshelf-2021, 01books-worst-25years
review:
Intriguing idea, a book about female desire, but this book is not about that. At all.
]]> Normal People 37539457
A year later, they're both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.]]> 266 Sally Rooney 0571334644 Britta 2 Conversations with Friends but I tried to read her second book with an open mind. The writing was good and some of the themes were interesting but I was rather bored by the selfabsorbed, cliché-characters: women who just want to 'get the man' and who always question their self-worth after a break-up, and men who are behaving as if they come straight out of a 'boys-will-be-boys'-movie. So 1950ies. And the ending is just plain cheesy.

2.5* (mainly because the writing was good).

And not much has changed after the re-read in January 2019: Nope, I still don't get the hype...]]> 3.93 2018 Normal People
author: Sally Rooney
name: Britta
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2019/01/09
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2prize-booker2018, 2018, 2018bw-read, femlit, fiction, kindle-scribd, 2019, 01secondshelf-read, 2prize-women2019, 2secondshelf-prizeworthy, 2secondshelf-2021, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, irish-lit, fiction-literay, 01books-worst-25years
review:
I have to admit I wasn't taken with Rooney's debut Conversations with Friends but I tried to read her second book with an open mind. The writing was good and some of the themes were interesting but I was rather bored by the selfabsorbed, cliché-characters: women who just want to 'get the man' and who always question their self-worth after a break-up, and men who are behaving as if they come straight out of a 'boys-will-be-boys'-movie. So 1950ies. And the ending is just plain cheesy.

2.5* (mainly because the writing was good).

And not much has changed after the re-read in January 2019: Nope, I still don't get the hype...
]]> Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1) 28446947 Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.

How about Autumn 2016?

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.

Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.

From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

Here comes Autumn.]]> 264 Ali Smith 0241207002 Britta 4 4.5*]]> 3.67 2016 Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1)
author: Ali Smith
name: Britta
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/09/18
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2017bw-read, 2017, femlit, fiction, kindle-scribd, netgalley, rereads, 01secondshelf-read, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay, 2novels52, 01books-best-25years
review:
This is a book well worth re-reading. So many new things to discover!
4.5*
]]> <![CDATA[The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World]]> 23995249
In this illuminating biography, Andrea Wulf brings Humboldt’s extraordinary life back into focus: his prediction of human-induced climate change; his daring expeditions to the highest peaks of South America and to the anthrax-infected steppes of Siberia; his relationships with iconic figures, including Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson; and the lasting influence of his writings on Darwin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Muir, Thoreau, and many others. Brilliantly researched and stunningly written, The Invention of Nature reveals the myriad ways in which Humboldt’s ideas form the foundation of modern environmentalism—and reminds us why they are as prescient and vital as ever.]]> 473 Andrea Wulf 038535066X Britta 4 4.5* 4.28 2015 The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
author: Andrea Wulf
name: Britta
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2020/04/14
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2020, 2020non-fic, 2buddy-reads, femlit, nonfiction-science-nature, non-fiction, 01booknaturalist-bookclub, 01books-best-25years
review:
4.5*
]]> Cleopatra: A Life 7968243 The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.

Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.

Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and–after his murder–three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.

Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra’s supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff ‘s is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.]]> 369 Stacy Schiff 0316001929 Britta 5 3.73 2010 Cleopatra: A Life
author: Stacy Schiff
name: Britta
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2020/01/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: egypt, 2readwomen2020, 2020, 2020decade, 2020non-fic, feminism, femlit, favs, fivestars, non-fiction, 2020tops, 2buddy-reads, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 01women1001-read-nonfiction, 01books-best-25years
review:

]]> Women & Power: A Manifesto 36313514 128 Mary Beard 1788160606 Britta 4 Re-read.<br />2nd Re-read. 4.10 2017 Women & Power: A Manifesto
author: Mary Beard
name: Britta
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/15
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2018bw-read, 2018, femlit, non-fiction, 2019, 01secondshelf-read, rereads, feminism, 2secondshelf-prizeworthy, 2secondshelf-2021, 2august2021-30books, 2021, 2021non-fiction, 2021re-read, 01women1001, nonfiction-shorties, 01women1001-read, 01women1001-read-nonfiction, 01unhinged-book
review:
Re-read.
2nd Re-read.
]]> <![CDATA[Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

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

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Britta 4 Reread in October.]]> 4.21 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
author: Naomi Klein
name: Britta
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2btp2024-nonfiction, 2womensprize-nonfiction, 2024, 2024nonfiction, 2024tops, can-lit, culture-criticism, favs, femlit, non-fiction, 2024-1st-time, 01author-leadingladies2, 2024re-read, rereads, 01books-best-25years
review:
Read for the BTP / Octofinals.
Reread in October.
]]> <![CDATA[The Cost of Living (Living Autobiography #2)]]> 40099413 From the twice-Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home :

Dazzling, essential, entirely unlike anything else -- a memoir on modern womanhood, rejecting oppressive social expectations and turning instead towards a thrilling, transformative freedom

What does it mean to be free - as an artist, a woman, a mother or daughter? And what is the price of that freedom?

In this dazzling memoir, Deborah Levy confronts the essential questions of modern womanhood with humour, pragmatism, and profoundly resonant wisdom. Reflecting on the period when she wrote the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Hot Milk - when her mother was dying, her daughters were leaving home, her marriage was coming to an end - she is characteristically eloquent on the social expectations and surreal realities of daily life. And expanding far beyond these bounds, she describes a uniquely frank, wise and thrilling manifesto for female experience: embracing the exhilarating terror of freedom, seeking to understand what that freedom could mean and how it might feel.]]> 187 Deborah Levy 0241977568 Britta 5 30 Books in 30 Days / Book #30.

I loved this!]]> 4.27 2018 The Cost of Living (Living Autobiography #2)
author: Deborah Levy
name: Britta
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/31
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 2019, femlit, favs, fivestars, memoirs, 01secondshelf-read, non-fiction, 01women1001, nonfiction-shorties, 01women1001-read, 2023, 2023nonfiction, 2023re-read, 2023tops, 2august2023-30books, feminism, bookishbooks, 01women1001-read-nonfiction
review:
Reread in 2023
30 Books in 30 Days / Book #30.

I loved this!
]]> Praiseworthy 181866973 672 Alexis Wright 0811238016 Britta 5 4.14 2023 Praiseworthy
author: Alexis Wright
name: Britta
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/13
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 2024, 2024-1st-time, 2024poc, 2024tops, 2024women1001, aussie-lit, favs, fiction, femlit, indiginous, 2buddy-reads, 2press-new-directions, fiction-literay, 2024-1st-time-fiction, 01books-best-25years
review:

]]> Last Samurai 35610855 Is he a genius? A real-life child prodigy? He’s grown up watching Seven Samurai on a hypnotising loop � his mother’s strategy to give him not one but seven male role models. And yet Ludo remains obsessed with the one thing his mother refuses to tell him: his real father’s name. Let loose on London, Ludo sets out on a secret quest to find the last samurai � the father he never knew.

Originally published in 2000 to international acclaim, The Last Samurai is a paean to the power of language and learning, dazzling, delighting and inspiring a legion of readers.]]> 496 Helen DeWitt 1784707961 Britta 5 4.08 2000 Last Samurai
author: Helen DeWitt
name: Britta
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2019/01/31
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: 01secondshelf-read, 2019, debuts, femlit, fiction, fivestars, favs, 2buddy-reads, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, 2press-new-directions, fiction-literay, 01books-best-25years
review:
Even though I didn't love everything in the book (I only skimmed the long quotes from obscure books or the passages written in Japanese and Islandic), but it still blew me away.
]]>