en-US Mon, 13 May 2024 18:29:31 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 411873
Ethan Nichtern, the charismatic and creative force behind New York's upstart Interdependence Project is your guide to the beauty that is everywhere in the urban jungle-in the rattling of subway trains, the screechings of traffic, the hum and drone of millions scurrying for work, food, sustenance, art, culture, and meaning. There may be no greater setting for exploring the great truth that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "Whatever effects one directly, effects all indirectly."

One City melds Dr. King's message with modern Buddhist wisdom to offer a new way of understanding what binds us all together-no matter where we are, no matter who. With its pop-culture savvy, humor, and literary liveliness, One City will speak to--and even, it's fair to say, help define--the spiritually-inclined, conscious Next Generation.]]> 192 Ethan Nichtern 0861715160 Ethan 0 currently-reading 4.21 2007
author: Ethan Nichtern
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> 210451059 How do we stand firm amid the ups and downs of existence?

In today’s culture of polarization and constant change, how do we find the confidence to navigate challenges? Is now really the time for meditation, for looking inward? What do we do with mindfulness? Meditation teacher Ethan Nichtern tackles these questions, taking contemporary considerations of power, identity, ethics, and confidence to new heights in this essential guide to self-discovery.

Ethan examines the Buddhist concept of the Eight Worldly Winds, the four paired opposites of praise and blame, pleasure and pain, fame and insignificance, and success and failure. Delving into these dichotomies reveals invaluable insights into our relationships with others (including teachers, friends, leaders, the disgraced, and the adored) and ourselves. With transformative meditation exercises, Confidence empowers us to cultivate and access our innate wisdom.

]]> 240 Ethan Nichtern 1608688550 Ethan 0 to-read 4.28
author: Ethan Nichtern
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.28
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]]> 60475490 —Judith L. Lief, editor of The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma

A mad riot of art, Buddhism, mandala principle, spiritual pursuits, growing up goth in the 90s, the theories of Marshall McLuhan, and a mongoose—to name but a few.

Meditation teacher, filmmaker, writer, and art savant Kevin Townley turns his unique gaze upon 26 artists and magnifies the power and meaning of the five Buddhist wisdom energies through explorations of their work. Rather than trying to “explain�� these energies, he reveals them to you in familiar visual language while, of course, pushing the boundaries of what you might have thought you saw at first glance. Townley leads you to, invites you in, and sometimes springs upon you, the perennial wisdom in the worlds of artists from Artemisia to Hilma af Klint to Marilyn Minter.

Beautifully written and hilariously disarming, Look, Look, Look, Look, Look Again vibrates with lucid insight into society, history, and establishment, while teaching you a lot about meditation and Buddhism along the way. In exploring the practice, life, and work of these 26 artists (all of whom are women) through the lens of the five wisdom energies, you come away with a deeper understanding of yourself, the world, and the true dharma that transcends culture and religion—and a profound gratitude for anyone really willing to look.

“Without a doubt, Townley is the Fran Lebowitz of Buddhist writing.��
—John Hodgman, host of the Judge John Hodgman Podcast

“Kevin Townley demystifies that daunting link between art and spirituality while leaving room for the divine. By weaving artists' histories with his own, he makes the reader feel comfortable drawing connections between heady concepts and personal experience. Through a unique blend of compassion and curiosity, Kevin Townley has given readers a more intimate, spiritually-minded Ways of Seeing .��
—Tavi Gevinson, actor, writer, and founder of Rookie]]> 284 Kevin Thomas Townley Jr. 1736943901 Ethan 5 4.48
author: Kevin Thomas Townley Jr.
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.48
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rating: 5
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]]> 29430534
In this down-to-earth book, Ben Connelly sure-handedly guides us through the intricacies of Yogacara and the richness of the “Thirty Verses.�� Dedicating a chapter of the book to each line of the poem, he lets us thoroughly lose ourselves in its depths. His warm and wise voice unpacks and contextualizes its wisdom, showing us how we can apply its ancient insights to our own modern lives, to create a life of engaged peace, harmony, compassion, and joy.

In fourth-century India one of the great geniuses of Buddhism, Vasubandhu, sought to reconcile the diverse ideas and forms of Buddhism practiced at the time and demonstrate how they could be effectively integrated into a single system. This was the Yogacara movement, and it continues to have great influence in modern Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. “Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only,�� or “Trimshika,�� is the most concise, comprehensive, and accessible work by this revered figure.

Vasubandhu’s “Thirty Verses�� lay out a path of practice that integrates the most powerful of Buddhism’s psychological and mystical Early Buddhism’s practices for shedding afflictive emotional habit and the Mahayana emphasis on shedding divisive concepts, the path of individual liberation and the path of freeing all beings, the path to nirvana and the path of enlightenment as the very ground of being right now. Although Yogacara has a reputation for being extremely complex, the “Thirty Verses�� distills the principles of these traditions to their most practical forms, and this book follows that sense of focus; it goes to the heart of the matter—how do we alleviate suffering through shedding our emotional knots and our sense of alienation?

This is a great introduction to a philosophy, a master, and a work whose influence reverberates throughout modern Buddhism.]]> 248 Ben Connelly 1614292841 Ethan 5 4.43
author: Ben Connelly
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.43
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rating: 5
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]]> 34273236
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned �� from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren �� an enigmatic artist and single mother �� who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother–daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town �� and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost . . .]]> 338 Celeste Ng 0735224293 Ethan 4 4.05 2017
author: Celeste Ng
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2017
rating: 4
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date added: 2018/09/23
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]]> 35259724
However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers�� façades.

When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.]]> 400 Imbolo Mbue 0525509712 Ethan 5 3.92 2016
author: Imbolo Mbue
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/06/12
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]]> 12349 A cross-cultural tale of two women brought together by the intersections of television and industrial agriculture, fertility and motherhood, life and love—the breakout hit by the celebrated author of A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki’s mesmerizing debut novel has captivated readers and reviewers worldwide. When documentarian Jane Takagi-Little finally lands a job producing a Japanese television show that just happens to be sponsored by an American meat-exporting business, she uncovers some unsavory truths about love, fertility, and a dangerous hormone called DES. Soon she will also cross paths with Akiko Ueno, a beleaguered Japanese housewife struggling to escape her overbearing husband.

Hailed by USA Today as “rare and provocative�� and awarded the Kirayama Prize for Literature of the Pacific Rim, My Year of Meats is a modern-day take on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for fans of Michael Pollan, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Kingsolver.]]> 366 Ruth Ozeki 0140280464 Ethan 5 to-read 4.02 1998
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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]]> 23637499 A FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD

Winner of the FERRO-GRUMLEY AWARD

In the tradition of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha comes a new spiritual novel that is a stunning feat of storytelling and imagination.

A Poet of the Invisible World follows Nouri, a boy born in thirteenth-century Persia with four ears instead of two. Orphaned as an infant, he’s taken into a Sufi order, where he meets an assortment of dervishes and embarks on a path toward spiritual awakening.

Along the way, Nouri will find himself in the sumptuous court of a sultan, a barren farm in the hills of Spain, a bustling city on the north coast of Africa, and a monastery perched high in the mountains. He will fall in love—and encounter
an adversary who will try to destroy that love.

As Nouri stumbles from one experience to the next, he grows into manhood. Each trial he endures will shatter another obstacle within—and lead him toward transcendence.

Michael Golding’s previous work has been described as “brilliant�� (The Cleveland Plain Dealer) and “so lavish and so colorful, it’s like a meal in the open air, laid out on brocade�� (Los Angeles Times). With this new novel, seven years in the writing, he has created a gripping tale that deals with many of life’s deepest questions. A Poet of the Invisible World will astonish readers as it awakens them to the poetry inside themselves.]]> 336 Michael Golding 1250071283 Ethan 5 to-read 3.80 2015
author: Michael Golding
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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]]> 8259344 288 David Michie 0984207007 Ethan 0 to-read 4.21 2009
author: David Michie
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/05/08
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]]> 13642735
Fear is something that's such a part of our lives that it doesn't seem it would be possible to live without it. This book disputes that claim in a powerful way. Gaylon Ferguson presents traditional Buddhist teachings to show that the fear that so often wreaks havoc on us is in fact quite insubtantial—and it's mostly something we create ourselves. If we can learn to see that, it becomes pretty simple to un-create it, and we also discover that there's a natural fearlessness in us that goes far deeper than fear. With this natural bravery as our foundation, we can live our own lives more effectively and also be a better help and comfort to others.]]> 272 Gaylon Ferguson 1590309731 Ethan 5 4.27 2013
author: Gaylon Ferguson
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2013
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/03/19
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]]> 154505 ]]> 163 James N. Powell Ethan 4 3.72 2007
author: James N. Powell
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2007
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/03/19
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]]> 24728470 M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.

Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.]]> 256 Patti Smith 1101875100 Ethan 5 4.00 2015
author: Patti Smith
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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]]> 23754479
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother �� her only family �� is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.

Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world �� including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.

Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters �� Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers �� and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.]]> 563 Jonathan Franzen 0374239215 Ethan 4 currently-reading 3.62 2015
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2015
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/02/01
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]]> 21412400 No One Belongs Here More Than You, a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny �� so Miranda July �� readers will be blown away.

Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people's babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense non-profit where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.

When Cheryl's bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl's eccentrically-ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee �� the selfish, cruel blond bombshell �� who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.

Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July's first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic and important voice today, and a writer for all time. The First Bad Man is dazzling, disorienting, and unforgettable.]]> 288 Miranda July 1439172560 Ethan 5 currently-reading 3.68 2015
author: Miranda July
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/01/01
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]]> 380853 276 Eileen Myles 0876859325 Ethan 3 3.83 1994
author: Eileen Myles
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1994
rating: 3
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]]> 24499258 Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door.

Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t. Every nine years, the house’s residents—an odd brother and sister—extend a unique invitation to someone who’s different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late. . . .

Spanning five decades, from the last days of the 1970s to the present, leaping genres, and barreling toward an astonishing conclusion, this intricately woven novel will pull you into a reality-warping new vision of the haunted house story—as only David Mitchell could imagine it.]]> 238 David Mitchell 0812998685 Ethan 4 3.81 2015
author: David Mitchell
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2015/11/14
date added: 2015/11/14
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]]> 25147754 “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.��
��
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,�� a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
��
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.]]> 4 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0147520509 Ethan 5 4.43 2015
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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]]> 20613582 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, he must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater.

A writer whose work Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious . . . cracklingly intelligent . . . and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.]]> 256 Ben Lerner 0865478104 Ethan 4 3.78 2014
author: Ben Lerner
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/09/07
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]]> 11100788
In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.]]> 181 Ben Lerner Ethan 5 3.82 2011
author: Ben Lerner
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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]]> 44551 159 Anne Waldman 0872863166 Ethan 5 4.13 1975
author: Anne Waldman
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1975
rating: 5
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]]> 7905092
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbor," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?

In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
(jacket)]]> 562 Jonathan Franzen 0374158460 Ethan 4 3.78 2010
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2010
rating: 4
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]]> 113429 205 Miranda July 0743299396 Ethan 5 3.83 2007
author: Miranda July
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2007
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/09/01
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]]> 15953436 ��
This three-volume collection presents in��lively, relevant language the comprehensive teachings of the Tibetan Buddhist path of the hinayana, mahayana, and vajrayana. Considered Chögyam Trungpa’s magnum opus,�� The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma ��will resonate with new and senior students of Buddhism.
��
In this third and final volume, Chögyam Trungpa’s examines the vajrayana teachings of the tantric path. The vajrayana, or "diamond vehicle," also referred to as tantra, draws upon and extends the teachings of the hinayana and mahayana. As with the hinayana and the mahayana, the formal acceptance into the vajrayana is marked by a vow, in this case the�� samaya ��vow. There is an emphasis at this stage on the student-teacher relationship and on the quality of devotion. Generally, students must complete preliminary practices, called�� ngöndro , to prepare themselves for initiation into the vajrayana path before going further. Having done so, they then receive the appropriate empowerments to begin tantric practices. There are empowerment ceremonies of many kinds, called�� abhishekas . The vajrayana includes both form practices, such as visualizations and�� sadhanas ��(ritual liturgies), and formless practices based on allowing the mind to rest naturally in its inherent clarity and emptiness. Although on the surface, there is much greater complexity in tantric practices, the principles of mindfulness and awareness and the cultivation of compassion and skillful action continue to be of central importance.��

The tantric path requires complete engagement and fierce dedication. It is said to be a more rapid path, but it is also more dangerous. There is a quality of directness, abruptness, and wholeheartedness.�� Tantrikas , or vajrayana practitioners, recognize that the most challenging aspects of life, the energies and play of confused emotions and frightening obstacles, can be worked with as gateways to freedom and realization. Other topics covered in detail in this volume include the four reminders, the mandala principle, mahamudra, atiyoga, and more.]]> 944 Chögyam Trungpa 1590308042 Ethan 5 4.76 2013
author: Chögyam Trungpa
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.76
book published: 2013
rating: 5
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]]> 15796700 477 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Ethan 5 4.32 2013
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2015/08/19
date added: 2015/08/19
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]]> 20819685
For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.]]> 624 David Mitchell 1400065674 Ethan 3 3.82 2014
author: David Mitchell
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2014
rating: 3
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date added: 2015/04/03
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]]> 49628
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .

Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.

But the story doesn't end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.]]> 509 David Mitchell 0375507256 Ethan 5 4.02 2004
author: David Mitchell
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2004
rating: 5
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]]> 12302843 224 Lodro Rinzler 1590309375 Ethan 5 3.83 2012
author: Lodro Rinzler
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/04/03
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]]> 22237160
Though Vincent van Gogh is one of the most popular painters of all time, we know very little about a ten-month period in the painter's youth when he and his brother, Theo, broke off all contact. In The Season of Migration , Nellie Hermann conjures this period in a profoundly imaginative, original, and heartbreaking vision of Van Gogh's early years, before he became the artist we know today.
In December 1878, Vincent van Gogh arrives in the coal-mining village of Petit Wasmes in the Borinage region of Belgium, a blasted and hopeless landscape of hovels and slag heaps and mining machinery. Not yet the artist he is destined to become, Vincent arrives as an ersatz preacher, barely sanctioned by church authorities but ordained in his own mind and heart by a desperate and mistaken spiritual vocation. But what Vincent experiences in the Borinage will change him. Coming to preach a useless gospel he thought he knew and believed, he learns about love, suffering, and beauty, ultimately coming to see the world anew and finding the divine not in religion but in our fallen human world.
In startlingly beautiful and powerful language, Hermann transforms our understanding of Van Gogh and the redemptive power of art.]]> 244 Nellie Hermann 0374255474 Ethan 5 3.54 2015
author: Nellie Hermann
name: Ethan
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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]]> 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 Ethan 5 4.06 2013
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Ethan
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/04/03
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]]>