Jon's bookshelf: read en-US Tue, 24 Sep 2024 11:21:27 -0700 60 Jon's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[MongoDB Applied Design Patterns]]> 18981956
Many businesses launch NoSQL databases without understanding the techniques for using their features most effectively. This book demonstrates the benefits of document embedding, polymorphic schemas, and other MongoDB patterns for tackling specific big data use cases,

Operational Perform real-time analytics of business data Use MongoDB as a product catalog master or inventory management systemContent Learn methods for storing content nodes, binary assets, and discussionsOnline advertising Apply techniques for frequency capping ad impressions, and keyword targeting and biddingSocial Learn how to store a complex social graph, modeled after Google+Online Provide concurrent access to character and world data for a multiplayer role-playing game]]>
244 Rick Copeland 1449340067 Jon 3 programming, databases 3.70 2013 MongoDB Applied Design Patterns
author: Rick Copeland
name: Jon
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2013/05/16
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: programming, databases
review:

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The Doors of Perception 3188964 The Doors of Perception is a philosophical essay, released as a book, by Aldous Huxley. First published in 1954, it details his experiences when taking mescaline.

The book takes the form of Huxley's recollection of a mescaline trip that took place over the course of an afternoon in May 1953. The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'.

Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.]]>
208 Aldous Huxley Jon 0 to-read 3.91 1956 The Doors of Perception
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Jon
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]]> 17125 The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury

This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.]]>
182 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Jon 0 3.98 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Jon
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/15
shelves: to-read, _wynrkjae, fiction, historical-fiction
review:

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<![CDATA[Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language]]> 248193
Le ton beau de Marot� literally means ”The sweet tone of Marot�, but to a French ear it suggests ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot�. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge.

The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.

Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.

Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , Dante's Inferno, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye , Villon's Ballades, ±·˛ą˛ú´Ç°ě´Ç±ąâ€™s essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.

Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today’s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.

Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.]]>
632 Douglas R. Hofstadter 0465086454 Jon 0 to-read 4.25 1995 Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language
author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
name: Jon
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/06
shelves: to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Homeland (Forgotten Realms: The Dark Elf Trilogy, #1; Legend of Drizzt, #1)]]> 50027 Discover the origin story of one of the greatest heroes of the Realms—Drizzt Do’Urden—in this thrilling first installment of the Dark Elf Trilogy

Drow ranger Drizzt Do’Urden, first introduced in The Icewind Dale Trilogy, quickly became one of the fantasy genre’s standout characters. With Homeland, Salvatore pulls back the curtain to reveal the startling tale of how this hero came to be—how this one lone drow walked out of the shadowy depths of the Underdark; how he left behind an evil society and a family that wanted him dead.

As the third son of Mother Malice and weaponmaster Zaknafein, Drizzt Do’Urden is meant to be sacrificed to Lolth, the evil Spider Queen, per drow tradition. But with the unexpected death of his older brother, young Drizzt is spared—and, as a result, further ostracized by his family. As Drizzt grows older, developing his swordsmanship skills and studying at the Academy, he begins to realize that his idea of good and evil does not match up with those of his fellow drow. Can Drizzt stay true to himself in a such an unforgiving, unprincipled world?

Homeland is the first book in the Dark Elf Trilogy and the Legend of Drizzt series.]]>
343 R.A. Salvatore Jon 0 to-read, fiction, fantasy 4.26 1990 Homeland (Forgotten Realms: The Dark Elf Trilogy, #1; Legend of Drizzt, #1)
author: R.A. Salvatore
name: Jon
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/30
shelves: to-read, fiction, fantasy
review:

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<![CDATA[Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings]]> 870160
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones offers a collection of accessible, primary Zen sources so that readers can contemplate the meaning of Zen for themselves. Within the pages, readers will find:

When Zen Flesh, Zen Bones was published in 1957, it became an instant sensation with an entire generation of readers who were just beginning to experiment with Zen. Over the years it has inspired leading American Zen teachers, students, and practitioners. Its popularity is as high today as ever.]]>
211 Paul Reps 0804831866 Jon 0 to-read, philosophy, buddhism 4.17 1957 Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings
author: Paul Reps
name: Jon
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/25
shelves: to-read, philosophy, buddhism
review:

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Cat's Cradle 876077 191 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0440111498 Jon 0 fiction, literature 4.11 1963 Cat's Cradle
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Jon
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at: 2016/01/01
date added: 2023/07/10
shelves: fiction, literature
review:

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Le Silence de la mer 385185 Le Silence de la mer (1942) est le premier titre à y être publié. Le récit met en scène une famille française qui oppose son silence à l'officier allemand qu'elle a été contrainte de loger, révélant ainsi "la vie sous-marine des sentiments cachés, des désirs et des pensées qui nient et qui luttent". Vercors invitait les Français à refuser l'occupation allemande, la trahison de Pétain et les pièges d'une propagande prônant le mariage des deux peuples, alors qu'elle masquait la barbarie et la servitude. Sa nouvelle fit entrer le livre en guerre, en proposant une voie d'insoumission aux écrivains, et connut un grand retentissement dans le monde.
Les autres écrits, qui accompagnent Le Silence de la mer, ont pour cadre la France occupée par l'Allemagne hitlérienne. Tous invitent l'homme, conscient de ses devoirs, à l'engagement et à la dignité.]]>
189 Vercors 2253003107 Jon 4 3.92 1942 Le Silence de la mer
author: Vercors
name: Jon
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1942
rating: 4
read at: 2015/01/09
date added: 2023/07/08
shelves: historical-fiction, fiction, in-french
review:

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The Kindly Ones 8466951 994 Jonathan Littell Jon 0 4.04 2006 The Kindly Ones
author: Jonathan Littell
name: Jon
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2020/05/15
date added: 2023/06/05
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<![CDATA[The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife]]> 47849
The Middle Passage presents us with an opportunity to reexamine our lives and to ask: "Who am I apart from my history and the roles I have played?" It is an occasion for redefining and reorienting the personality, a necessary rite of passage between the extended adolescence of the first adulthood and our inevitable appointment with old age and mortality.

The Middle Passage addresses the following issues:
How did we acquire our original sense of self? What are the changes that herald the Middle Passage? How does one revision the sense of self? What is the relationship between Jung's concept of individuation and our commitment to others? What attitudes and behavior support individuation and help us move from misery to meaning?

This book shows how we may travel the Middle Passage consciously, thereby rendering our lives more meaningful and the second half of life immeasurably richer.

--back cover]]>
127 James Hollis 0919123600 Jon 0 to-read 4.45 1993 The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife
author: James Hollis
name: Jon
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/02/09
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<![CDATA[Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence]]> 39704874
In her 20 years of clinical experience, Perel has treated hundreds of couples whose home lives are empty of passion. They describe relationships that are open and loving, yet sexually dull. What is going on?

In this explosively original book, Perel explains that our cultural penchant for equality, togetherness, and absolute candor is antithetical to erotic desire for both men and women. Sexual excitement doesn't always play by the rules of good citizenship. It is politically incorrect. It thrives on power plays, unfair advantages, and the space between self and other. More exciting, playful, even poetic sex is possible, but first we must kick egalitarian ideals and emotional housekeeping out of our bedrooms.

While Mating in Captivity shows why the domestic realm can feel like a cage, Perel's take on bedroom dynamics promises to liberate, enchant, and provoke. Flinging the doors open on erotic life and domesticity, she invites us to put the "X" back in sex.

©2006 Esther Perel (P)2006 HarperCollins Publishers]]>
264 Esther Perel Jon 0 to-read 4.29 2006 Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence
author: Esther Perel
name: Jon
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/02/09
shelves: to-read
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Silence 25200 "In my opinion one of the finest novels of our time." - Graham Greene

Shusaku Endo is Japan's foremost novelist, and Silence is generally regarded to be his masterpiece. In a perfect fusion of treatment and theme, this powerful novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the fearful persecution of the small Christian community.]]>
219 Shūsaku Endō 0800871863 Jon 0 to-read 4.11 1966 Silence
author: Shūsaku Endō
name: Jon
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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Little Fires Everywhere 34331079
Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than 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 status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends of the Richardsons 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 unexpected and devastating costs.

Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

Named a Best Book of the Year by: People, The Washington Post, Bustle, Esquire, Southern Living, The Daily Beast, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Audible, Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ, Library Reads, Book of the Month, Paste, Kirkus Reviews, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and many more...

Perfect for book clubs! Visit celesteng.com for discussion guides and more. ]]>
348 Celeste Ng Jon 0 currently-reading 4.23 2017 Little Fires Everywhere
author: Celeste Ng
name: Jon
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/02/09
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics)]]> 20576437

From the Trade Paperback edition.]]>
370 Wallace Stegner Jon 0 4.24 1987 Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics)
author: Wallace Stegner
name: Jon
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at: 2021/10/09
date added: 2021/10/09
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The Ministry for the Future 50998056
From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined.

Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come.

Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us—and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written.]]>
563 Kim Stanley Robinson 0316300136 Jon 0 to-read 3.84 2020 The Ministry for the Future
author: Kim Stanley Robinson
name: Jon
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/10/02
shelves: to-read
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On Beauty 57939765 Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth

Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.]]>
473 Zadie Smith Jon 0 4.00 2005 On Beauty
author: Zadie Smith
name: Jon
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2021/09/17
date added: 2021/09/17
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The Unseen World 32191748 The Unseen World’s heart-stopping, fascinating conclusion.]]> 451 Liz Moore 0393354415 Jon 0 to-read 4.08 2016 The Unseen World
author: Liz Moore
name: Jon
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/09/09
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy]]> 42973186 This thrilling critique of the forces vying for our attention re-defines what we think of as productivity, shows us a new way to connect with our environment, and reveals all that we've been too distracted to see about our selves and our world.

When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as . . . doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process.]]>
225 Jenny Odell 1612197507 Jon 0 currently-reading 3.64 2019 How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
author: Jenny Odell
name: Jon
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/08/23
shelves: currently-reading
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Empire Falls 187020
Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it’s Janine, Miles� soon-to-be ex-wife, who’s taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it’s the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town–and seems to believe that “everything� includes Miles himself. In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace]]>
483 Richard Russo 0375726403 Jon 4 fiction 3.94 2001 Empire Falls
author: Richard Russo
name: Jon
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 4
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date added: 2021/06/26
shelves: fiction
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A State of Freedom 35624689 276 Neel Mukherjee 0393292916 Jon 0 currently-reading 3.87 2018 A State of Freedom
author: Neel Mukherjee
name: Jon
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/06/05
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<![CDATA[Empire Falls (Vintage Contemporaries)]]> 13031504 NATIONAL BESTSELLER â€� PULITZER PRIZE WINNER •ĚýThe bestselling author of Nobody's Fool and Straight Man delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace. “Rich, humorous ... Mr. Russo’s most seductive book thus far.â€� —The New York TimesWelcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned mills whose citizens surround themselves with the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors and who find humor and hope in the most unlikely places, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo. Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it’s Janine, Milesâ€� soon-to-be ex-wife, who’s taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it’s the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town–and seems to believe that “everythingâ€� includes Miles himself.Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.]]> 636 Richard Russo Jon 0 currently-reading 4.19 2001 Empire Falls (Vintage Contemporaries)
author: Richard Russo
name: Jon
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/04/17
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Take What You Can Carry 55513876 An aspiring photographer follows her dreams and faces her fears in a poignant novel about finding beauty, promise, and love amid the chaos of war-torn Kurdistan.

It’s 1979. Olivia Murray, a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper, is determined to become a photojournalist and make a difference with her work. When opportunity arrives, she seizes it, accompanying her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, to northern Iraq for a family wedding, hoping to capture an image that lands her a job in the photo department. More important, though, the trip is a chance to understand Delan’s childhood and bridge the differences of their pasts. Yet when the return home proves less safe than Delan believed, Olivia is confronted with a reality she had not expected, and is awakened to the dangers of a town patrolled by Iraqi military under curfew and constant threat.

But in this world torn apart by war, there are intoxicating sights and scents, Delan’s loving family, innocence not yet compromised, and small acts of kindness that flourish unexpectedly. All of it will be tested when Olivia captures a shattering, tragic moment on film, one that upends all their lives and proves that true bravery begins with an open heart.]]>
337 Gian Sardar 154202241X Jon 0 currently-reading 4.36 2021 Take What You Can Carry
author: Gian Sardar
name: Jon
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/04/04
shelves: currently-reading
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Chances Are . . . 44177960
One beautiful September day, three sixty-six-year-old men convene on Martha's Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties. They couldn't have been more different then, or even today--Lincoln's a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher, and Mickey a musician beyond his rockin' age. But each man holds his own secrets, in addition to the monumental mystery that none of them has ever stopped puzzling over since a Memorial Day weekend right here on the Vineyard in 1971. Now, forty-four years later, as this new weekend unfolds, three lives and that of a significant other are displayed in their entirety while the distant past confounds the present like a relentless squall of surprise and discovery. Shot through with Russo's trademark comedy and humanity, Chances Are . . . also introduces a new level of suspense and menace that will quicken the reader's heartbeat throughout this absorbing saga of how friendship's bonds are every bit as constricting and rewarding as those of family or any other community.
ĚýĚýĚýĚý For both longtime fans and lucky newcomers, Chances Are . . . is a stunning demonstration of a highly acclaimed author deepening and expanding his remarkable achievement.]]>
320 Richard Russo Jon 0 3.98 Chances Are . . .
author: Richard Russo
name: Jon
average rating: 3.98
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Tenth of December 39712929 One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet.

In the taut opener, “Victory Lap,� a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In “Home,� a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is. A hapless, deluded owner of an antiques store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.

Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.

Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov’s dictum that art should “prepare us for tenderness.”]]>
271 George Saunders Jon 0 currently-reading 4.00 2013 Tenth of December
author: George Saunders
name: Jon
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/03/15
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West With Giraffes 56449476 An emotional, rousing novel inspired by the incredible true story of two giraffes who made headlines and won the hearts of Depression-era America.

“Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes…�

Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave.

It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world’s first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes.

Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it’s too late.]]>
346 Lynda Rutledge 1542023351 Jon 0 4.34 2021 West With Giraffes
author: Lynda Rutledge
name: Jon
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2021/03/11
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The Ardent Swarm 56449198
Sidi lives a hermetic life as a bee whisperer, tending to his beloved “girls� on the outskirts of the desolate North African village of Nawa. He wakes one morning to find that something has attacked one of his beehives, brutally killing every inhabitant. Heartbroken, he soon learns that a mysterious swarm of vicious hornets committed the mass murder—but where did they come from, and how can he stop them? If he is going to unravel this mystery and save his bees from annihilation, Sidi must venture out into the village and then brave the big city and beyond in search of answers.

Along the way, he discovers a country and a people turned upside down by their new post–Arab Spring reality as Islamic fundamentalists seek to influence votes any way they can on the eve of the country’s first democratic elections. To succeed in his quest, and find a glimmer of hope to protect all that he holds dear, Sidi will have to look further than he ever imagined.

In this brilliantly accessible modern-day parable, Yamen Manai uses a masterful blend of humor and drama to reveal what happens in a country shaken by revolutionary change after the world stops watching.]]>
174 Yamen Manai 1542020468 Jon 0 4.10 2017 The Ardent Swarm
author: Yamen Manai
name: Jon
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/03/01
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Jesus' Son 17258177 American master Denis Johnson's nationally bestselling collection of blistering and indelible tales about America's outcasts and wanderers

Denis Johnson's now classic story collection Jesus' Son chronicles a wild netherworld of addicts and lost souls, a violent and disordered landscape that encompasses every extreme of American culture. These are stories of transcendence and spiraling grief, of hallucinations and glories, of getting lost and found and lost again. The insights and careening energy in Jesus' Son have earned the book a place of its own among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.]]>
144 Denis Johnson Jon 0 currently-reading 4.12 1992 Jesus' Son
author: Denis Johnson
name: Jon
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/02/28
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<![CDATA[Uphill Athlete: Training für Skibergsteiger und Bergläufer]]> 51105861 Ob der Marathon auf dem Mount Everest oder das Skitourrennen auf dem Marmoladagletscher in den Dolomiten � profitieren auch Sie von dem großen Erfahrungsschatz der besten Bergsportathleten.]]> 384 Steve House 3745306694 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.62 2019 Uphill Athlete: Training für Skibergsteiger und Bergläufer
author: Steve House
name: Jon
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/02/26
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<![CDATA[Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life]]> 8117684 "A warm, generous and hilarious guide through the writer's world and its treacherous swamps." �Los Angeles Times

Advice on writing and on life from an acclaimed bestselling

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at ourĚýĚýfamily cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.']]>
272 Anne Lamott 0307424987 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.35 1994 Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
author: Anne Lamott
name: Jon
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/02/22
shelves: currently-reading
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Manhattan Beach 48675062
‎Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that once belonged to men, now soldiers abroad. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.

With the atmosphere of a noir thriller, Egan’s first historical novel follows Anna and Styles into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men. Manhattan Beach is a deft, dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world.]]>
449 Jennifer Egan Jon 0 currently-reading 3.87 2017 Manhattan Beach
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Jon
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/02/15
shelves: currently-reading
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The Snow Leopard 21953205
In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by acclaimed travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer.]]>
367 Peter Matthiessen 1101663189 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.15 1978 The Snow Leopard
author: Peter Matthiessen
name: Jon
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/02/13
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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A Visit from the Goon Squad 8519525 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
A New York Times Book Review Best Book

One of the Best Books of the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Newsday, NPR's On Point, O, the Oprah Magazine, People, Publishers Weekly, Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Slate, Time, The Washington Post, and Village Voice

Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.




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337 Jennifer Egan Jon 0 3.75 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Jon
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2021/02/13
date added: 2021/02/13
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<![CDATA[The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (D.O.D.O. #1)]]> 32075463
When Melisande Stokes, an expert in linguistics and languages, accidently meets military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons in a hallway at Harvard University, it is the beginning of a chain of events that will alter their lives and human history itself. The young man from a shadowy government entity approaches Mel, a low-level faculty member, with an incredible offer. The only condition: she must sign a nondisclosure agreement in return for the rather large sum of money.

Tristan needs Mel to translate some very old documents, which, if authentic, are earth-shattering. They prove that magic actually existed and was practiced for centuries. But the arrival of the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment weakened its power and endangered its practitioners. Magic stopped working altogether in 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace—the world’s fair celebrating the rise of industrial technology and commerce. Something about the modern world "jams" the "frequencies" used by magic, and it’s up to Tristan to find out why.

And so the Department of Diachronic Operations—D.O.D.O. —gets cracking on its real mission: to develop a device that can bring magic back, and send Diachronic Operatives back in time to keep it alive . . . and meddle with a little history at the same time. But while Tristan and his expanding operation master the science and build the technology, they overlook the mercurial—and treacherous—nature of the human heart.

Written with the genius, complexity, and innovation that characterize all of Neal Stephenson’s work and steeped with the down-to-earth warmth and humor of Nicole Galland’s storytelling style, this exciting and vividly realized work of science fiction will make you believe in the impossible, and take you to places—and times—beyond imagining.]]>
769 Neal Stephenson Jon 0 4.01 2017 The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (D.O.D.O. #1)
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Jon
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2021/01/22
date added: 2021/01/22
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Paula 22011835 The New York Times Cualquier libro de Isabel Allende es un acontecimiento. Paula lo es especialmente porque se trata del más conmovedor, más personal y más íntimo de todos los que ha publicado hasta la fecha. Cuando la gran autora chilena se encontraba en España con ocasión de la presentación de El plan infinito , su hija entró en estado de coma. Junto al lecho de Paula, mientras seguía con angustia la evolución de su enfermedad, Isabel Allende comenzó a redactar en un cuaderno una historia de su familia y de sí misma con el propósito de regalársela a su hija una vez superara el dramático trance. Sin embargo, éste se prolongó durante meses y los apuntes de la autora acabaron convirtiéndose en este libro apasionante y revelador. Isabel Allende ejerce aquí su prodigioso talento narrativo para recuperar y asumir sus propias vivencias como mujer y como escritora, así como las de su familia y las de la historia reciente de su país. Autorretrato de insólita emotividad al tiempo que exquisita recreación de la sensibilidad de las mujeres de nuestra época, Paula perdura en el ánimo del lector con la intensidad de una experiencia indeleble.]]> 368 Isabel Allende 8401342686 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.56 1994 Paula
author: Isabel Allende
name: Jon
average rating: 4.56
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[The Auld Doctor and Other Poems and Songs in Scots]]> 12772760 48 David Rorie Jon 0 to-read, poetry, in-scots This should be fun.. :) 4.00 2006 The Auld Doctor and Other Poems and Songs in Scots
author: David Rorie
name: Jon
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/01
shelves: to-read, poetry, in-scots
review:
This should be fun.. :)
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<![CDATA[Subpersonalities: The People Inside Us]]> 603535 256 John Rowan 0415043298 Jon 0 3.76 1989 Subpersonalities: The People Inside Us
author: John Rowan
name: Jon
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/12/12
shelves: to-read, psychology, psychotherapy, personality-theory, psychosynthesis
review:

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<![CDATA[Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy #1)]]> 55710853 A Brief History of Seven Killings: an African Game of Thrones.

In the stunning first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.]]>
637 Marlon James Jon 0 currently-reading 3.54 2019 Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy #1)
author: Marlon James
name: Jon
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/11/24
shelves: currently-reading
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Embassytown 19755140
In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak. Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language. When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak—but which speaks through her, whether she likes it or not.

Praise for Embassytown

“A breakneck tale of suspense . . . disturbing and beautiful by turns. I cannot emphasize enough how terrific this novel is. It's definitely one of the best books I've read in the past year, perfectly balanced between escapism and otherworldly philosophizing.� —io9

â€� Embassytown Ěýis a fully achieved work of art. . . . Works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigour and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and even the old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a protagonist become more of a person than she gave promise of being.â€� —Ursula K Le Guin

Ěý“The Kafkaesque writer journeys to the distant edges of the universe in his latest sci-fi thriller.â€� —Entertainment Weekly

“Utterly astonishing . . . A major intellectual achievement.� —Kirkus Reviews

“Brilliant storytelling . . . The result is a world masterfully wrecked and rebuilt.â€� —P ublishers Weekly Ěý(starred review)]]>
369 China Miéville Jon 0 4.00 2011 Embassytown
author: China Miéville
name: Jon
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/11/21
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A Little Life 39100683
In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.

Source: penguinrandomhouse.com]]>
951 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539266 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.29 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Jon
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/11/09
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity]]> 8243164 Part of the Jewish Encounter seriesIn 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty–three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza’s progeny.In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition� s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe� s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism.Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero—a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.]]> 306 Rebecca Goldstein 0805242732 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.21 2006 Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity
author: Rebecca Goldstein
name: Jon
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/11/03
shelves: currently-reading
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The Dutch House 44569767 The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.

Set over the course of five decades,ĚýThe Dutch HouseĚýis a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

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353 Ann Patchett 0062963694 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.25 2019 The Dutch House
author: Ann Patchett
name: Jon
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/31
shelves: currently-reading
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The Only Woman in the Room 40785754 She possessed a stunning beauty. She also possessed a stunning mind. Could the world handle both?

Her beauty almost certainly saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated in everything else, she overheard the Third Reich's plans while at her husband's side, understanding more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, and the whirlwind escape landed her in Hollywood. She became Hedy Lamarr, screen star.

But she kept a secret more shocking than her heritage or her marriage: she was a scientist. And she knew a few secrets about the enemy. She had an idea that might help the country fight the Nazis...if anyone would listen to her.

A powerful novel based on the incredible true story of the glamour icon and scientist whose groundbreaking invention revolutionized modern communication, The Only Woman in the Room is a masterpiece.

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320 Marie Benedict 1492666874 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.11 2019 The Only Woman in the Room
author: Marie Benedict
name: Jon
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/28
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery]]> 30753888 Join over 1 million other readers worldwide on a journey of spiritual growth and self-awareness.

What you don't know about yourself can hurt you and your relationships—and even keep you in the shallows with God. Do you want help figuring out who you are and why you're stuck in the same ruts?

The Enneagram is an ancient personality typing system with an uncanny accuracy in describing how human beings are wired, both positively and negatively. In The Road Back to You Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile forge a unique approach—a practical, comprehensive way of accessing Enneagram wisdom and exploring its connections with Christian spirituality for a deeper knowledge of ourselves, compassion for others, and love for God.

Witty and filled with stories, this book allows you to peek inside each of the nine Enneagram types, keeping you turning the pages long after you have read the chapter about your own number. Not only will you learn more about yourself, but you will also start to see the world through other people's eyes, understanding how and why people think, feel, and act the way they do.

To guide your first steps into your self-awareness journey, The Road Back to You

Introductions to each Enneagram typeQuestions to help you identify your numberChanges you can make today to pursue deeper self-awarenessDigestible windows into the other types, helping you see others with more compassion and empathyThe wisdom of the Enneagram can help take you further along into who you really are—leading you into places of spiritual discovery you would never have found on your own, and paving the way to the wiser, more compassionate person you want to become.]]>
229 Ian Morgan Cron Jon 0 currently-reading 4.28 2016 The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery
author: Ian Morgan Cron
name: Jon
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/26
shelves: currently-reading
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The Weight of Ink 40776163 An intellectual and emotional jigsaw puzzle of a novel for readers ofĚýA. S. Byatt’s Possession and Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book.

Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, anĚýemigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history.Ěý Ěý

As the novel opens, Helen has been summoned by a former student to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation. Enlisting the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and in a race with another fast-moving team of historians, Helen embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documentsâ€� scribe, the elusiveĚý“Aleph.”ĚýĚýĚ�

Electrifying and ambitious, sweeping in scope and intimate in tone, The Weight of Ink is a sophisticatedĚýwork of historical fiction about women separated by centuries, and the choices and sacrifices they must makeĚýin orderĚýreconcile the life of the heart and mind.]]>
704 Rachel Kadish Jon 5
Absolutely worth a reread to explore all of these themes more deeply and discover the ones I missed. Such a wonderfully deep book � and also a superb quarantine escape hatch :)]]>
4.12 2017 The Weight of Ink
author: Rachel Kadish
name: Jon
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2020/10/18
date added: 2020/10/18
shelves: historical-fiction, britain, to-reread
review:
A captivating plot spanning centuries, with psychologically deep characters and an impressively broad array of well-developed themes: love and human connection across cultures and faiths, the limitations and biases of historical research, the overpowering pull of tradition and heritage in life, and the frequently ill-fated attempt of youth to escape that pull.

Absolutely worth a reread to explore all of these themes more deeply and discover the ones I missed. Such a wonderfully deep book � and also a superb quarantine escape hatch :)
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<![CDATA[Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Pulitzer Prize Winner)]]> 18918254 689 J. Anthony Lukas 030782375X Jon 0 currently-reading 4.44 1985 Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
author: J. Anthony Lukas
name: Jon
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/15
shelves: currently-reading
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The Moral Order of a Suburb 661246 rapid growth in America, promises to be the moral order of the future. A valuable contribution to the literature on social control, this study of conflict management should attract general readers and scholars alike.]]> 192 M.P. Baumgartner 0195069951 Jon 0 to-read, sociology, history 3.82 1988 The Moral Order of a Suburb
author: M.P. Baumgartner
name: Jon
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/07
shelves: to-read, sociology, history
review:

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<![CDATA[Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston's South End]]> 26867406 288 Sylvie Tissot 1781689490 Jon 0 3.25 2015 Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston's South End
author: Sylvie Tissot
name: Jon
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2020/10/06
date added: 2020/10/06
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<![CDATA[Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In]]> 8527130 The key text on problem-solving negotiation-updated and revised

Getting to Yes has helped millions of people learn a better way to negotiate. One of the primary business texts of the modern era, it is based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deals with all levels of negotiation and conflict resolution.

Getting to Yes offers a proven, step-by-step strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict. Thoroughly updated and revised, it offers readers a straight- forward, universally applicable method for negotiating personal and professional disputes without getting angry-or getting taken.]]>
204 Roger Fisher 0143118757 Jon 0 3.89 1981 Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
author: Roger Fisher
name: Jon
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/09/16
shelves: _metafilter-superpower, life-toolbox, programming-career, currently-reading
review:

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The Left Hand of Darkness 25837084 Ursula K. Le Guin's groundbreaking work of science fiction—winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

A lone human ambassador is sent to Winter, an alien world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants can change their gender whenever they choose. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.]]>
320 Ursula K. Le Guin Jon 0 4.14 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Jon
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at: 2020/09/15
date added: 2020/09/15
shelves: science-fiction, _marginal-revolution
review:

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<![CDATA[The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution]]> 11663595
Francis Fukuyama, author of the bestselling The End of History and the Last Man and one of our most important political thinkers, provides a sweeping account of how today’s basic political institutions developed. The first of a major two-volume work, The Origins of Political Order begins with politics among our primate ancestors and follows the story through the emergence of tribal societies, the growth of the first modern state in China, the beginning of the rule of law in India and the Middle East, and the development of political accountability in Europe up until the eve of the French Revolution.

Drawing on a vast body of knowledge—history, evolutionary biology, archaeology, and economics—Fukuyama has produced a brilliant, provocative work that offers fresh insights on the origins of democratic societies and raises essential questions about the nature of politics and its discontents.]]>
620 Francis Fukuyama 1429958936 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.33 2011 The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
author: Francis Fukuyama
name: Jon
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/08/30
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)]]> 39978195 559 Hilary Mantel Jon 0 3.97 2009 Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Jon
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/08/09
shelves: fiction, historical-fiction, currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century]]> 18892690 Ěý
Wealth and Power answers this question by examining the lives of eleven influential officials, writers, activists, and leaders whose contributions helped create modern China. This fascinating survey begins in the lead-up to the first Opium War with Wei Yuan, the nineteenth-century scholar and reformer who was one of the first to urge China to borrow ideas from the West. It concludes in our time with human-rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, an outspoken opponent of single-party rule. Along the way, we meet such titans of Chinese history as the Empress Dowager Cixi, public intellectuals Feng Guifen, Liang Qichao, and Chen Duxiu, Nationalist stalwarts Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, and Communist Party leaders Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhu Rongji.
Ěý
The common goal that unites all of these disparate figures is their determined pursuit of fuqiang,Ěý“wealth and power.â€� This abiding quest for a restoration of national greatness in the face of a “century of humiliationâ€� at the hands of the Great Powers came to define the modern Chinese character. It’s what drove both Mao and Deng to embark on root-and-branch transformations of Chinese society, first by means of Marxism-Leninism, then by authoritarian capitalism. And this determined quest remains the key to understanding many of China’s actions today.
Ěý
By unwrapping the intellectual antecedents of today’s resurgent China, Orville Schell and John Delury supply much-needed insight into the country’s tortured progression from nineteenth-century decline to twenty-first-century boom. By looking backward into the past to understand forces at work for hundreds of years, they help us understand China today and the future that this singular country is helping shape for all of us.
Ěý
Advance praise for Wealth and Power
Ěý
�Wealth and Power offers everything readers might expect from its two eminent authors. The hardest challenge in writing about China, or finding things to read about it, is perceiving significant patterns while remaining aware of the chaos and contradictions. Orville Schell and John Delury meet that challenge in exemplary form.�—James Fallows, national correspondent, The Atlantic
Ěý
“A brilliantly original and essential book . . . It is required reading for anyone seeking to understand China’s motives and the future of global competition, and is, quite simply, a pleasure to read. Vivid, literate, and brimming with insights, Wealth and Power deserves to become a classic.�—Evan Osnos, China correspondent, The New Yorker
Ěý
â€Ŕá˛Ô Wealth and Power, Schell and Delury present us with the historical background to understand the driving mechanism that lies at the center of China today. By no longer presenting China’s past two centuries as a record of recurrent failures, they give us a portrait of a nation in the making, and of leaders with the skills and determination to redirect China’s energies on a global scale.â€�—Jonathan D. Spence, author of The Search for Modern China


From the Hardcover edition.]]>
643 Orville Schell 0679645381 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.31 2013 Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century
author: Orville Schell
name: Jon
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/07/19
shelves: currently-reading
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Pride and Prejudice 1885 Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work "her own darling child" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679783268]]>
279 Jane Austen 1441341706 Jon 4 fiction, currently-reading 4.28 1813 Pride and Prejudice
author: Jane Austen
name: Jon
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1813
rating: 4
read at: 2016/07/03
date added: 2020/07/12
shelves: fiction, currently-reading
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Dictator 25602111 Imperium...Conspirata...and now, the long-awaited final volume of the author's best-selling Cicero trilogy.

With ĚýDictator,ĚýRobert Harris brings the saga of Cicero's life to a time when some of the most epic events in human history occurred: the collapse of the Roman republic, the subsequent civil war, the murder of Pompey and the assassination of Julius Caesar. Yet the question it asks is a timeless one: how is political freedom to be safeguarded against the triple threat of unscrupulous personal ambition, of an electoral system dominated by vested financial interests, and of the corrupting impact of waging ceaseless foreign wars? And in the very human figure of Cicero--brilliant, flawed, frequently fearful, and yet ultimately brave--Harris gives us a hero for both his own time, and for ours.]]>
416 Robert Harris Jon 0 4.61 2015 Dictator
author: Robert Harris
name: Jon
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2020/07/10
date added: 2020/07/10
shelves:
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Song of Solomon 6582898 354 Toni Morrison Jon 0 currently-reading 4.33 1977 Song of Solomon
author: Toni Morrison
name: Jon
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/06/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Conspirata (Cicero, #2) 8141518 Fatherland and Enigma, comes the second novel in his trilogy about Cicero and Rome, Conspirata.]]> 403 Robert Harris 1439199825 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.32 2009 Conspirata (Cicero, #2)
author: Robert Harris
name: Jon
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/06/15
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States]]> 34324534 Ěý
“History as it should be written.”—Barry Cunliffe, Guardian
Ěý
“Scott hits the nail squarely on the head by exposing the staggering price our ancestors paid for civilization and political order.”—Walter Scheidel, Financial Times
Ěý
Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today’s states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family—all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction.
Ěý
Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the “barbarians� who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.]]>
312 James C. Scott 0300182910 Jon 0 to-read, history, politics 4.12 2017 Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
author: James C. Scott
name: Jon
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/06/04
shelves: to-read, history, politics
review:

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Philosophy and Social Hope 18922679 309 Richard Rorty 0141946113 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.28 1999 Philosophy and Social Hope
author: Richard Rorty
name: Jon
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/06/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[Dissolution (Matthew Shardlake, #1)]]> 8141315 The first novel in the Matthew Shardlake Tudor Mystery series—soon to be an original streaming series!Dissolution is an utterly riveting portrayal of Tudor England. The year is 1537, and the country is divided between those faithful to the Catholic Church and those loyal to the king and the newly established Church of England. When a royal commissioner is brutally murdered in a monastery on the south coast of England, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s feared vicar general, summons fellow reformer Matthew Shardlake to lead the inquiry. Shardlake and his young protégé uncover evidence of sexual misconduct, embezzlement, and treason, and when two other murders are revealed, they must move quickly to prevent the killer from striking again.A “remarkable debut� (P. D. James), Dissolution introduces a thrilling historical series that is not to be missed by fans of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.Awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger � the highest honor in British crime writing]]> 482 C.J. Sansom 1440650160 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.20 2003 Dissolution (Matthew Shardlake, #1)
author: C.J. Sansom
name: Jon
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/05/31
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes]]> 49644992 A page-turning biography of world-changing economist John Maynard Keynes and the big ideas that outlived him.

In the spring of 1934, Virginia Woolf sketched an affectionate biographical portrait of her great friend John Maynard Keynes. Writing a full two years before Keynes would revolutionize the economics world with the publication of The General Theory, Woolf nevertheless found herself unable to condense her friend's already-extraordinary life into anything less than twenty-five themes, which she jotted down at the opening of her homage: "Politics. Art. Dancing. Letters. Economics. Youth. The Future. Glands. Genealogies. Atlantis. Mortality. Religion. Cambridge. Eton. The Drama. Society. Truth. Pigs. Sussex. The History of England. America. Optimism. Stammer. Old Books. Hume."

Keynes was not only an economist, as he is remembered today, but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, a man who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. A moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes immersed himself in a creative milieu filled with ballerinas and literary icons as he developed his own innovative and at times radical thought, reinventing Enlightenment liberalism for the harrowing crises of his day--which included two world wars and an economic collapse that challenged the legitimacy of democratic government itself. The Price of Peace follows Keynes from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London's riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, through stock market crashes and currency crises to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire and wartime ballet openings at Covent Garden.

In this riveting biography, veteran journalist Zachary D. Carter unearths the lost legacy of one of history's most important minds. John Maynard Keynes's vibrant, deeply human vision of democracy, art, and the good life has been obscured by technical debates, but in The Price of Peace, Carter revives a forgotten set of ideas with the power to reinvent national government and reframe the principles of international diplomacy in our own time.]]>
656 Zachary D. Carter 0525509038 Jon 0 4.39 2020 The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
author: Zachary D. Carter
name: Jon
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/05/29
shelves: to-read, biographies, economics
review:

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Midnight's Children 9124721 Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Winner of the Booker of Bookers

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,â€� all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.Ěý

This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight’s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.
--randomhousebooks.com]]>
674 Salman Rushdie 0307744116 Jon 0 currently-reading 3.92 1981 Midnight's Children
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Jon
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/05/25
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[The Gilded Hour (Waverly Place #1)]]> 24784031 The year is 1883, and in New York City, it’s a time of dizzying splendor, crushing poverty, and tremendous change. With the gravity-defying Brooklyn Bridge nearly complete and New York in the grips of anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, Anna Savard and her cousin Sophie—both graduates of the Woman’s Medical School—treat the city’s most vulnerable, even if doing so may put everything they’ve strived for in jeopardy.

Anna's workĚýhas placed her in the path of four children who have lost everything, just as she herself once had. Faced with their helplessness, Anna must make an unexpected choice between holding on to the pain of her past and letting love into her life.

For Sophie, an obstetrician and the orphaned daughter of free people of color, helping a desperate young mother forces her to grapple with the oath she took as a doctor—and thrusts her and Anna into the orbit of Anthony Comstock, a dangerous man who considers himself the enemy of everything indecent and of anyone who dares to defy him.

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934 Sara Donati 0698140672 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.34 2015 The Gilded Hour (Waverly Place #1)
author: Sara Donati
name: Jon
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/05/25
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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Lincoln in the Bardo 30254065 Lincoln in the BardoĚýis a literary experience unlike any other—for no one but Saunders could conceive it.

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,� the president says at the time. “God has called him home.� Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo
Ěýis an astonishingĚýfeat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical and invented—to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when weĚýknow that everything we love must end?

Praise for George Saunders
Ěý
“No one writes more powerfully than George Saunders.�—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Ěý
“Saunders makes you feel as though you are reading fiction for the first time.�—Khaled Hosseini
Ěý
“George Saunders is a complete original. There is no one better, no one more essential to our national sense of self and sanity.�—Dave Eggers
Ěý
“Few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does.�—Junot Díaz

“Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.�—Zadie Smith
Ěý
“George Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We’re lucky to have him.�—Jonathan Franzen
Ěý
“An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.�—Thomas Pynchon]]>
368 George Saunders Jon 5
A grieving Abraham Lincoln mourns the loss of his son and the loss of Union sons, and resolves to destroy those other sons as fast as he possibly can.

A thousand souls living just past the edge of life, removed from time, mourning the passage of time.

Centuries of supplicants queue before a dead boy and his father, lost in egotistical rants and craving to finish what they never could have faced in their past lives.

and everyone waits for a visit from the people who long ago stopped visiting.

"Some bandy-legged dog proudly back-ploughs the grass to cover its modest shit; a Cloud-Mass down-valley breaks apart over the course of a brandy-deepened hour; louvered blinds yield dusty beneath your dragging finger, and it is nearly noon and you must decide; you have seen what you have seen, and it has wounded you, and it seems you only have one choice left.
... None of it was real; nothing was real.
Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely clear.
These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth.
And now we must lose them."

If it matters, the writing is excellent and the form is unique. Five stars.]]>
3.75 2017 Lincoln in the Bardo
author: George Saunders
name: Jon
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2020/05/25
date added: 2020/05/25
shelves:
review:
People die. George Saunders will bravely remind you of this fact, and force you to face the consequences. Life is meaningless, or perhaps life is precious. The paradoxes posed by this book will weigh on me for a while yet.

A grieving Abraham Lincoln mourns the loss of his son and the loss of Union sons, and resolves to destroy those other sons as fast as he possibly can.

A thousand souls living just past the edge of life, removed from time, mourning the passage of time.

Centuries of supplicants queue before a dead boy and his father, lost in egotistical rants and craving to finish what they never could have faced in their past lives.

and everyone waits for a visit from the people who long ago stopped visiting.

"Some bandy-legged dog proudly back-ploughs the grass to cover its modest shit; a Cloud-Mass down-valley breaks apart over the course of a brandy-deepened hour; louvered blinds yield dusty beneath your dragging finger, and it is nearly noon and you must decide; you have seen what you have seen, and it has wounded you, and it seems you only have one choice left.
... None of it was real; nothing was real.
Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely clear.
These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth.
And now we must lose them."

If it matters, the writing is excellent and the form is unique. Five stars.
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The Third Secret 51113813 The Columbus Affair.

Explosive in both its pace and its revelations, The Third Secret is a remarkable international thriller. Bestselling author Steve Berry tackles some of the most controversial ideas of our time in a breakneck journey through the history of the Church and the future of religion.

Fatima, Portugal, 1917: The Virgin Mary appears to three peasant children, sharing with them three secrets, two of which are soon revealed to the world. The third secret is sealed away in the Vatican, read only by popes, and not disclosed until the year 2000. When revealed, its quizzical tone and anticlimactic nature leave many faithful wondering if the Church has truly unveiled all of the Virgin Mary’s words–or if a message far more important has been left in the shadows.

Vatican City, present day: Papal secretary Father Colin Michener is concerned for the Pope. Night after restless night, Pope Clement XV enters the Vatican’s Riserva, the special archive open only to popes, where the Church’s most clandestine and controversial documents are stored. Though unsure of the details, Michener knows that the Pope� s distress stems from the revelations of Fatima.

Equally concerned, but not out of any sense of compassion, is Alberto Cardinal Valendrea, the Vatican’s Secretary of State,. Valendrea desperately covets the papacy, having narrowly lost out to Clement at the last conclave. Now the Pope’s interest in Fatima threatens to uncover a shocking ancient truth that Valendrea has kept to himself for many years.

When Pope Clement sends Michener to the Romanian highlands, then to a Bosnian holy site, in search of a priest–possibly one of the last people on Earth who knows Mary’s true message� a perilous set of events unfolds. Michener finds himself embroiled in murder, suspicion, suicide, deceit, and his forbidden passion for a beloved woman. In a desperate search for answers, he travels to Pope Clement’s birthplace in Germany, where he learns that the third secret of Fatima may dictate the very fate of the Church–a fate now lying in Michener’s own hands.]]>
400 Steve Berry Jon 0 currently-reading 4.32 2005 The Third Secret
author: Steve Berry
name: Jon
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/05/19
shelves: currently-reading
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The Sense of an Ending 38313161 Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize

A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes' oeuvre.

This intense novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about � until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.]]>
162 Julian Barnes Jon 0 currently-reading 3.84 2011 The Sense of an Ending
author: Julian Barnes
name: Jon
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/05/10
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[Proteinaholic: How Our Obsession with Meat Is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It]]> 25765140
Whether you are seeing a doctor, nutritionist, or a trainer, all of them advise to eat more protein. Foods, drinks, and supplements are loaded with extra protein. Many people use protein for weight control, to gain or lose pounds, while others believe it gives them more energy and is essential for a longer, healthier life. Now, Dr. Garth Davis, an expert in weight loss asks, “Is all this protein making us healthier?�

The answer, he emphatically argues, is NO. Too much protein is actually making us sick, fat, and tired, according to Dr. Davis. If you are getting adequate calories in your diet, there is no such thing as protein deficiency. The healthiest countries in the world eat far less protein than we do and yet we have an entire nation on a protein binge getting sicker by the day.

As a surgeon treating obese patients, Dr. Davis was frustrated by the ever-increasing number of sick and overweight patients, but it wasn't until his own health scare that he realized he could do something about it. Combining cutting-edge research, with his hands-on patient experience and his years dedicated to analyzing studies of the world’s longest-lived populations, this explosive, groundbreaking book reveals the truth about the dangers of protein and shares a proven approach to weight loss, health, and longevity.]]>
381 Garth Davis Jon 0 currently-reading 4.44 2015 Proteinaholic: How Our Obsession with Meat Is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It
author: Garth Davis
name: Jon
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/03/17
shelves: currently-reading
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Enchiridion 24615 64 Epictetus 0486433595 Jon 4 philosophy, stoicism 4.20 125 Enchiridion
author: Epictetus
name: Jon
average rating: 4.20
book published: 125
rating: 4
read at: 2012/06/26
date added: 2020/02/23
shelves: philosophy, stoicism
review:

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<![CDATA[Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?]]> 33814857 389 Graham Allison 0544935330 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.36 2017 Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
author: Graham Allison
name: Jon
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/02/15
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts]]> 23878688 Over 20 million copies sold!

A perennial New York Times bestseller for over a decade!

Falling in love is easy. Staying in love—that’s the challenge. How can you keep your relationship fresh and growing amid the demands, conflicts, and just plain boredom of everyday life?

In the #1 New York Times international bestseller The 5 Love Languages®, you’ll discover the secret that has transformed millions of relationships worldwide. Whether your relationship is flourishing or failing, Dr. Gary Chapman’s proven approach to showing and receiving love will help you experience deeper and richer levels of intimacy with your partner—starting today.

The 5 Love Languages® is as practical as it is insightful. Updated to reflect the complexities of relationships today, this new edition reveals intrinsic truths and applies relevant, actionable wisdom in ways that work.

Includes the Love Language assessment so you can discover your love language and that of your loved one.]]>
232 Gary Chapman 0802492401 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.32 1990 The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts
author: Gary Chapman
name: Jon
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/02/08
shelves: currently-reading
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Pompeii 6625051 BESTSELLER - "Terrific... gripping... A literally shattering climax." -- The New York Times Book ReviewĚýAll along the Mediterranean coast, the Roman empire’s richest citizens are relaxing in their luxurious villas, enjoying the last days of summer. The world’s largest navy lies peacefully at anchor in Misenum. The tourists are spending their money in the seaside resorts of Baiae, Herculaneum, and Pompeii. But the carefree lifestyle and gorgeous weather belie an impending cataclysm, and only one man is worried. The young engineer Marcus Attilius Primus has just taken charge of the Aqua Augusta, the enormous aqueduct that brings fresh water to a quarter of a million people in nine towns around the Bay of Naples. His predecessor has disappeared. Springs are failing for the firstĚýtime in generations. And now there is a crisis on the Augustaâ€� s sixty-mile main line—somewhere to the north of Pompeii, on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Attilius—decent, practical, and incorruptible—promises Pliny, the famous scholar who commands the navy, that he can repair the aqueduct before the reservoir runs dry. His plan is to travel to Pompeii and put together an expedition, then head out to the place where he believes the fault lies. But Pompeii proves to be a corrupt and violent town, and Attilius soon discovers that there are powerful forces at work—both natural and man-made—threatening to destroy him. With his trademark elegance and intelligence, Robert Harris, bestselling author of Archangel and Fatherland, re-creates a world on the brink of disaster.]]> 368 Robert Harris 1588363937 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.17 2003 Pompeii
author: Robert Harris
name: Jon
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/02/07
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[The Annotated Hobbit: The Hobbit, or, There and back again]]> 823754 The Hobbit serves as an introduction to the enchanting world of Middle-earth, home of elves, wizards, dwarves, goblins, dragons, orcs and a host of other creatures depicted in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion -- tales that sprang from the mind of the most beloved author of all time, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Newly expanded and completely redesigned, Douglas A. Anderson's The Annotated Hobbit is the definitive explication of the sources, characters, places, and things of J.R.R. Tolkien's timeless classic. Integrated with Anderson's notes and placed alongside the fully restored and corrected text of the original story are more than 150 illustrations showing visual interpretations of The Hobbit specific to many of the cultures that have come to know and love Tolkien's Middle-earth. Tolkien's original line drawings, maps and color paintings are also included, making this the most lavishly informative edition of The Hobbit available.

The Annotated Hobbit shows how Tolkien worked as a writer, what his influences and interests were, and how these relate to the invented world of Middle-earth. It gives a valuable overview of Tolkien's life and the publishing history of The Hobbit, and explains how every feature of The Hobbit fits within the rest of Tolkien's invented world. Here we learn how Gollum's character was revised to accommodate the true nature of the One Ring, and we can read the full text of The Quest of Erebor, Gandalf's explanation of how he came to send Bilbo Baggins on his journey with the dwarves. Anderson also makes meaningful and often surprising connections to our own world and literary history -- from Beowulf to The Marvellous Land of Snergs, from the Brothers Grimm to C. S. Lewis.]]>
399 J.R.R. Tolkien Jon 0 to-read, fiction, fantasy 4.53 1937 The Annotated Hobbit: The Hobbit, or, There and back again
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Jon
average rating: 4.53
book published: 1937
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/02/01
shelves: to-read, fiction, fantasy
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Munich 35575615 From the internationally best-selling author of Fatherland and the Cicero Trilogy--a new spy thriller about treason and conscience, loyalty and betrayal, set against the backdrop of the fateful Munich Conference of September, 1938.

Guy Legat is a rising star of the British diplomatic service, serving in 10 Downing Street as a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Rikard von Holz is on the staff of the German Foreign Office--and secretly a member of the anti-Hitler resistance. The two men were friends at Oxford in the 1920s, but have not been in contact since. Now, when Guy flies with Chamberlain from London to Munich, and Rikard travels on Hitler's train overnight from Berlin, their paths are set on a disastrous collision course. And once again, Robert Harris gives us actual events of historical importance--here are Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini, Daladier--at the heart of an electrifying, un-put-downable novel.]]>
450 Robert Harris 0525520279 Jon 0 4.15 2017 Munich
author: Robert Harris
name: Jon
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/25
date added: 2020/01/25
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<![CDATA[The Country of the Blind: Mandarin Companion Graded Readers Level 1, Simplified Chinese Edition]]> 26215569
Mandarin Companion is a series of easy-to-read novels in Chinese that are fun to read and proven to accelerate language learning. Every book in the Mandarin Companion series is carefully written to use characters, words, and grammar that a learner is likely to know.

Level 1 is intended for Chinese learners at an upper-elementary level. Most learners will be able to approach this book after one to two years of formal study, depending on the learner and program. This series is designed to combine simplicity of characters with an easy-to-understand storyline which helps learners to expand their vocabularies and language comprehension abilities. The more they read, the better they will become at reading and grasping the Chinese language.]]>
98 H.G. Wells 1941875033 Jon 0 currently-reading, in-chinese 4.27 The Country of the Blind: Mandarin Companion Graded Readers Level 1, Simplified Chinese Edition
author: H.G. Wells
name: Jon
average rating: 4.27
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/01/10
shelves: currently-reading, in-chinese
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Pachinko 34051011
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.]]>
496 Min Jin Lee Jon 0 currently-reading 4.35 2017 Pachinko
author: Min Jin Lee
name: Jon
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/01/09
shelves: currently-reading
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A Confederacy of Dunces 18162555
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber]]>
417 John Kennedy Toole Jon 0 currently-reading 3.86 1980 A Confederacy of Dunces
author: John Kennedy Toole
name: Jon
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/01/03
shelves: currently-reading
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Jerusalem: The Biography 12114607
How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the “center of the world� and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem’s biography is told through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the men and women—kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores—who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem. As well as the many ordinary Jerusalemites who have left their mark on the city, its cast varies from Solomon, Saladin and Suleiman the Magnificent to Cleopatra, Caligula and Churchill; from Abraham to Jesus and Muhammad; from the ancient world of Jezebel, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod and Nero to the modern times of the Kaiser, Disraeli, Mark Twain, Lincoln, Rasputin, Lawrence of Arabia and Moshe Dayan.

Drawing on new archives, current scholarship, his own family papers and a lifetime’s study, Montefiore illuminates the essence of sanctity and mysticism, identity and empire in a unique chronicle of the city that many believe will be the setting for the Apocalypse. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem, and the only city that exists twice—in heaven and on earth.


From the Hardcover edition.]]>
688 Simon Sebag Montefiore Jon 0 currently-reading 4.17 2011 Jerusalem: The Biography
author: Simon Sebag Montefiore
name: Jon
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/01/03
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Turtles All the Way Down 35498621 JOHN GREEN, the acclaimed author of Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars, returns with a story of shattering, unflinching clarity in this brilliant novel of love, resilience, and the power of lifelong friendship.

Aza Holmes never intended to pursue the disappearance of fugitive billionaire Russell Pickett, but there’s a hundred-thousand-dollar reward at stake and her Best and Most Fearless Friend, Daisy, is eager to investigate. So together, they navigate the short distance and broad divides that separate them from Pickett’s son Davis.

Aza is trying. She is trying to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, and maybe even a good detective, while also living within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thoughts.]]>
299 John Green 0525555358 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.05 2017 Turtles All the Way Down
author: John Green
name: Jon
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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The Last Samurai 30317598
Helen DeWitt’s 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was “destined to become a cult classicâ€� (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so “Why not just, â€destined to become a classic?’â€� (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise?

Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn’t his father’s name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He’ll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.]]>
548 Helen DeWitt 0811225518 Jon 0 4.07 2000 The Last Samurai
author: Helen DeWitt
name: Jon
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at: 2019/12/30
date added: 2019/12/30
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The Rational Bible: Exodus 36389023 A national bestseller! Why do so many people think the Bible, the most influential book inĚýworld history, is outdated? Why do our friends and neighbors â€� andĚýsometimes we ourselves â€� dismiss the Bible as irrelevant, irrational,Ěýimmoral, or all of these things? This explanation of the Book of Exodus, theĚýsecond book of the Bible, will demonstrate that the Bible is not only powerfullyĚýrelevant to today’s issues, but completely consistent with rational thought. Do you think the Bible permitted the trans-Atlantic slave trade? You won’tĚýafter reading this book. Do you struggle to love your parents? If you do, you need this book. Do you doubt the existence of God because belief in God is “irrational?â€� ThisĚýbook will give you reason after reason to rethink your doubts. The title of this commentary is, “The Rational Bibleâ€� because its approachĚýis entirely reason-based. The reader is never asked to accept anything on faithĚýalone. As Prager says, “If something I write does not make rational sense, I haveĚýnot done my job.â€� The Rational Bible is the fruit of Dennis Prager’s forty years of teaching theĚýBible to people of every faith, and no faith. On virtually every page, you willĚýdiscover how the text relates to the contemporary world and to your life. His to change your mind â€� and then change your life.]]> 559 Dennis Prager Jon 0 currently-reading 4.56 The Rational Bible: Exodus
author: Dennis Prager
name: Jon
average rating: 4.56
book published:
rating: 0
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Compass 34616787 Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.

With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources—nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie—and binds them together in a most magical way.]]>
382 Mathias Énard 0811226638 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.05 2015 Compass
author: Mathias Énard
name: Jon
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Custom of the Country (Vintage Classics)]]> 20106014 Edith Wharton’s lacerating satire on marriage and materialism in turn-of-the-century New York features her most selfish, ruthless, and irresistibly outrageous female character.
Ěý
Undine Spragg is an exquisitely beautiful but ferociously acquisitive young woman from the Midwest who comes to New York to seek her fortune. She achieves her social ambitions—but only at the highest cost to her family, her admirers, and her several husbands. Wharton lavished on Undine an imaginative energy that suggests she was as fascinated as she was appalled by the alluring monster she had created. It is the complexity of her attitude that makes The Custom of the Country—with its rich social and emotional detail and its headlong narrative power—one of the most fully realized and resonant of her works.

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305 Edith Wharton Jon 0 currently-reading 4.31 1913 The Custom of the Country (Vintage Classics)
author: Edith Wharton
name: Jon
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1913
rating: 0
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist 40961543
Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.

But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.]]>
228 Mohsin Hamid Jon 0 3.79 2007 The Reluctant Fundamentalist
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: Jon
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2019/11/30
date added: 2019/11/30
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<![CDATA[How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia]]> 17410533 From the internationally bestselling author of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," the boldly imagined tale of a poor boy's quest for wealth and love.
His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world's pulse. "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" meets that reputation--and exceeds it. the astonishing and riveting tale of a man's journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, it steals its shape from the business self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over "rising Asia." It follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of water. Yet his heart remains set on something else, on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along.
"How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia "is a striking slice of contemporary life at a time of crushing upheaval. Romantic without being sentimental, political without being didactic, and spiritual without being religious, it brings an unflinching gaze to the violence and hope it depicts. And it creates two unforgettable characters who find moments of transcendent intimacy in the midst of shattering change.]]>
240 Mohsin Hamid 110160378X Jon 0 4.11 2013 How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: Jon
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/11/25
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The Country of the Blind 2400431 56 H.G. Wells 0141022450 Jon 0 3.82 1904 The Country of the Blind
author: H.G. Wells
name: Jon
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1904
rating: 0
read at: 2017/05/01
date added: 2019/11/24
shelves: science-fiction, fiction, currently-reading
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Ego Is the Enemy 29428533 The instant Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and international bestseller“While the history books are filled with tales of obsessive visionary geniuses who remade the world in their image with sheer, almost irrational force, I’ve found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition.â€� —from the prologue ĚýMany of us insist the main impediment to a full, successful life is the outside world. In fact, the most common enemy lies our ego. Early in our careers, it impedes learning and the cultivation of talent. With success, it can blind us to our faults and sow future problems. In failure, it magnifies each blow and makes recovery more difficult. At every stage, ego holds us back. ĚýEgo Is the Enemy draws on a vast array of stories and examples, from literature to philosophy to his­tory. We meet fascinating figures such as George Marshall, Jackie Robinson, Katharine Graham, Bill Belichick, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who all reached the highest levels of power and success by con­quering their own egos. Their strategies and tactics can be ours as well. ĚýIn an era that glorifies social media, reality TV, and other forms of shameless self-promotion, the battle against ego must be fought on many fronts. Armed with the lessons in this book, as Holiday writes, “you will be less invested in the story you tell about your own specialness, and as a result, you will be liberated to accomplish the world-changing work you’ve set out to achieve.”]]> 247 Ryan Holiday 069819215X Jon 0 currently-reading 4.34 2016 Ego Is the Enemy
author: Ryan Holiday
name: Jon
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/10/26
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Tuesdays with Morrie 5000312
Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you?

Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying of ALS - or motor neurone disease - Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live.]]>
210 Mitch Albom Jon 0 currently-reading 4.56 1997 Tuesdays with Morrie
author: Mitch Albom
name: Jon
average rating: 4.56
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3)]]> 34017126 The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.

Essun has inherited the phenomenal power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every outcast child can grow up safe.

For Nassun, her mother's mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.]]>
398 N.K. Jemisin Jon 0 currently-reading 4.47 2017 The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Jon
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/10/16
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[Japan and the Shackles of the Past (What Everyone Needs to Know (Hardcover))]]> 18635378
In Japan and the Shackles of the Past, R. Taggart Murphy places the current troubles of Japan in a sweeping historical context, moving deftly from early feudal times to the modern age that began with the Meiji Restoration. Combining fascinating analyses of Japanese culture and society over the centuries with hard-headed accounts of Japan's numerous political regimes, Murphy not only reshapes our understanding of Japanese history, but of Japan's place in the contemporary world. He concedes that Japan has indeed been out of sight and out of mind in recent decades, but contends that this is already changing. Political and economic developments in Japan today risk upheaval in the pivotal arena of Northeast Asia, inviting comparisons with Europe on the eve of the First World War. America's half-completed effort to remake Japan in the late 1940s is unraveling, and the American foreign policy and defense establishment is directly culpable for what has happened. The one apparent exception to Japan's malaise is the vitality of its pop culture, but it's actually no exception at all; rather, it provides critical clues to what is going on now.

With insights into everything from Japan's politics and economics to the texture of daily life, gender relations, the changing business landscape, and popular and high culture, Japan and the Shackles of the Past is the indispensable guide to understanding Japan in all its complexity.
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443 R. Taggart Murphy 0199845980 Jon 0 to-read, _hardcore-history 4.26 2014 Japan and the Shackles of the Past (What Everyone Needs to Know (Hardcover))
author: R. Taggart Murphy
name: Jon
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/10/10
shelves: to-read, _hardcore-history
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Phaedrus (Hackett Classics) 360882 144 Plato 0872202208 Jon 0 to-read, philosophy 3.98 -370 Phaedrus (Hackett Classics)
author: Plato
name: Jon
average rating: 3.98
book published: -370
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/09/17
shelves: to-read, philosophy
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<![CDATA[Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1)]]> 8045789 Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut—young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.

Ender's Game is the winner of the 1985 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel.


At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]>
226 Orson Scott Card Jon 0 fiction, currently-reading 4.31 1985 Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1)
author: Orson Scott Card
name: Jon
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/09/14
shelves: fiction, currently-reading
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Exit West 31578016 From the internationally bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a love story that unfolds in a world being irrevocably transformed by migration.
Ěý
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, thrust into premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As violence and the threat of violence escalate, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through Ěý. . .

Exit West is an epic compressed into a slender page-turner—both completely of our time and for all time, Mohsin Hamid’s most ambitious and electrifying novel yet.]]>
240 Mohsin Hamid 073521218X Jon 0 fiction 3.88 2017 Exit West
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: Jon
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2019/08/18
date added: 2019/08/18
shelves: fiction
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Player Piano 8141563 354 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Jon 0 currently-reading 3.99 1952 Player Piano
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Jon
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/07/24
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When Breath Becomes Air 25899336
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naĂŻve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything," he wrote. "Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'" When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.]]>
208 Paul Kalanithi 0812988418 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.41 2016 When Breath Becomes Air
author: Paul Kalanithi
name: Jon
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/07/15
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<![CDATA[The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell]]> 8150727
AmongĚýthe most profound and influential explorations of mind-expanding psychedelic drugs ever written, here are two complete classic books—The Doors of PerceptionĚýandĚýHeaven and Hell—in which Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, reveals the mind's remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness. This edition also features an additional essay, "Drugs That Shape Men's Minds," now included for the first time.]]>
100 Aldous Huxley 0061892823 Jon 0 currently-reading 4.03 1956 The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Jon
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/07/14
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Milkman 42378358 In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,� the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him—and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend—rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers. Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day.

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352 Anna Burns 164445100X Jon 0 3.64 2018 Milkman
author: Anna Burns
name: Jon
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/06/18
shelves: _marginal-revolution, fiction, currently-reading
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<![CDATA[The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)]]> 28147302 The second novel in a new fantasy trilogy by Hugo, Nebula & World Fantasy Award nominated author N.K. Jemisin.

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS... FOR THE LAST TIME.

The season of endings grows darker as civilization fades into the long cold night. Alabaster Tenring -- madman, world-crusher, savior -- has returned with a mission: to train his successor, Essun, and thus seal the fate of the Stillness forever.

It continues with a lost daughter, found by the enemy.

It continues with the obelisks, and an ancient mystery converging on answers at last.

The Stillness is the wall which stands against the flow of tradition, the spark of hope long buried under the thickening ashfall. And it will not be broken.
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321 N.K. Jemisin Jon 0 currently-reading 4.44 2016 The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Jon
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/06/08
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The Second Sex 18687491 Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,â€� and a groundbreaking exploration of inequality and otherness. ĚýThis long-awaited new edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as it was sixty years ago, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.

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833 Simone de Beauvoir Jon 0 currently-reading 4.20 1949 The Second Sex
author: Simone de Beauvoir
name: Jon
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/04/26
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<![CDATA[Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process]]> 35822989 The long-awaited guide to writing long-form nonfiction by the legendary author and teacher

Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer’s craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and he presents extracts from his work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny. In one essay, he considers the delicate art of getting sources to tell you what they might not otherwise reveal. In another, he discusses how to use flashback to place a bear encounter in a travel narrative, while observing that “readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.� The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising—and revising, and revising.

Draft No. 4 is enriched by multiple diagrams and by personal anecdotes and charming reflections on the life of a writer. McPhee describes his enduring relationships with The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and recalls his early years at Time magazine. Throughout, Draft No. 4 is enlivened by his keen sense of writing as a way of being in the world.

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210 John McPhee Jon 0 currently-reading 4.24 2013 Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
author: John McPhee
name: Jon
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/04/15
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)]]> 12961964 The Handmaid's Tale is not only a radical and brilliant departure for Margaret Atwood, it is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The regime takes the Book of Genesis absolutely at its word, with bizarre consequences for the women and men of its population. The story is told through the eyes of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order. In condensed but eloquent prose, by turns cool-eyed, tender, despairing, passionate, and wry, she reveals to us the dark corners behind the establishment's calm facade, as certain tendencies now in existence are carried to their logical conclusions. The Handmaid's Tale is funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force. It is Margaret Atwood at her best.]]> 325 Margaret Atwood Jon 0 4.10 1985 The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Jon
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/03/31
shelves: fiction, dystopia, currently-reading
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<![CDATA[The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)]]> 38213103 355 N.K. Jemisin Jon 0 4.39 2015 The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Jon
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2019/03/30
date added: 2019/03/30
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