en-US Tue, 12 Dec 2023 16:50:53 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 18490 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780141439471

'Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart ...'

Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.

Based on the third edition of 1831, this volume contains all the revisions Mary Shelley made to her story, as well as her 1831 introduction and Percy Bysshe Shelley's preface to the first edition. This revised edition includes as appendices a select collation of the texts of 1818 and 1831 together with 'A Fragment' by Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori's 'The Vampyre: A Tale'.]]> 288 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Laura 4 started-and-set-down 3.77 1818
author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
name: Laura
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1818
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/12
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:

]]> 20170404 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 333 Emily St. John Mandel 0385353308 Laura 2 started-and-set-down
Second Review: I listened to it this time and found the plot much more compelling than when I read it the first time but I still found the characters less than inspiring. The apocalypse felt fairly believable (although, why did it take so long for civilization to get back up and running?) but somehow this story is still missing something. It's like Mandel raises the right kinds of questions but doesn't really offer any real theories. The characters all felt shallow, like players being moved around to fill their parts in the story. There was a certain level of honesty and grief that this book never reached. Sure, it is great to say 'Because survival is insufficient' but the story didn't make that statement feel true or necessary. ]]> 4.05 2014
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Laura
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2019/08/21
date added: 2022/11/19
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:
First Review: I just can't go on. I don't care about any of the post apocalyptic characters enough (though, much like others who've written negative reviews, I do like Miranda). I've already read The Road. And I don't see much hope that the book will somehow gain a beating heart at some point.

Second Review: I listened to it this time and found the plot much more compelling than when I read it the first time but I still found the characters less than inspiring. The apocalypse felt fairly believable (although, why did it take so long for civilization to get back up and running?) but somehow this story is still missing something. It's like Mandel raises the right kinds of questions but doesn't really offer any real theories. The characters all felt shallow, like players being moved around to fill their parts in the story. There was a certain level of honesty and grief that this book never reached. Sure, it is great to say 'Because survival is insufficient' but the story didn't make that statement feel true or necessary.
]]> 7603 Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

]]> 356 Azar Nafisi 081297106X Laura 2 started-and-set-down, to-read 3.64 2003
author: Azar Nafisi
name: Laura
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at: 2010/04/23
date added: 2021/03/07
shelves: started-and-set-down, to-read
review:

]]> 40663183
The year is 1979. The Islamic Revolution is just around the corner, as is a massive solar eclipse. In this epic novel set in the small Iranian city of Naishapur, a retired judge and his wife, Bibi, grow apples, plums, peaches, and sour cherries, as well as manage several generations of family members. The days here are marked by long, elaborate lunches on the terrace and arguments about the corrupt monarchy in Iran and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. And yet life in the orchard continues. An uncle develops into a powerful cleric. A young nephew goes to university, hoping to lead the fight for a new Iran and marry his childhood sweetheart. Another nephew surrenders to opium, while his widowed father dreams of a life in the West. Told through a host of vivid, unforgettable characters that range from servants to elderly friends of the family, To Keep the Sun Alive is the kind of rich, compelling story that not only informs the past, but raises questions about political and religious extremism today.]]> 272 Rabeah Ghaffari 194822609X Laura 2 started-and-set-down
I just can't find anything to grab a hold of in this book & I have better books coming in at the library. I'm 130 pages in and the promised revolution isn't even close to happening & maybe I just wanted something that this book isn't going to offer me. And none of the characters are really tugging at me enough to keep reading. Oh well. There are a million other books to read!]]> 3.94 2019
author: Rabeah Ghaffari
name: Laura
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2019/04/18
date added: 2019/04/18
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:
I wish there was a category between "read" and "currently reading" that left you the option to say "abandoned but might come back?"

I just can't find anything to grab a hold of in this book & I have better books coming in at the library. I'm 130 pages in and the promised revolution isn't even close to happening & maybe I just wanted something that this book isn't going to offer me. And none of the characters are really tugging at me enough to keep reading. Oh well. There are a million other books to read!
]]> 2306331 Peace Like a River, Leif Enger's new work is a rugged and nimble story about an aging train robber on a quest to reconcile the claims of love and judgment on his life, and the failed writer who goes with him.

In 1915 Minnesota, novelist Monte Becket has lost his sense of purpose. His only success long behind him, Monte lives simply with his wife and son. But when he befriends outlaw Glendon Hale, a new world of opportunity and experience presents itself. Glendon has spent years in obscurity, but the guilt he harbors for abandoning his wife, Blue, over two decades ago, has lured him from hiding. As the modern age marches swiftly forward, Glendon aims to travel back to his past--heading to California to seek Blue's forgiveness. Beguiled and inspired, Monte soon finds himself leaving behind his own family to embark for the unruly West with his fugitive guide. As they desperately flee from the relentless Charles Siringo, an ex-Pinkerton who's been hunting Glendon for years, Monte falls ever further from his family and the law, to be tempered by a fiery adventure from which he may never get home.]]> 287 Leif Enger 0871139855 Laura 4 started-and-set-down
Monte Becket is an author facing his sophomore slump. His first book came easily, but the success of that book makes it hard to measure up with any of his subsequent stories. Lucky for Monte, he gets swept away in a story not of his own invention and gets to bear witness to the journey for redemption of Glendon, a gentle outlaw who has become his neighbor. It's a western in the way that News of the World is a western--the setting doesn't dominate the story.

What fascinates in this story is the way that Glendon chases his guilt and is chased by it at the same time, how everywhere he turns is another reminder of the wrongs he's committed that are closing in on him. His conscience seems to be catching up with him. We never get to see the courage that might have inspired his original crimes, except through the possibly similar exploits of a young up-and-coming bandit named Hood Roberts. We only see Glendon after his life of crime has expired, leaving him with only guilt and the skill for disappearing. He's a man in search of grace, a quality that Leif Enger likes to give to all his best characters.

Last time, I tried to read this too soon on the heels of Peace Like a River, which I immediately decided was the best book I'd ever read. To ask this book to follow that was asking too much. This time, I was able to catch all the subtle ties that join these two books with nostalgia rather than disappointment. If Leif Enger has a fault, it is that his female characters feel a bit cliche and unattainable, the kinds of women a lonely cowboy might idealize the longer he's away from her. The women are all loyal, tough, and lovely, but none of them seem like my sister or my friends. They seem more like an afterthought or a prize to be won then like real people. I imagine they would each have secret lives of annoyance and loneliness that Enger never taps into.

All that to say, Leif Enger has a new book coming out this fall and I wanted to say that I'd read the others before I bought that one. It was a better book this second time around, and I'm glad to have spent time with it.



First Review: (1 star) I couldn't get into it despite my enthusiasm for Peace Like a River. I just didn't care at all about the characters....]]> 3.74 2008
author: Leif Enger
name: Laura
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2018/05/21
date added: 2018/05/21
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:
When you step out of still water, it seals itself behind you leaving no trace that you've ever been there. That's how I felt stepping away from this book, like I'd been underwater in the world Leif Enger created, but once I left, the characters would keep on living and my presence would not have disturbed them. I don't think I'll remember this book for long--it didn't really take me anywhere--but I'm not sad I spent time with these characters.

Monte Becket is an author facing his sophomore slump. His first book came easily, but the success of that book makes it hard to measure up with any of his subsequent stories. Lucky for Monte, he gets swept away in a story not of his own invention and gets to bear witness to the journey for redemption of Glendon, a gentle outlaw who has become his neighbor. It's a western in the way that News of the World is a western--the setting doesn't dominate the story.

What fascinates in this story is the way that Glendon chases his guilt and is chased by it at the same time, how everywhere he turns is another reminder of the wrongs he's committed that are closing in on him. His conscience seems to be catching up with him. We never get to see the courage that might have inspired his original crimes, except through the possibly similar exploits of a young up-and-coming bandit named Hood Roberts. We only see Glendon after his life of crime has expired, leaving him with only guilt and the skill for disappearing. He's a man in search of grace, a quality that Leif Enger likes to give to all his best characters.

Last time, I tried to read this too soon on the heels of Peace Like a River, which I immediately decided was the best book I'd ever read. To ask this book to follow that was asking too much. This time, I was able to catch all the subtle ties that join these two books with nostalgia rather than disappointment. If Leif Enger has a fault, it is that his female characters feel a bit cliche and unattainable, the kinds of women a lonely cowboy might idealize the longer he's away from her. The women are all loyal, tough, and lovely, but none of them seem like my sister or my friends. They seem more like an afterthought or a prize to be won then like real people. I imagine they would each have secret lives of annoyance and loneliness that Enger never taps into.

All that to say, Leif Enger has a new book coming out this fall and I wanted to say that I'd read the others before I bought that one. It was a better book this second time around, and I'm glad to have spent time with it.



First Review: (1 star) I couldn't get into it despite my enthusiasm for Peace Like a River. I just didn't care at all about the characters....
]]> 33544874 From the bestselling, twice Orange Prize-shortlisted, National Book Award-nominated author comes a vibrant tale of transformation: of a man in his later years and a woman novelist, each drawn to the Levant on a journey of self-discovery

Jules Epstein has vanished from the world. He leaves no trace but a rundown flat patrolled by a solitary cockroach, and a monogrammed briefcase abandoned in the desert.

To Epstein's mystified family, the disappearance of a man whose drive and avidity have been a force to be reckoned with for sixty-eight years marks the conclusion of a gradual fading. This transformation began in the wake of Epstein's parents' deaths, and continued with his divorce after more than thirty-five years of marriage, his retirement from a New York legal firm, and the rapid shedding of possessions he'd spent a lifetime accumulating. With the last of his wealth and a nebulous plan, he departs for the Tel Aviv Hilton.

Meanwhile, a novelist leaves her husband and children behind in Brooklyn and checks into the same hotel, hoping that the view of the pool she used to swim in on childhood holidays will unlock her writer's block. But when a man claiming to be a retired professor of literature recruits her for a project involving Kafka, she is drawn into a mystery that will take her on a metaphysical journey and change her in ways she could never have imagined.

Bursting with life and humour, this is a profound, mesmerising, achingly beautiful novel of metamorphosis and self-realisation � of looking beyond all that is visible towards the infinite.]]> 304 Nicole Krauss 0062431013 Laura 1 started-and-set-down 3.05 2017
author: Nicole Krauss
name: Laura
average rating: 3.05
book published: 2017
rating: 1
read at: 2017/11/06
date added: 2017/11/06
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:
I just couldn't. I'm sorry, Nicole. I think I'd rather go re-read your brilliant History of Love rather than slog my way through this one. The first chapter was GREAT and then that character got dropped and I lost interest pretty quickly.
]]> 1569499 � What, in the fullest sense, is involved in our National Security?
� When considering Weapons of Mass Destruction, does our inventory include soil loss, climate change, and ground water poisoning? And should we add Economic Weapons of Mass Destruction to our list of targets?
� Whose freedom are we considering when we speak of the "free market" or "free enterprise"?
� What is the price of ownership without affection?

These and several other questions lie at the heart of Wendell Berry's latest collection of essays, writing "motivated by fear of our violence to one another and to the world, and my hope that we might do better." Setting aside abstraction in favor of clarity, coherence, and passion, this new book provides a setting of immediate danger and profound hope. The core of this collection � "Imagination in Place," "The Way of Ignorance," "Quantity and Form," "The Purpose of a Coherent Community," "Compromise, Hell!" � consists of some of the finest essays of Wendell Berry's long career, and the whole offers an exhilarating sense of purpose and a clear call to action.
]]> 208 Wendell Berry 1593760779 Laura 0 started-and-set-down 4.20 2005
author: Wendell Berry
name: Laura
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2015/03/02
date added: 2015/03/02
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:
Cherry picked my way through it. Lost interest for now...
]]> 57460 "You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out―perhaps a little at a time."
"And how long is that going to take?"
"I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps."
"That could be a long time."
"I will tell you a further mystery," he said. "It may take longer." Wendell Berry’s clear-sighted depiction of humanity’s gifts―love and loss, joy and despair―is seen though his intimate knowledge of the Port William Membership.]]> 363 Wendell Berry 1582431604 Laura 4 “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.�
Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. “Where did you get that crap?�
I said, “Jesus Christ.�
And Troy said, “Oh.�
It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

I've started this book three times, each time quitting after concluding that I had very little in common with this ineligible bachelor barber. But by the time I reached this moment in the book (on page 287), I was glad to have spent some time in his company.

I finally ended up reading this book because I kept bumping into Wendell Berry's ideas and admiring them. His influence was all over Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus. And Malcolm Guite, author of Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, made it clear that he's also a fan of Berry's thinking.

So I persevered past the first 30 pages--enduring Jayber's slow and patient retelling of his early years. While I never loved Jayber himself, or felt that I truly understood his outsider status, he endeared me to himself with his thoughtful loyalty to Mattie Chatham and to the world he remembers and longs to preserve. Perhaps he (and Wendell Berry) have allowed nostalgia to blur out the difficulties of the life of a subsistence farmer, but I tend to prefer this romantic version of the past anyhow. It's how I want it to have been.

If you're put off by the plot or the first few pages, persevere if you're interested in the old economy, before credit and factory a farming, a world in which farmwives went "to town with produce, bought their groceries, and [went] home with money" as opposed to today, when they go"to the store with only money and [go] home with only groceries." Persevere if you're interested in gentle spiritual insights, like his declaration that if love "did not happen to us, we could not imagine it."

I am choosing to forgive the aimlessness of the plot and the slow pace because I admire Wendell Berry's ability to not only share the ideas he loves, but get me to love them too. I will continue to read his books, approaching them with the patience I would have if I lived in the world Berry remembers and wants to remake.]]> 4.39 2000
author: Wendell Berry
name: Laura
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2015/02/13
date added: 2015/02/13
shelves: books-i-believe-in, started-and-set-down
review:
“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.�
Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. “Where did you get that crap?�
I said, “Jesus Christ.�
And Troy said, “Oh.�
It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

I've started this book three times, each time quitting after concluding that I had very little in common with this ineligible bachelor barber. But by the time I reached this moment in the book (on page 287), I was glad to have spent some time in his company.

I finally ended up reading this book because I kept bumping into Wendell Berry's ideas and admiring them. His influence was all over Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus. And Malcolm Guite, author of Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, made it clear that he's also a fan of Berry's thinking.

So I persevered past the first 30 pages--enduring Jayber's slow and patient retelling of his early years. While I never loved Jayber himself, or felt that I truly understood his outsider status, he endeared me to himself with his thoughtful loyalty to Mattie Chatham and to the world he remembers and longs to preserve. Perhaps he (and Wendell Berry) have allowed nostalgia to blur out the difficulties of the life of a subsistence farmer, but I tend to prefer this romantic version of the past anyhow. It's how I want it to have been.

If you're put off by the plot or the first few pages, persevere if you're interested in the old economy, before credit and factory a farming, a world in which farmwives went "to town with produce, bought their groceries, and [went] home with money" as opposed to today, when they go"to the store with only money and [go] home with only groceries." Persevere if you're interested in gentle spiritual insights, like his declaration that if love "did not happen to us, we could not imagine it."

I am choosing to forgive the aimlessness of the plot and the slow pace because I admire Wendell Berry's ability to not only share the ideas he loves, but get me to love them too. I will continue to read his books, approaching them with the patience I would have if I lived in the world Berry remembers and wants to remake.
]]> 88815
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.

"Extreme times call for extreme reactions, extreme writing. Hamid has done something extraordinary with this novel." —Washington Post

"One of those achingly assured novels that makes you happy to be a reader." —Junot Diaz

"Brief, charming, and quietly furious . . . a resounding success." —Village Voice

A Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Notable Book]]> 184 Mohsin Hamid 0151013047 Laura 1 started-and-set-down 3.69 2007
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: Laura
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2007
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2014/03/20
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:

]]> 17416437
Rachel Adams’s life had always gone according to plan. She had an adoring husband, a beautiful two-year-old son, a sunny Manhattan apartment, and a position as a tenured professor at Columbia University. Everything changed with the birth of her second child, Henry. Just minutes after he was born, doctors told her that Henry had Down syndrome, and she knew that her life would never be the same. In this honest, self-critical, and surprisingly funny book, Adams chronicles the first three years of Henry’s life and her own transformative experience of unexpectedly becoming the mother of a disabled child. A highly personal story of one family’s encounter with disability, Raising Henry is also an insightful exploration of today’s knotty terrain of social prejudice, disability policy, genetics, prenatal testing, medical training, and inclusive education. Adams untangles the contradictions of living in a society that is more enlightened and supportive of people with disabilities than ever before, yet is racing to perfect prenatal tests to prevent children like Henry from being born. Her book is gripping, beautifully written, and nearly impossible to put down. Once read, her family’s story is impossible to forget.]]> 258 Rachel Adams 0300180004 Laura 0 started-and-set-down 3.73 2013
author: Rachel Adams
name: Laura
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2013/12/30
date added: 2013/12/30
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:

]]> 8546358 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Chased the Moon welcomes you to her newest locale: Walls of Water, North Carolina, where the secrets are thicker than the fog from the town’s famous waterfalls, and the stuff of superstition is just as real as you want it to be.

It’s the dubious distinction of thirty-year-old Willa Jackson to hail from a fine old Southern family of means that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam—built by Willa’s great-great-grandfather during Walls of Water’s heyday, and once the town’s grandest home—has stood for years as a lonely monument to misfortune and scandal. And Willa herself has long strived to build a life beyond the brooding Jackson family shadow. No easy task in a town shaped by years of tradition and the well-marked boundaries of the haves and have-nots.

But Willa has lately learned that an old classmate—socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood—of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored the Blue Ridge Madam to her former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. Maybe, at last, the troubled past can be laid to rest while something new and wonderful rises from its ashes. But what rises instead is a skeleton, found buried beneath the property’s lone peach tree, and certain to drag up dire consequences along with it.

For the bones—those of charismatic traveling salesman Tucker Devlin, who worked his dark charms on Walls of Water seventy-five years ago—are not all that lay hidden out of sight and mind. Long-kept secrets surrounding the troubling remains have also come to light, seemingly heralded by a spate of sudden strange occurrences throughout the town.

Now, thrust together in an unlikely friendship, united by a full-blooded mystery, Willa and Paxton must confront the dangerous passions and tragic betrayals that once bound their families—and uncover truths of the long-dead that have transcended time and defied the grave to touch the hearts and souls of the living.

Resonant with insight into the deep and lasting power of friendship, love, and tradition, The Peach Keeper is a portrait of the unshakable bonds that—in good times and bad, from one generation to the next—endure forever.]]> 273 Sarah Addison Allen 0553807226 Laura 1 started-and-set-down 3.84 2011
author: Sarah Addison Allen
name: Laura
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2011
rating: 1
read at: 2011/05/27
date added: 2011/07/23
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:
Lame. I was really looking forward to this book, but I don't even remember why anymore. It was so predictable that I figured out the basic plot in about 10 minutes of reading, started flipping through to the end of the book to confirm that my basic theories were correct (they were) and realized I just didn't care enough to dredge through the mediocre storytelling.
]]> 7744084 A delightful comedy of manners about two sisters who must set aside their differences when they inherit a house in the Hamptons

Half-sisters Cassie and Peck could not be more different. Cassie is a newly divorced journalist with her feet firmly planted on the ground; Peck is a vintage-obsessed actress with her head in the clouds. In fact, the only thing they seem to have in common is their inheritance of Fool's House, a rundown cottage left to them by their beloved Aunt Lydia. But Cassie and Peck can't afford the house, and they can't agree on anything, much less what to do with the place. Plus, along with the house, they've inherited an artist-inresidence and self-proclaimed genius named Biggsy who seems to bring suspiciously bad luck wherever he goes. As these two likable sisters try to understand their aunt's puzzling instructions to "seek a thing of utmost value" from within the house, they're both distracted by romantic entanglements with men from their pasts.

The Summer We Read Gatsby, set in the end-of-an-era summer of 2008, is filled with fabulous parties, eccentric characters, and insider society details that showcase Ganek's pitch-perfect sense of style and wit.]]> 292 Danielle Ganek 0670021784 Laura 0 started-and-set-down Blech. 3.19 2010
author: Danielle Ganek
name: Laura
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/08/30
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:
Blech.
]]> 6643090
The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?]]> 359 Helen Simonson 1400068932 Laura 2 started-and-set-down 3.89 2010
author: Helen Simonson
name: Laura
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2010/05/15
date added: 2010/05/15
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:

]]> 6098148
Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny. Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana. Sheila. Meet the Ames Girls: eleven childhood friends who formed a special bond growing up in Ames, Iowa. As young women, they moved to eight different states, yet managed to maintain an enduring friendship that would carry them through college and careers, marriage and motherhood, dating and divorce, a child’s illness and the mysterious death of one member of their group. Capturing their remarkable story, The Girls from Ames is a testament to the deep bonds of women as they experience life’s joys and challenges � and the power of friendship to triumph over heartbreak and unexpected tragedy.

The girls, now in their forties, have a lifetime of memories in common, some evocative of their generation and some that will resonate with any woman who has ever had a friend. Photograph by photograph, recollection by recollection, occasionally with tears and often with great laughter, their sweeping and moving story is shared by Jeffrey Zaslow, Wall Street Journal columnist, as he attempts to define the matchless bonds of female friendship. It demonstrates how close female relationships can shape every aspect of women’s lives � their sense of themselves, their choice of men, their need for validation, their relationships with their mothers, their dreams for their daughters � and reveals how such friendships thrive, rewarding those who have committed to them.

The Girls from Ames is the story of a group of ordinary women who built an extraordinary friendship. With both universal insights and deeply personal moments, it is a book that every woman will relate to and be inspired by.]]> 297 Jeffrey Zaslow 1592404456 Laura 1 started-and-set-down 3.37 2009
author: Jeffrey Zaslow
name: Laura
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2009
rating: 1
read at: 2010/02/11
date added: 2010/02/11
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:

]]> 6452749
In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to "prosper" you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of "positive psychology" and the "science of happiness." Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes—like mortgage defaults—contributed directly to the current economic crisis.

With the myth-busting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative� thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best—poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.]]> 206 Barbara Ehrenreich 0805087494 Laura 2 started-and-set-down 3.71 2009
author: Barbara Ehrenreich
name: Laura
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2009/12/31
date added: 2009/12/31
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:
Liked the concept, but I got the point pretty quickly. Read only the chapters that seemed interesting and took it back.
]]> 3078805 Three Junes comes an intimate new work of fiction: a tale of two sisters, together and apart, told in their alternating voices over twenty-five years.

Louisa Jardine is the older one, the conscientious student, precise and careful: the one who yearns for a good marriage, an artistic career, a family. Clem, the archetypal youngest, is the rebel: uncontainable, iconoclastic, committed to her work but not to the men who fall for her daring nature. Louisa resents that the charismatic Clem has always been the favorite; yet as Clem puts it, “On the other side of the fence–mine–every expectation you fulfill . . . puts you one stop closer to that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world–or plummet in very grand style.�

In this vivid, heartrending story of what we can and cannot do for those we love, the sisters grow closer as they move farther apart. Louis settles in New York while Clem, a wildlife biologist, moves restlessly about until she lands in the Rocky Mountains. Their complex bond, Louisa observes, is “like a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching.�

Alive with all the sensual detail and riveting characterization that mark Glass’s previous work, I See You Everywhere is a piercingly candid story of life and death, companionship and sorrow, and the nature of sisterhood itself.]]> 287 Julia Glass 0375422757 Laura 0 started-and-set-down 3.23 2008
author: Julia Glass
name: Laura
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2009/07/18
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:

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From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 Laura 2 started-and-set-down 3.94 2005
author: Joan Didion
name: Laura
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at: 2008/03/26
date added: 2007/11/21
shelves: started-and-set-down
review:

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